Job Search & Career Blog
CV, Cover Letter and Interview guide. Here you
can find CV Example and information on how to
write a CV.
Lessons for the future? Survival during the Great Depression
October 25th, 2008
The last three generations, Baby Boomers and Generations X and Y, have never experienced anything remotely like the Great Depression. There is no modern equivalent. Recessions are relatively mild, and relatively brief. Depressions are relatively severe, and extremely long.
The great fear created by the current economic meltdown is that this might be a precursor to another Great Depression. 90 years ago, our grandparents were trying to raise families in a world where there was no money, no future, and no obvious way out. Even people with jobs were finding it very hard, because so many people were unemployed that the national economies were barely functional, and remained that way for a decade.
The Great Depression was an economic disaster the like of which the world had never seen before. The global economy ground to a halt. Banks were wiped out, and so were people’s savings and their hopes of a better life.
This was a brutal time, remembered even by the survivors of World War Two as the worst time in their lives. Even in America, survival, not employment, became the main daily issue. Some people basically survived by any means available, including hunting wild animals, eating squirrels, and anything else which was available.
Another survival method, to put it politely, was practiced by people finding buyers for things they didn’t own. Crime soared, too, as life became almost impossible. Stealing food, which the current Western population usually considers some sort of tale from Old Europe, hundreds of years ago, was also common. It was the only way they could get food.
The world, in some ways, became like Russia in the 90s, a place where what you could buy figured out as what you get for the price of what you’d sold.
That process, obviously, has limits. People only own so much, and they can’t really afford to sell necessities. So, first to go were things they could live without, luxury items, old furniture, clothes, etc. Then the choices got harder, while the options got fewer.
It could be a choice between selling the pram and feeding the child. Most people spent as much time at pawn shops and other places where they could sell things, as looking for work. It was either that or forget about eating, which you can only do for so long.
If you’ve ever been poor, or had depression, you’ll appreciate how appropriate a description of the period as The Great Depression really is. It’s left scars across all cultures and history itself.
It’s where the original American hobo culture started, and where the Australian swagman culture (started by an earlier local depression in the 1890s) was reborn. People would, literally, walk across the country, if they had to, to find work, leaving their families behind. Sometimes the families wouldn’t hear from them for months, and had to survive as best they could, with whatever was available.
It was simply a matter of keeping going until you found work, wherever it happened to be. In Europe, currencies like the German mark collapsed, and impoverished the whole country. In Britain, dole queues stretched for miles.
The modern Western idea of poverty came from the Great Depression era. Families were fed on flour and water, cooked up into sourdough, or damper, or any one of thousands of variations. Anything edible was used.
People would hoard food. The common image in US folklore of a hobo eating out of a can came from that time. Canned food, as a matter of fact, kept a whole generation alive. Because money was so short, people learned to buy supplies of food that would keep for a long time. Rice, and other foods that could be trusted to be stored for a while, were kept. Fruit was usually turned into jam, some of which could be sold, but which could also be kept for a very long time.
In big cities, the food situation was so bad that soup kitchens were set up, usually by philanthropic organizations. These were food based versions of the hostels and shelters of the modern era, but they were feeding huge numbers of people, every day. They were more like aid to Third World countries than welfare. Even places like New York were basically reduced to a handout economy methodology. People simply could not afford to buy food.
If you have a look at the pictures of those times, what you see is really what the cameras could find. They tried hard, and often, but most of the horrors of poverty and deprivation rarely show up in media. There are endless stories of the Depression, and the huge crowds of unemployed people in dingy streets queuing for jobs are only a small part of the real story.
People lived where they could, how they could. Living in a barn, or some other non-residential place, wasn’t at all unusual. Some would work for a roof over their heads, because the employer was almost broke, too.
The Great Depression started in 1929, but it didn’t finish in most parts of the world until the late 1930s, or in some cases after the Second World War. A generation of kids grew up with poor clothes, unemployed parents, and a feeble education made worse by the fact that when old enough they were more likely to get work than their parents, being cheaper labor.
If another Great Depression were to happen, it would be much worse. There are a lot more people now, squeezed into the same spaces. Even the first breezes of the economic meltdown have created serious problems for a lot of people.
Let’s hope we can learn the lessons of the Great Depression as history, not as a survival manual for ourselves.
Leave a Reply
