Pinched

by Don Peck

  The deterioration in race relations was not only the worst consequence of the period’s economic weakness, but also its most enduring. “It is one of the most unfortunate coincidences of United States history,” wrote Friedman, “that what was at the time the most pronounced period of economic stagnation since the founding of the republic set in just as Reconstruction ended and the federal government finally withdrew its troops from the defeated southern states.… No one will ever know whether the country’s race relations, both in the South and elsewhere, would have taken a different course had economic times been better during this key period.”

  Like other forms of intolerance, racial discrimination and violence built slowly, reaching full flower only after years of economic anxiety and disappointment had passed. Reconstruction had ended in 1879, but it wasn’t until the 1890s that most southern states began to enact the Jim Crow laws that would segregate society for generations, supported by a Supreme Court that had grown steadily less forceful in its support for equal rights. Demagogues gained traction; “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman, for example, won the governorship of South Carolina in 1890, and then a U.S. Senate seat. He called for the repeal of black voting rights and openly defended lynching.

  In nearly every aspect, American politics and government became more reactionary. The Populist movement, a predominantly rural movement that is today identified mostly as an effort to abandon the gold standard, was also highly insular, xenophobic, and at times tinged by racism (although it solicited and received support from black farmers, particularly in its early days). “The populists sought to preserve the agrarian and small-town economy, and the way of life based on it, that had been America’s past,” wrote Friedman.

  They were angered by perceived exploitation, and emboldened by a sense of moral superiority. Populism was, correspondingly, an expression of resentment as well as resistance to the advance of the capitalist, industrialist, and therefore more urbanized economy that was to become America’s future.… In their specific policy proposals and even more so in their broader social and cultural agenda, the populists represented a turning backward: a closing of American society, a rigidification, and in many ways a retreat from tolerance, in the face of continual economic disappointment.

  The Populist movement was of course diffuse and dynamic, and reactionary thinking jostled with progressive ideas, support for women’s suffrage being perhaps the most notable. But neither women’s suffrage nor other policies that would have expanded individual rights actually advanced as long as hard times endured. Instead, many rights and freedoms were curtailed, and civic life diminished.

  “THERE IS SCARCELY a workman, whatever the present comfort of his life, who is not oppressed by the horrible nightmare of a possible loss of his situation,” reported the Labor Leader in 1893. “No faithfulness, no skill, no experience can protect him against the danger of being cast adrift with his family at the next shift of the market. He is part of the grist in the great mill of demand and supply, and when his time comes it remorselessly crushes him between its iron rollers.”

  The language of a budding labor movement was at times drenched in Marxism by the 1890s, prompting revolutionary fears among some members of the American elite. Other elites—troubled by society’s unbridled greed; or by the dissipation that characterized city life in hard times; or even by the closing of the American frontier, and with it, the presumed loss of the pioneer spirit—feared the onset of American decline.

  Of course, none of this came to pass. The discovery of new gold deposits and better mining techniques increased the gold supply and put an end to deflation. Bad harvests in Europe helped American farmers. And manufacturing technology continued to advance, providing new job opportunities and rising wages. What followed was nearly two decades of almost uninterrupted growth, the Progressive Era, which took some of the roughest edges off of laissez-faire capitalism, and the continued rise of America as the world’s predominant power. Indeed, when we look back on the late nineteenth century today, what stands out is not the hardship and uncertainty of the period, but rather the utter transformation of the American economy—and of American life.

  The United States emerged from the nineteenth century with an increasingly urban, industrial economy and a transient population, centered on immediate families, with weaker connections to extended family. It also emerged with an educated workforce that was the envy of the world (American farmers, cognizant of the decline of their profession, had pushed society to expand the education system, and had pushed their children through it). But this molting of the U.S. economy was disruptive, anxious, and, above all, bewildering to those who lived through it. It is only with the benefit of hindsight that we see it as a success.

  THE GREAT DEPRESSION

  Among all American economic calamities, the Great Depression of the 1930s stands alone in the pain that it levied, and it should be invoked cautiously as a comparison to our own times. From peak to trough, the nation’s real output fell by 30 percent and the stock market lost nearly 90 percent of its value. Unemployment neared 25 percent in 1933, and didn’t fall below 14 percent until World War II began. For more than a decade, until the war perversely lifted the U.S. economy, the economic environment was bleaker than any the country had experienced before or has experienced since. Still, the ways in which society changed in the ’30s as initial panic gave way to years of grinding anxiety are in some respects instructive. In the Depression, one can see several of the same forces that are again reshaping the American family and culture today.

  The Depression began with the stock-market crash of 1929, but the pattern of economic growth before the crash is telling. In the national memory, the 1920s stand out as a time of heady growth and dizzying gains in wealth, but in fact most Americans didn’t experience the decade that way. Farmers still made up a quarter of the workforce in 1929, and they had missed out on the boom entirely; a crop glut following World War I had caused an agricultural depression. In America’s towns and cities, unemployment was generally low, but in many industries, wages were stagnant or declining; along with agriculture, oil and textiles were known as “sick sectors.” Even in heavy manufacturing, where wages for skilled workers grew quickly, the introduction of new, labor-saving technologies shrank the ranks of the workforce.

