Nos genuflectitur ad non princeps sed Princeps Pacem!
Listen, O isles, unto me; and hearken, ye people, from far; The LORD hath called me from the womb; from the bowels of my mother hath he made mention of my name. (Isaiah 49:1 KJV)
Given the state of the Obama economy these pictures could have been taken last week.
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.
I saw more smiles than frowns in these photos. I also noticed that the photos were almost all of families, together. Most of the photos were of people working. I wonder if these people considered themselves “poor?”
B&W pictures make it look so bad. Not long ago someone e-mailed me a bunch of KODACHROME COLOR photos of the 1930s. All the difference in the world!
My folks lived through that time, from the hard times on a tobacco farm in Tennessee to the hard times in the dust bowl where they did not leave. They survived.
My mother, father, and grandfather remembered this time well. I do, too - partically. I was born in 1950. I remember living in my grandpa’s house that had electricity (REA), a well, and an outhouse out back.
I remember as a young boy getting baths in a big galvanized tub filled with hot water taken from the well and heated on the stove. Heat was a coal burning stove/heater that was in the kitchen/open room in the center of the house...the whole house was about 750 square feet, 4 rooms. When my mom swept the floors all she need do was sweep the dirt through the cracks in the wood to the dirt below.
He was a carpenter, my dad a veteran serviceman with a 5th grade education. It wasn’t hard with their help to do better than they did. I worry now, with Obama and his socialists, if those times of my childhood will be visited on my grandchildren.
Ironic, isn’t it, that we must rely on our cousins across The Pond to find images that The Left doesn’t want us to see.
U-6, the “real” unemployment rate, May 2012: 14.8%.
Thing is, it comes from the UK to show how bad we had it. They’ve never done a series on how bad the UK was during that time and turn of the century (1890-1900). It made our Depression look like prosperity.
And this didn’t stop for over 10 years under an FDR administration.
Will we learn?
Using the accurate U6 data, we’re not all that far away:
http://portalseven.com/employment/unemployment_rate_u6.jsp?fromYear=2000&toYear=2012
Don't think these white folks would've quite understood.
Am I crazy, or most of those people look BETTER fit than people today? If you take random photos of poor people in America, they are fat and are clearly not suffering from the lack of food. Those depression era poor people at least look to have dignity (at least in appearance).
Must be a lot criminals in these pictures. For as we are constantly told today poverty causes crime.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We must remember that those brave men and women now known as "the greatest generation" came through the exact period depicted in these pictures, making their sacrifices for the "land of the free."
Those who survived went on to build the later period of growth and prosperity which so-called "progressives" now are destroying in their attempts to impose the ideas their ancestors fought against decades ago.