The Depression as Depicted in Art, Literature and Pop Culture. True or not?

[Shangas]

I apologise for the wordy title, but try as I might, I wasn't able to fit everything that I wanted to say into just a couple of words.

In recent days, I've been reacquainting myself with an old TV show which I haven't seen in YEARS. The Waltons. For those who don't know it, it concentrates on the Walton Family living in the fictional township of Walton's Mountain, Virginia, during the period ca. 1933-1946, during the period of the Depression and the World War.

In watching the episodes, I was reminded a lot of the 1960s film "To Kill a Mockingbird", starring Gregory Peck.

I studied "To Kill a Mockingbird" in school, and it's become one of my favourite books. But between Mockingbird and The Waltons, I began to wonder:

How accurately do these (and other) literary or filmic depictions of the Depression, reflect how hard it really was?

we all hear stories from our grandparents or parents, and we see it in TV shows like The Waltons, in films like The Sting, or Road to Perdition, The Untouchables, King Kong, and so-forth. But how accurately on a whole, does film and literature, capture the Depression?

Is it exaggerated? Softened? Or is what we see on screen and read in books, pretty much, exactly as it was during the 1930s?

For example, in the Waltons, and in Mockingbird, there's a lot of talk about bartering between neighbours. Since there's hardly two pennies to rub together, a doctor might deliver a baby for a sack of potatoes, or a man might repair a car in return for a month's worth of firewood, or in the case of Atticus Finch, handle some legal work, in return for nuts, firewood and other farm-produce.

How common were transactions like this?

You see hints in the movies and books and TV shows about past prosperity. The Waltons own a piano (an expensive item, even today), the Finches own a radio, and in 'The Sting', the main characters are able to ride on the 20th Century Limited. And now, they're struggling to pay electric bills, or repair boilers, fix cars or find new clothes. Even the smallest transactions are a big struggle, and there's a lot of emphasis on making every single penny stretch as far as it'll go. Was it as hard as we're led to believe? (for some people, at least), or has this been included because "it makes good watching/reading"?

How much of what we see in Depression-era films, books and TV series are based on reality/memories, and how much is exaggerated or made up?

On the other end of the scale, you have TV shows such as 'Jeeves and Wooster'. Now I know that it's a comedy show, but still, it shows the big gap between the rich and the poor during this time. To what extent were people who were born into money (or had made money) able to hold onto it, and continue their pre-1929 lives?

All this stuff got me thinking, about the myths and legends, the artistic license, but also, the realities of the Depression. And I thought it might make for interesting discussion on the Lounge.

 

[kiwilrdg]

For example, in the Waltons, and in Mockingbird, there's a lot of talk about bartering between neighbours. Since there's hardly two pennies to rub together, a doctor might deliver a baby for a sack of potatoes, or a man might repair a car in return for a month's worth of firewood, or in the case of Atticus Finch, handle some legal work, in return for nuts, firewood and other farm-produce.

Bartering like that is still fairly common in small rural American communities and between Church members in larger areas.

You see hints in the movies and books and TV shows about past prosperity. The Waltons own a piano (an expensive item, even today), the Finches own a radio, and in 'The Sting', the main characters are able to ride on the 20th Century Limited. And now, they're struggling to pay electric bills, or repair boilers, fix cars or find new clothes. Even the smallest transactions are a big struggle, and there's a lot of emphasis on making every single penny stretch as far as it'll go. Was it as hard as we're led to believe? (for some people, at least), or has this been included because "it makes good watching/reading"?

They were in a time when people tried to get quality items that were important and to not spend money on items that were not necessary unless their quality of life was really going to improve because of it. The piano is a great example. Since the family got so much more enjoyment from the piano it would be worth patching their clothes for a while to pay for it since they could enjoy playing and hearing it for so many years. It is not like the video games of today were a new expensive attachment every few weeks would be needed to keep it entertaining for two people

 

[LizzieMaine]

The Waltons owned an expensive Zenith radio, when in reality they probably would have had cheap Philco or Crosley, but that's more a flaw of the set designer than of the scripts, so I gave them a pass for that.

