From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend by Priscilla Murolo

Author:Priscilla Murolo [Murolo, Priscilla]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781595588562
Publisher: The New Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

EARLY YEARS OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION

Organized labor’s weakness in numbers and militancy helped set the stage for the Great Depression. While the Roaring Twenties saw gigantic increases in industrial output and home construction, unionism’s decline placed strict limits on both wage hikes and on workers’ ability to resist the speedups that helped limit industrial employment. The bottom line was that working people could not buy enough to sustain the system: earnings were simply too low and joblessness too common. By summer 1929, consumer spending had tapered off despite easy credit, home building had slumped, and manufacturers’ unsold inventories had swelled to the point where many firms were cutting production and laying off workers. The U.S. economy was already teetering when the stock market crash of October 1929 pushed it over the edge.

Total national income fell from about $83 billion in 1929 to $40 billion in 1932. Working people got the worst of it. By January 1930, unemployed workers numbered 4 million. By the end of 1932, 15–17 million people were jobless, about a third of the labor force. Millions more made do with part-time jobs. Unions lost about half a million members.

Wages were cut. From 1929 to 1933, average annual earnings fell 19 percent in transportation, 30 percent in manufacturing, 35 percent in mining, 42 percent in agriculture, 48 percent in construction. There was little cushion: fewer than half of white working-class families had savings in 1929, just $336 on the average. Workers of color had less.

Local governments and charities tried to provide relief, but their efforts were overwhelmed. Homeless encampments sprang up on public or vacant land on the outskirts of cities across the country. Many households dissolved, their children going to friends, relatives, or homes run by charities. Hunger was widespread, and malnutrition encouraged the spread of diseases like tuberculosis and pellagra. New York City recorded ninety-five deaths by starvation in 1931. Despair flourished too: New York City reported 25,000 suicides in 1930–31.

The depression hit minority and immigrant communities especially hard. In 1931, African Americans were 17 percent of the population and 33 percent of the unemployed—the disproportion was even more striking in cities like Charleston, South Carolina (49 percent of the population and 78 percent of the unemployed) and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (8 percent of the population, 38 percent of the unemployed). Tejanos called the depression “La Chilla” (“the squeal”) because it caused so much pain; in Texas an entire family could work all day picking cotton, and make just enough to buy themselves a single meal. After the blizzard of February 1932, New York City hired 12,000 men to shovel the streets; Bernardo de Vega recalled, “Many Puerto Ricans jumped at the chance to make some money . . . wrapped up in rags, their necks covered with old newspapers, swinging their shovels and shivering to the bone.” David Moore remembered African Americans in Detroit in 1929, the year he turned seventeen, “going around to these markets where there was a possibility of food, picking up rotten potatoes, cutting the rotten off to salvage some part of that potato that may be good.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.