This is propaganda!!!
In those years settlers in the West were still living in dugouts by choice so they could work their land.
Blacks and whites were living in “hovels” in the South, but they called them homes.
Migrant workers are migrant workers. I’ve done some of that on a sheep shearing team in New Zealand. It was hard work, and we were not pretty, but it paid and fed us.
Those times were hard, but put those photos next to starving Africans. In spite of the depression, everyone looks well nurished.
We cannot look at the 1930’s through the lens of our current prosperity and ease. They toughed it out because life was tough in the best of times.
Hey troll, go back to your mommie’s basement
I lived in Alabama in the 60s. I remember tar-paper shacks. My grandparents lived in a 700 sq ft house and considered themselves blessed. When my Dad was a Colonel, we lived in a 1500 sq ft house and only owned one car. We literally ate at the kitchen table - a metal and Formica thing we all squeezed in to, although my Dad considered himself a wealthy man. I was an adult before I lived in a house with a ‘dining room’.
Growing up during the Depression, my Mom wasn’t allowed to wear shoes to school until there was frost on the ground. Everyone else did the same, and no one felt ‘poor’. In fact, her Mom kept a second table so she could share their food with the bums who were poor and in need of help. The bums were polite, and usually offered to help with the chores.
Very different times.
Just living to adulthood in those days was a lot harder than it is now. I like to remind my children, when we read historical novels or watch shows with historic settings, that nobody, not even kings, had what we consider basic sanitation and household necessities. They were cold, they were dirty, they had fleas and intestinal parasites, and their food was going bad. There were flies everywhere, and rooms were full of smoke.
Might as well hit the road in a covered wagon as stay home!
The three Oscars nominated movie was made in 1945.
It is on youtube for Free.
You said it. Those times were hard on the heels of the Civil War, and in the South we were still recovering from that when the GD hit. Those pictures look like my childhood to me. We were dirty scruffy little barefoot urchins living off the land as best we could. But we never knew we were poor. Mom wouldn’t let the goats or chickens stay in the house for long. She would shoo them out. They always came back in during warm months though. There were no screens to keep them out. Bedbugs, mosquitos, snakes, mice; all part of life. Didn’t see indoor plumbing or electric lights until I was 9 yrs. This was in rural TN.
I also tend to think that these old-timey Depression era photos were/are often used as propoganda.
It's the old John Steinbeck/Woody Guthrie feel one gets when one looks at them. Art was used by the communists to agitate Labor and further FDR's New Deal policies.
It's very interesting to read the history of how the activists worked; I know some people in S. California are trying to use these same techniques today with the Mexican migrants.
When I look at these photos I see people who are a bit dirty with mussed hair (and it was commoner for kids to be dirtier back then in general as they ran around outside), but they don't look like Cambodian refugees. And many were from European immigrant families where things for them were tougher before they came to America.
Sure, there's no doubt that people struggle during severe downturns. But the commies definitely twist these types of photos for political advantage.
I bet we'd see many attempts to propogate these same types of photos today (remember the homeless stories/photos of the Reagan era?) if Bush was in office instead of Obama.
I agree. FDR did in fact have one of the biggest propaganda machines going to push his socialism agenda. Don't flame me folks I'm not saying those weren't hard times for many. My parents grew up during The Great Depression and were born before it hit.
You have to look at not just the stock market aspect but a bigger player was local or regional disasters making getting by rough. The Dust Bowl is a prime example. The ability to provide for needs was greatly diminished.
FDR also sent his propaganda crews into our region The Tennessee Valley and tried to portray those living here as backward, illiterate, poverty ridden, dirt farmers living in horrid conditions. Far from it. My Mom grew up on family farms mainly. They always had food. MY grandfather did everything from prison guard to helping build Norris Dam to owning a saw mill.
My Dad's family lived in the city. They too were poor but had a pretty good existence all things considered. I have a picture of my dad and his brother and sister playing on tricycles likely the 1920's vintage. In the summer my dads uncle would load up an army squad tent into his car and camping gear. He took my dad and my dads brother up to a camp on the river. He helped them get set up and he went back to town to work. Next weekend he would drive back up and the family had plenty of fish to eat. My grandfather worked as a night supervisor over janitors and maintenance in a then famous Knoxville restaurant. The man walked to work every day and by every day I mean just that. They weren't rich.
My dad even though he grew up in town would get on his bicycle on weekends during the school year and ride about 40 miles up to the camp on the river and a friend of the failiy's farm to spend the night and ride the bike home next morning.
By today's standards they were likely well below the poverty level. Granddad was originally from Oklahoma and left there with my grandmother who was from East Tennessee and he returned back here with her.
There were thriving communities in these ridges and mountains up too the flooding of the rivers. FDR used a Poverty Propaganda Program and soil erosion propaganda against this region to sell the forming of TVA The Tennessee Valley Authority to congress.
There was a Freeper from Virgina who had a wealth of information on the southern Appalachian region. I can't recall his user or real name right now. He passed on a couple years ago IIRC.
If you look at most of the pictures closely they are not pictures of poverty. Heck looking at the homes blacks lived in at North Carolina I'm rather amused. For the day those were actually good homes for anyone. They were the typical build. Cheap, affordable to most anyone, and they served the purpose. My first home as an adult back in 1980 after my Navy tour looked about the same construction. The inside was where it mattered. Me and my late first wife loved it.
Today I live in a double-wide me and my second wife bought over 20 years ago. The cost was what I could afford and was paid off in less than a decade. It will serve us well for our remaining lifetime. My Mom lives in a rather large two story brick home nearby. After Dad passed last year it's a considerable bit for her to keep up now.
I have seen kids just down right filthy barefooted and the boys had no shirts. I was born in the late 50's. I grew up middle class in the 1960's in a rural area mostly. The family across the road was poor as a church house mouse with 9 kids. We played together and at the end of the day all of us were clean before we went to bed that night in our homes. When playing though were got filthy by anyones stanndards. I have always been skeptical of how government portrayed things in The Great Depression.