In general, the Depression hit rock bottom thru the fall and winter of 1932-33, and it hit the urban and small-town poor the hardest -- people living in farm country at least had the benefit of being able to raise part of what they needed to live on and store up for the winter. City people, thrown out of work with no unemployment insurance or welfare programs, had nothing -- some cities had emergency relief programs, but this help went only to absolute paupers, and wasn't very much. In some cities, "public assistance" amounted to small portions of restaurant garbage collected in big cans labeled "Edible Swill" and doled out in soup kitchens. So if you were poor, lived in a city, and couldn't find a job your only hope for survival was to first sell or pawn anything and everything you owned of value, and then turn to either begging or petty crime. The cliche of the "Depression apple salesman" was the result of a surplus of apples in 1932 left to rot in warehouses because nobody was buying them -- rather than letting them rot away, they were sold to unemployed men on credit for three cents each, and would be sold on the street for a nickel. It was one step up from begging, but not by much, and by New Years 1933, these men were literally everywhere.

You don't see this side of Depression life very often in TV or movies because it was so relentlessly grim. Things were tight even if you *did* have a job -- because the average man lived under the constant pressure of knowing that all that separated him from that pitiful bum on the corner in the ragged coat with the crate of apples was his paycheck, and that could disappear without warning at any time.

 

[kiwilrdg]

The Waltons owned an expensive Zenith radio, when in reality they probably would have had cheap Philco or Crosley, but that's more a flaw of the set designer than of the scripts, so I gave them a pass for that.

your only hope for survival was to first sell or pawn anything and everything you owned of value,

Perhaps that radio is not as out of place as it at first appears. They were a family that had resources to support themselves and they were smart. Sounds like a good payment for a load of lumber.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Possibly. But that particular radio wasn't built until 1937, and it showed up in the series as early as 1933.

Be that as it may, though, barter was very common, especially in small towns where people knew each other and could reasonably expect to get a fair deal. There was some of it in cities --for example, the 1933 Golden Gloves boxing tournament in New York allowed patrons to buy a ticket with either cash or the equivalent value in merchandise. They ended up taking in everything from canned goods to ladies' underpants. Barter became essential during the bank failures and bank holiday of early 1933 -- even people with jobs couldn't get their money, because the banks had either collapsed and their money was lost or the banks were closed and their assets were frozen and they could neither make withdrawals or write checks. So unless they had some cash hidden away in the mattress or an old coffee can under the garage floor, they had to barter for necessities. In some cities temporary "scrip" was issued by local governments or merchants' associations to keep business going, but people didn't trust it and didn't like to use it.

This period of the Depression didn't last long -- the bulk of the bank failures occured during January and February, the Bank Holiday occured during the first week after FDR's inauguration, and most of the banks reopened in mid-March -- but it was the greatest economic crisis in U. S. History, and it made an impression that colored people's memories of the entire era.

 

[sheeplady]

I know both sets of my grandparents (who lived through the depression) strongly disliked the Waltons. They felt it romanticized the depression and was far too rosy of a picture. I do think my mother's parents in particular had it quite hard during the depression and it was no where close to their own experience. It wasn't uncommon even in farm families to not have enough to eat, to have to turn your children out onto the street to fend for themselves, or lose your property and possessions. I am sure that this was not a common perception, however, given the popularity of the show. It's also possible that my grandparent's experiences during that time period were more negative than the average population.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Another way in which the Waltons were an atypical Depression farm family is that they had electricity. I don't know the specifics of that exact part of Virginia, but the majority of farms in the early 1930s were "off the grid," and either generated their own electricity with 32-volt windmill generators or used kerosene lanterns. The REA started making major inroads in getting rural sectors wired by the late thirties, but it was well into the forties before a lot of rural areas got electrical service.

 

[Gingerella72]

I think the only way to truly get a sense of what different people were experiencing during that time period is to read true accounts from people who lived through it, or talk to them (if you can find anyone you know still alive that lived through it). Times were tough all across the board, but not everyone had it as bad as others. It's easy for pop culture to draw on stereotypes, because we like to compartmentalize things to better understand them.

My dad was born into the dust bowl plains of eastern Colorado in 1931 and for the first 10 years of his life he remembers nothing but poverty and hard times on the farm. My mother, on the other hand, was born in 1930 to an affluent family in Tampa FL and remembers driving past bread lines in her father's big black car and her dad explaining to her why all those men were standing in line, and having a nanny and a cook. Very different experiences of the same time period.