  From 1920 to 1929, disposable per capita income grew by only about 1 percent a year, and even this low figure is misleading. Among the top 1 percent of earners, incomes rose 75 percent across the decade. A large proportion of families, however, saw scant income growth. Productivity gains showed up mostly in higher corporate profits, which rose 62 percent between 1923 and 1929. Dividends rose by roughly the same amount, but only a tiny fraction of Americans had any money in the stock market.

  One thing that made the twenties roar—in addition to the conspicuous consumption of the moneyed—was the willingness of ordinary people to outspend their incomes, taking on debt to do so. The installment plan became a fixture of society in the latter part of the 1920s. By the end of the decade, 60 percent of all cars and 80 percent of all radios were being purchased on installment. Many Americans shared an infectious optimism, born of strong growth, even though most of that growth wasn’t actually making its way into their paychecks. In his classic history of the era, The Great Depression: America, 1929–1941, Robert McElvaine wrote, “[A] growing number of people accepted the proposition that ‘God intended the American middle class to be rich.’ ”

  In Florida, land speculation was rampant in the mid-1920s, and buyers, attracted by the state’s weather and potential as a winter haven, swarmed in; nine in ten never planned to occupy their property. The real-estate mania may have been most intense in Florida, but it was hardly unique to the state. “It was our fault,” said one mid-western real-estate agent at the time, “for overselling [houses], and the banks’ fault for overlending.” In the go-go years of the 1920s, “everybody was buying a better home than he could afford.” Stories of homeowners who’d seen their house apprecia
te “tenfold in value over the past ten years” had fed a frenzy.

  Many factors caused the Depression—too much leverage in the equity market; too much inventory in U.S. factories; Germany’s difficulty paying back war debt, and the cascade of problems that caused for the international financial system. Weak government response in the immediate wake of the crash—a failure to aggressively loosen either monetary or fiscal policy—contributed mightily to the catastrophe. And premature fiscal tightening in 1937 extended it.

  But the Depression was also the result of a debt-and-consumption binge, and it unfolded, in part, as a real-estate crisis. Residential construction imploded in the 1930s, and foreclosures multiplied manyfold. By 1933, local newspapers were filled with ads for distressed-property sales. To ward off foreclosure, families began “doubling up,” renting out rooms or portions of the house to lodgers. Many houses, vacant or inhabited by residents who could barely put food on the table, slowly fell into disorder and disrepair.

  THE ECONOMIC CONDITIONS of the 1930s deeply influenced every facet of life. Skirts famously lengthened, and many boys, fearful of the consequences of an unintended pregnancy, came to regard girls as “booby traps.” Marriage rates dropped sharply, but so did divorces; divorce was expensive, and government relief was easier to come by for families than for individuals.

  In her classic sociology of the Depression, The Unemployed Man and His Family, Mirra Komarovsky vividly describes how joblessness strained—and in many cases fundamentally altered—family relationships in the 1930s. During 1935 and ’36, Komarovsky and her research team interviewed the members of fifty-nine white middle-class families in which the husband and father had been out of work for at least a year. Her research revealed deep psychological wounds. “It is awful to be old and discarded at 40,” said one father. “A man is not a man without work.” Another said plainly, “During the depression I lost something. Maybe you call it self-respect, but in losing it I also lost the respect of my children, and I am afraid I am losing my wife.” Noted one woman of her husband, “I still love him, but he doesn’t seem as ‘big’ a man.”

  Taken together, the stories paint a picture of diminished men, bereft of familial authority. Household power—over children, spending, and daily decisions of all types—generally shifted to wives over time (and some women were happier overall as a result). Amid general anxiety and men’s loss of self-worth and loss of respect from their wives, sex lives withered. Socializing all but ceased as well, a casualty of poverty and embarrassment. Although some men embraced family life, most became distant. Children described their father as “mean,” “nasty,” or “bossy,” and didn’t want to bring friends around, for fear of what he might say. “There was less physical violence and aggression towards the wife than towards the child,” Komarovsky wrote.

  Of course, even in the 1930s, most people kept their jobs, and the period’s impact on family life varied greatly. “Many families have drawn closer and ‘found’ themselves in the depression,” wrote the sociologists Robert Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd in Middletown in Transition, their 1937 study of everyday life in Muncie, Indiana. With social options limited by thin wallets, some husbands, wives, and children gardened together and used their yards more in summer, and at night played cards or listened to the radio. Yet the Lynds acknowledged that in other families, the Depression had “precipitated a permanent sediment of disillusionment and bitterness,” born of hardship, anxiety, and fear for the future. It was difficult to say, they noted, where the balance lay between the two.

  The Lynds had first studied Muncie, a typical middle-class city of the time, in 1924 and 1925, when the economy was booming. Upon their return six years into the Depression, they found that petty jealousies over material things had seemed to multiply between neighbors, and that what bonds still existed didn’t extend far. “In its relation to outside groups … Middletown seems recently to have been building its fences higher. The city is more antagonistic to [outsiders]; individuals in the city are seemingly more wary of one another; need of protection and security is more emphasized.”

