Posted on 06/09/2012 9:30:09 AM PDT by djone
"And you thought it was bad now... Since the onset of the recession in 2007, pundits have compared the crisis to the Great Depression of the 1930s - but this week's release of 1,000 photographs from that bygone era serves as a reminder of how truly harsh that period was. "
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
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.
They seemed more blank to me. Considering that they knew the pics were being taken it was probably the best they could muster.
As to your 'Did they consider themselves poor'. From my experience probably not. I had just started school when the depression started. My father cut grass for NYC. Our place did not have any heat or own toilet. Our heat was the kitchen stove. We gathered in two rooms sleeping on the floor for the winter. I went with my father to gather wooden boxes to burn from the grocery stores on Broadway. Egg box cardboard was also good. We went to the 96st Street freight train stop where my father bought eggs from the incoming freight men. I believe it was 25 cents per dozen. There was no money for health care. My mother was taken to Harlem Hospital as a charity case. I lost all my upper teeth. We didn't know what poor was. It was life. Regards.
Must be a lot criminals in these pictures. For as we are constantly told today poverty causes crime.
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!
“Hey troll, go back to your mommie’s basement”
A little difficult since I am a grandmother, my own mother having been dead seventeen years and did not have a basement.
The pictures are valuable history of the depression years, but then I read the following commentary following one of the photos.
“While President Barack Obama has often been criticized for his handling of the economy and the unemployment crisis, which continues to threaten his re-election prospects, the situation is far less bleak that the one President Franklin D. Roosevelt faced when he was elected in 1932.”
Trailers for sale or rent
Rooms to let...fifty cents.
No phone, no pool, no pets
I ain't got no cigarettes
Ah, but..two hours of pushin' broom
Buys an eight by twelve four-bit room
I'm a man of means by no means
King of the road.
Third boxcar, midnight train
Destination...Bangor, Maine.
Old worn out suits and shoes,
I don't pay no union dues,
I smoke old stogies I have found
Short, but not too big around
I'm a man of means by no means
King of the road.
I know every engineer on every train
All of their children, and all of their names
And every handout in every town
And every lock that ain't locked
When no one's around.
I sing,
Trailers for sale or rent
Rooms to let, fifty cents
No phone, no pool, no pets
I ain't got no cigarettes
Ah, but, two hours of pushin' broom
Buys an eight by twelve four-bit room
I'm a man of means by no means
King of the road.
We all have a lot of personal and family memories, in common.
A grandmother, you should certainly know that the ‘debt’ whatever it was per person (you know, those stranded by the roadside in makeshift shacks, tents, and hovels) was infinitely smaller than the potential debt that this Obama government is shackling OUR children and grandchildren with.
IF you couple an insurmountable per capita debt with a vast portion of this country’s citizenry already totally dependent on government largesse and unwilling to diminish their ill-gotten booty one iota, you have an absolute catastrophe on the horizon. You might call it propaganda and ‘their’ choice, I know better, and I call it real poverty. You should know better.
great post! Fitting for the culture of the time. I remember singing this when I was younger.
“While President Barack Obama has often been criticized for his handling of the economy and the unemployment crisis, which continues to threaten his re-election prospects, the situation is far less bleak that the one President Franklin D. Roosevelt faced when he was elected in 1932.”
I’m not so sure thats true. In 1932 80% of folks lived on the farm and only 20% lived in the city. Its just the opposite now. When the big crash comes people won’t be able to grow their own food like they did back then.
Back then there were no credit cards so people did not have the debt people have now and most people rented their homes as opposed to owning and carrying a big mortgage. Subsistence was actually easier then than it is now. People were not as dependent on electricity and electronics as we are now either.
That “hovels in Winston-Salem, NC” shot is particularly galling.
The houses are not especially large and are unpainted. Paint was the first thing to go in hard times, Great Depression or before. There are no trees because they were burnt as fuel in wood cookstoves and for heat. Note that the bare ground is plowed. Food production.
I also note electic lines in the neighborhood and I see no outhouses, so there was city water and indoor plumbing.
Theses “hovels” so-called, were better than most out in the country had, white or black. Ignorance regarding history is no excuse. It’s certainly not appealing to look at from the vantage point of today, but it was servicable shelter with power, clean running water and garden space.
It got them through. Sneering at “hovels” doesn’t do anybody any good at all. It just reinforces a stereotype that is politically useful.
Most of these photos are flat out propaganda for FDR’s socialist policies. The photographers were sent out by government agencies or the NYT with the express goal of making things look bad. Many of them are posed for deception or don’t really represent what they are purported to show.
This has been well documented, for example here:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/18/the-case-of-the-inappropriate-alarm-clock-part-1/
BOOKMARK
With great faith and dignity, their parents worked hard in the fields, and later in the factories, to put food on the table, thereby instilling in the children a pride that would serve them well when, a few years later, they were called to duty to defend America in WWII.
Those soldiers, and their mothers, sisters and wives who planted victory gardens, worked in shipyards, and collected scrap metal for the war effort, were the ones who preserved the Founders' concept of liberty in the world and continued to make America the destination for poor oppressed people from all over the globe.
Real poverty was not an excuse for theft, either privately or by getting a bunch of elected politicians to pass a law to take from their neighbors what they could not legally steal individually. Instead, it was the motivator for achievement, lending a helping hand to neighbors, and for fellowship among believers that a Divine Providence was overruling America, and that the term "under God" was a meaningful acknowledgement of that idea.
Following the World War, a grateful nation became prosperous and the literal breadbasket of the world.
Those who, since then, have waged a fake and purely political "war on poverty" to advance their own status and coercive power over the lives of others are proving to be the great causers of poverty, because they have abandoned the very ideas of liberty, individual enterprise and personal responsibility which made America great--and they are doing it without the shame which should accompany such an effort.
It’s despicable that those photos would be used to make commentary on Obama’s economic disaster.
The pictures are valuable history of the depression years, but then I read the following commentary following one of the photos.
I repeat:
“While President Barack Obama has often been criticized for his handling of the economy and the unemployment crisis, which continues to threaten his re-election prospects, the situation is far less bleak that the one President Franklin D. Roosevelt faced when he was elected in 1932.”
It’s really tacky to make other folks suffering all about Obama.
Don’t miss BigBobbers post#32.
By the time I was born in 1948 my father’s father had lost the farm and was dead. I’m not sure when but my older brothers remembered grandpa and the farm. We never talked about that time. My grandma with a maiden sister lived in a three room shack in a tiny town that is now almost extinct. My uncle, who had gotten a college education and was working for a newspaper, had purchased it. It did not have running water. It did have electricity. I think that there was either a gas stove or an electric stove. The old wood burning stove was still there but unused. You had to pump water and use an outhouse. My aunt, who had married a doctor, provided for them. She wanted them to come to KCMO to live but they refused to leave Pettis county. I now have figured out why. My other uncle who was bi-polar and an alcoholic, lived there. You don’t leave family who needs you.
My father’s maternal grandfather came over from Ireland in 1850 at the age of 8 with his brother’s and parents to escape the potato famine. Now that was really hard times.
100 million Americans who can’t find jobs. 50 million Americans on food stamps. 50% of new college graduates unemployed....
Oh wait...that’s now.
A troll would be jumping to conclusions about the motives for the release of the pictures.
If you had personally been, or had family members that had lived through it, I don't think you'd be so quick to discount what is likely to happen if Obama is elected again. Honestly, you sound like an apologist for Obama. Since I know you don't know what you're talking about, it is pointless to try and make you see the obvious parallels.
The conclusion one is expected to reach is contained in the headline.
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