 

[sheeplady]

And even when they had electrical service that didn't mean the houses had it. It was a huge expense to put into an existing building. The house I grew up in had the electric done in 1941 when the then owners sold off a lot. The owners of house at that time were quite wealthy. (It was their summer home and they had servants who traveled with them and a full time man who lived at the summer home.) It was done before a lot of the other homes in the area because the owners had money.

 

[kiwilrdg]

They may have had a windmill and Delco system for power. I have replaced wires that had been used for Delco lines that were later hooked to 110 volt (that house is about 80 miles north west of Schuyler, Virginia where the writer of The Waltons grew up).

The thing that is neglected the most in The Waltons is the amount of work that was, and still is needed on a farm and sawmill. The kids would not have chores, it would be jobs just like the rest of the family. The old joke essay "Farm Kid's Letter Home" about how easy Marine Bootcamp is compared to farm life comes to mind.

 

[LizzieMaine]

My dad was born into the dust bowl plains of eastern Colorado in 1931 and for the first 10 years of his life he remembers nothing but poverty and hard times on the farm. My mother, on the other hand, was born in 1930 to an affluent family in Tampa FL and remembers driving past bread lines in her father's big black car and her dad explaining to her why all those men were standing in line, and having a nanny and a cook. Very different experiences of the same time period.

Exactly. Even with 25 percent unemployment during the winter of 1932-33, that meant 75 percent of the workforce still had jobs. The main issue for most of them was *fear.* Most non-farm working Americans during the thirties were blue-collar -- working in mills, factories, and docks -- were paid by the hour or by piecework, and rarely had any sort of strong union protection. They lived in constant fear of wage cuts, plant shutdowns, and other such sudden unilateral disruptions of their lives. Even the majority of white-collar Americans worked in support roles for such companies, and they often felt the axe even before the production staff -- and they found it much harder to find work if they were laid off, since most of the jobs that did open up were for casual labor, and an experienced laborer was going to get called for that job before a disposessed accountant or clerk. The more specialized you were in your job skills, the more danger you were in if you lost that job, and that fear shadowed just about everyone who wasn't independently wealthy. Thus FDR's inaugural address emphasizing the "nameless, unreasoning terror" that was paralyzing recovery.

 

[1961MJS]

Exactly. Even with 25 percent unemployment during the winter of 1932-33, that meant 75 percent of the workforce still had jobs. The main issue for most of them was *fear.* Most non-farm working Americans during the thirties were blue-collar -- working in mills, factories, and docks -- were paid by the hour or by piecework, and rarely had any sort of strong union protection. They lived in constant fear of wage cuts, plant shutdowns, and other such sudden unilateral disruptions of their lives. Even the majority of white-collar Americans worked in support roles for such companies, and they often felt the axe even before the production staff -- and they found it much harder to find work if they were laid off, since most of the jobs that did open up were for casual labor, and an experienced laborer was going to get called for that job before a disposessed accountant or clerk. The more specialized you were in your job skills, the more danger you were in if you lost that job, and that fear shadowed just about everyone who wasn't independently wealthy. Thus FDR's inaugural address emphasizing the "nameless, unreasoning terror" that was paralyzing recovery.

Hi Lizzie

I wonder how my two grandfathers figured into the situation. Grandpa Mike was a fireman on the Wabash Railroad. He fired the 573 which is in the Museum of Transportation in Saint Louis. Grandpa lived close to the roundhouse, so after the manager called the first couple of guys on the list, he'd call Grandpa. Railroad wages apparently never went down, so he made more on the two or three days a month he worked than he did as a bartender and WPA worker.

Grandaddy Harv was a coal miner in Kentucky and also only worked a few days a month as a mule driver in the hole. He lived a full 20 years longer than his two brothers who worked on the coal face digging and breathing coal dust 10 hours a day.

Note, both worked far less than full time, but both worked. Both farmed / gardened / raised cattle to eat and to make ends meet.

later

 

[Atticus Finch]

Both of my parents grew up during the Depression and in the rural South...much like the fictional Waltons and the Finch family. Mom and Dad often told me that, though they were poor, they didn't know it at the time. They had as much...or as little...as their friends and neighbors, so they thought their lives were perfectly normal. They didn't have television or the internet to let them know how actually modest was their existence.