  Trust among strangers and loose acquaintances was eroding, and rising material insecurity had brought with it a “greater insistence upon conformity and a sharpening of latent issues.” An intense nationalism had arisen since 1925, the Lynds found, and along with it an increasingly critical attitude toward all things foreign. One op-ed in a local Muncie paper exhorted its readers to “return to the old, sturdy, clean, upstanding America, the America that faced disaster unafraid and that went forward with the Bible and the flag.”

  Disillusionment among high-school and college graduates, many of them unable to find jobs, became common by the mid-1930s. Suspicions grew that higher education was no longer a sure path to prosperity and that ambition was pointless. Said one college president in a 1936 address, “How are we to teach thrift to those who have lost everything? Why teach youth to rise early when there are no jobs to go to?”

  The Lynds interviewed a series of young men and women in their late teens and twenties about their lives and found a “growing apathy.” One college graduate who had a job delivering parcels said that many of his peers were “just accepting the fact of a lower station in life and not struggling any longer.” A high-school teacher observed of his students, “They’re just getting used to the idea of there being no job, and there isn’t much explosiveness.”

  Many young adults who could not find footing in the job market were left permanently scarred. Glen Elder, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina and a pioneer in the field of “life course” studies, has spent much of his career tracking the various generations that lived through the Depression, to see how it shaped their lives. Some three decades after the Depression ended, and even after a long postwar boom, he found a pronounced diffidence in aging men (though not women) who had suffered hardship as twenty- and thirtysomethings during the 1930s. Unlike peers who had been largely spared during those lean years, these men came across, Elder told me, as “beaten and withdrawn—lacking ambition, direction, confidence in themselves.”

  Yet the period’s adolescents were shaped differently. McElvaine observed, “Although the children of the thirties lived through the same economic hardship as their parents did, it meant different things to the new generation. For one thing, children were largely free from the self-blame and shame that were so common among their elders.… The Depression’s most significant psychological problem was generally absent in the young.”

  Hardship caused adolescents to take on more responsibility earlier in life. “There were no working-class ‘teenagers’ in the 1930s,” wrote McElvaine. Boys took jobs after school wherever they could get them. Girls took the place of their mother, who was herself often working, as the custodian of smaller children and keeper of the home. “Ironically,” he noted, “the same family hardship that might weaken the self-reliance of a father could strengthen that quality in his child.” That’s in fact exactly what happened, writes Elder in Children of the Great Depression. As adolescents who suffered hardship during the ’30s grew into adulthood and middle age, Elder found, they showed no sign of the fatalism and reticence that marked people who were just a few years older. In fact, they became especially adaptable, family-oriented adults.

  ON THE ROSTER of history’s truly crippling downturns—both inside and outside the United States—the Great Depression as experienced in America stands out for the extent to which society as a whole remained unified and refused reactionary measures. Perhaps the very depth and breadth of the crisis inspired that togetherness. The middle class identified with the poor more than the rich during that time—and generally supported steps to help those brought low in the downturn. And to a large degree, the federal government with one hand protected the rights and interests of the downtrodden, and with the other, the property of the wealthy.

  Nonetheless, extremism and rancor did grow stronger throughout the period. Race-based job discrimination became fiercer, and lyn
chings, as they had in the 1880s and ’90s, became more commonplace. A New Republic story in 1931 noted that “[d]ust had been blown from the shotgun, the whip, and the noose, and Ku Klux practices were being resumed in the certainty that dead men not only tell no tales but create vacancies.”

  Father Charles Coughlin, known as “The Radio Priest,” regularly spoke to some 30 million or 40 million Americans—the largest radio audience in the world at the time—about the depravity of Communists, international financiers, and Jews. Coughlin praised Adolf Hitler and other Fascists, seeing in them a strength and moral purity absent from capitalist democrats; as the Depression stretched on, Coughlin became more strident. The Louisiana governor, senator, and presidential hopeful Huey Long, a champion of the poor and the working class, grew in stature. He denounced “imperialistic banking control” and preached a radical populism, rooted in aggressive wealth redistribution, with little respect for democratic principles.

  With the onset of World War II and the industrial production that it required, the Depression finally ended (conditions had been improving slowly in the years before the war). But it left the United States ineffably changed. In some respects, the Depression accelerated the evolution of the economy. Innovation was in fact extremely rapid throughout the 1930s, and the period saw an end to the widespread use of domestic servants and the beginnings of an appliance revolution. (John Maynard Keynes wrote at the time that one of the problems of the Depression was “technological unemployment,” due to the “discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour.”)

  More important were the cultural and political changes that resulted from the social and economic environment of the Depression. Family crowding and the deprivations of city life eventually catalyzed a burst of suburbanization after growth returned. Political reforms—including the Glass-Steagall Act and other banking measures—reshaped the country’s business and labor environment, and provided a foundation for decades of growth and social peace. A Democratic political majority, for better or worse, was cemented into place for decades. And the culture was imbued with a spirit of thrift that would last a generation.