AF

 

[Salty O'Rourke]

Another way in which the Waltons were an atypical Depression farm family is that they had electricity. I don't know the specifics of that exact part of Virginia, but the majority of farms in the early 1930s were "off the grid," and either generated their own electricity with 32-volt windmill generators or used kerosene lanterns. The REA started making major inroads in getting rural sectors wired by the late thirties, but it was well into the forties before a lot of rural areas got electrical service.

The Waltons' setting is somewhere within a reasonable drive (over unsurfaced roads) of Charlottesville, which puts in the center of the state and probably in or around Nelson County - Hamner's home town of Schuyler is in Nelson Co. The REA set up the Central Virginia Electric Cooperative around 1937-38 in that area.

Both of my parents were born in the 1920s in rural Virginia, farther west than the setting of The Waltons. My mom grew up on a farm, which my grandfather owned having bought it in 1930 just after the crash. He supplemented the farm income by operating a small sawmill, and there were 3 generations living in the house - sound familiar? Mom says that the day-to-day family life depicted in the show was generally in keeping with her upbringing. Her family had enough food but little money throughout the Depression, but the kids didn't feel a sense that they were "poor"; they were certainly better off than my Dad's family who lived in the county seat. My dad's family had a little garden patch and a cow and some chickens but did not have the ability to raise all the food they needed. My dad remembers accompanying my grandfather across the mountain to the CCC camp in the early '30s where my granddad would pick up a little money cutting hair. My folks remember when the county was electrified in the mid-30s; my paternal grandfather got a job keeping the backup generators running when the waterfall that drove the turbines slowed during dry spells.

My Great-grandfather operated a country store a la Lum 'n Abner and had a Delco system to run the lights, drink coolers, and gas pumps. My dad would stay with his grandparents in the summer months and one of his chores was to keep the Delco system running.

It was after the war before either of my grandfathers could install indoor plumbing in their homes, which is the biggest example of The Waltons playing fast and loose with the facts.

 

[LizzieMaine]

That's not too dissimilar from the experiences of my own family. They weren't farm people, instead living in town, but the emphasis on being willing and able to do any possible form of work at any time was the hallmark of the entire Depression generation. There were few people who'd turn down a job because it "wasn't in their line" or "they didn't have the training." You took the job and if you didn't know how to do it, you faked until you could pick up the basics.

My grandfather was a prime example of this. He went to work in a cooperage -- a factory making barrels -- when he was a teenager, and supplemented this playing semi-pro basketball and eventually leading a six-piece dance band. His brother was a Kingfish-like promoter, always coming up with a new scheme, and served as the band's booking manager during this period, while taking a cut for himself. They worked a lot but didn't make very much. When the Depression hit, the cooperage shut down, and my grandfather went to work on the docks, unloading tapioca ships and breathing the dust all day -- something that eventually contributed to the emphysema that would kill him. He also helped build the Waldo-Hancock Bridge, the first suspension bridge in Maine -- even though he had no knowledge of riveting or metalwork, the bridge is still standing, so he and his crewmates must've done pretty well as on-the-job trainees. He also dug ditches for the WPA, helped his father with carpentry, and when necessary helped his brother as a bootlegger, something for which my teetotaling grandmother never forgave him. (Even after Repeal people retained a taste for tax-free booze, and bootleggers survived by watering the product and undercutting the prices at the Green Front.) He finally taught himself basic auto mechanics and went to work at a gas station -- which he ended up owning and running for nearly forty years. That's a lot of different work over the space of a decade, but it was typical of his generation. They had neither electricity nor indoor plumbing until 1945, and didn't have a telelphone until 1950.

He didn't make much money -- the 1940 census gives his 1939 earnings as about $430 -- but he survived, and that was the ethos of the Depression generation. Survive, no matter what you have to do.

 

[rjb1]

My parents grew up in the rural south on farms during the 1930's, so they didn't go hungry, but were definitely not well off. My mother mentioned that sometimes they would only have some buttermilk and a biscuit for supper. However, I think this part of the country was so poor already that the Depression did not make it that much worse, except that there was less cash money. Oddly enough, I think most of the farm families, who were otherwise quite poor, had cars - mostly Model T's left over from the 1920's. I think they almost had to have them to get from the remote rural areas into town for any reason.
They never directly mentioned using a barter system, but I would be surprised if they didn't do that.

Then WWII broke out and that "saved" the whole family (parents, aunts, uncles). The men went into the Army and the women moved to town and got jobs in war plants. My dad went to school on the GI Bill and we lived happily ever after.
They never complained in a bitter way about the Depression or having lived in poverty but it did change their attitudes toward money and thrift. Around our house you watched carefully what you spent and never wasted anything. Even in her later years when she had plenty of money, my mother would tape together two really short pencils just to get a little more use out of them.
And they and none of their (numerous) brothers and sisters ever went back on the farm.

Lizzie is dead right in her comment above concerning the fear factor about losing one's job during the Depression. If you watch movies actually made during the Depression, as opposed to the ones like "The Waltons" made about the Depression, the male heroes in the old movies often speak about the possibility of losing their jobs in the same tone as we would talk about nuclear war or a killer asteroid. There just might not be an alternative out there.

 

[V.C. Brunswick]

That's not too dissimilar from the experiences of my own family. They weren't farm people, instead living in town, but the emphasis on being willing and able to do any possible form of work at any time was the hallmark of the entire Depression generation. There were few people who'd turn down a job because it "wasn't in their line" or "they didn't have the training." You took the job and if you didn't know how to do it, you faked until you could pick up the basics.

And in many ways it was probably a little easier to find work back then than today because employers didn't ask for a ton of credentials just for a low level position. At another forum that I frequent one of the members had a recent job offer that had the following requirements:

-- Masters Degree in Engineering
-- Proven track record in Industrial Design
-- Ability to sculpt clay, foam
-- Ability to build circuit boards
-- Expert in Mold Design
-- Master Machinist with Injection Mold and Tooling experience
-- Art Degree preferred
-- Chinese language skills a definite plus (???)
-- Knowledge of Patent Application Law

And they were only willing to pay him ten dollars an hour!

 

[LizzieMaine]

I think a real case can be made that modern civilization has become far too specialized for its own good -- creating a generation of people akin to highly-bred show dogs, which would have no possible hope of surviving if thrown into the wild. They've lost that adaptability that was absolutely essential to surviving the Depression, and God help them if we ever have another *real* Depression, not a relative inconvenience like 2008.

Educational qualifications weren't a big deal in most jobs in the thirties, because most adult Americans had little more than an 8th grade education. City people were more likely to have finished high school than farm folk, and younger people far more likely to have completed high school than their parents, but college was out of the question for most people -- less than five percent of the population held college degrees as late as 1940.

 

[Shangas]

It's been interesting reading all the replies. It was because of replies such as SheepLady's (who said her grandparents found the "Waltons" romanticised), that I wanted to create this thread. I wanted to find out just how accurate, or inaccurate, true, or untrue, depictions of the Depression are, when it comes to popular culture.

My grandmother lived through the Depression. In 1929, she would've been 15. Gran never told me anything about the Depression. She told me a lot about the War that followed. The Japanese invasion (she would've been in her mid/late 20s when that happened), and the food-shortages, the fighting, the bombing, the lack of electrical power. But of the Depression, almost nothing.

Shows like the Waltons did touch on some elements of the Depression which were mentioned here in the thread. Such as how city folk tended to have it harder, and why. How farming folk could afford to at least eek SOME of their survival off the land, by growing their own crops, slaughtering their own meat, having milk and water and so-forth. On the other hand, city-folk were completely reliant on what trains and trucks could bring in.

In fact I remember (a LONG time ago now), how FDR had to put in place some sort of law or condition of some kind (I forget what) to keep farmers sending their food into the cities, otherwise the city-folk would all starve. Perhaps someone with better knowledge or memory of these things could back me up on this. It was something I learnt in 10th grade history, a long time ago!

In reply to Vic. Brunswick & LizzieMaine, as a recent university graduate looking for work, I can tell you now, that whole thing about qualifications and experience is driving me nuts.

It's getting to the point where you need a Doctorate in Sanitary Engineering for the position of Maintenance Officer of Public Lavatorial Conveniences.

Who the hell needs a university degree to clean bloody toilets?

That was an exaggeration, but trust me, the truth ain't far behind.

 

[Dan Allen]

John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath depicts Sallisaw Oklahoma in the eastern part of the state as ravaged by the dust bowl. Sallisaw is just ten miles west of my home and according to the old timers, my mother included, who lived threw the period the Dust bowl did not exist here--that was hundreds of miles to the west. My mother said that there was normal rain and normal crops. The depression effected a few farmers, but relativity few--certainly there was no masses of refugees as the book and movie portrayed.