The Great Depression

Find archive articles on the Great Depression from the 1930’s. Our site has great information from old magazine and newspaper articles on the Great Depression.

‘It was a Nice Depression” (Scribner’s Magazine, 1937)

I always knew that I would one day find a reminiscence of the Great Depression – what I didn’t expect is finding it in a magazine from 1937. As mentioned in another part of this site, 1937 saw some measure of economic recovery (until it didn’t) and this reminiscence was penned by a fellow who wanted so badly to believe that the whole thing was finally over. He wished so earnestly that the Depression had ended that he listed just what he was missing about it already. Little did he know he had three more years to go.

‘It was a Nice Depression” (Scribner’s Magazine, 1937) Read More »

The Okies and the Dust Bowl (Ken Magazine, 1938)

The other half of California’s 200,000 migratory workers are farmers who trekked from the dust bowl area; they found work on farms, but not farming; it’s seasonal piecework, like in a mill. Each Oklahoma nomad dreams of a cottage and a cow, but he’s just sitting on a barbed wire fence. With the publicity over, the government has forgotten the dust bowl refugees. At Depression depth, a man might make $8 a week; now, $5 is lucky. They are the bitterest folk in America; blood may flow…

Click here if you would like to read a 1940 article about the the finest movie to ever document the flight of the Okies: The Grapes of Wrath.

The Okies and the Dust Bowl (Ken Magazine, 1938) Read More »

FDR’s Continuing Failures (New Outlook, 1935)

When FDR’s first term reached the half-way mark the editor of New Outlook, Francis Walton, sat down at his typewriter and summarized the new president’s record:

It is a record of action – mostly ill-considered. It is a record of astounding failures. It is a record of abandoned experiments smilingly excused and apologized for by their perpetrator even before they were undertaken… It is a record against which natural recovery is waging a super-human struggle to reach us.

FDR’s Continuing Failures (New Outlook, 1935) Read More »

The Lot of Women in the Great Depression (New Outlook Magazine, 1934)

An editorial by two American feminists who insisted that the economic depression of the Thirties had knocked the wind right out of the Women’s Movement. They argued that some of the high ground that was earned in the preceding decades had been lost and needed to be taken back; their points are backed up by figures from the U.S. Census Bureau as well as other agencies. Much column space is devoted to the employment discrimination practiced by both state and Federal governments in favor of single women at the expense of the married. It is grievously made clear that even the sainted FDR Administration was one of the cruel practitioners of wage inequality.


CLICK HERE to read about the pay disparity that existed between men and women during the 1930s.

The Lot of Women in the Great Depression (New Outlook Magazine, 1934) Read More »

The Federal Theater Project (Pathfinder & Literary Digest Magazines, 1939)

The Federal Theater Project (FTP) was a division of President
Roosevelt’s Works Project Administration (WPA). The WPA was organized in order to dream up jobs for the many unemployed Americans during the Great Depression. They employed manual laborers with the Civilian Conservation Corps, musicians with the Federal Music Project and historians with the Federal Records Survey – to name only a few of the agencies within the WPA. The Federal Theater Project was intended to hire the nation’s actors, costumers,directors and stagehands:

At its peak in 1936, FTP employed 12,500 people…it had puppet shows, vaudeville units, circuses and stock companies traveling through every state.

The Federal Theater Project (Pathfinder & Literary Digest Magazines, 1939) Read More »

The Unhappy Constituents (New Outlook Magazine, 1933)

If President Roosevelt were a Caliph in ancient Baghdad, he would disguise himself as a Congressman and wander about the country asking the man at the filling station, the hitch-hiker, the farmer and his wife, the local chairlady of a woman’s club – he would ask them what they thought of FDR, the NRA, [General] Hugh Johnson, Brain Trusters, Jim Farley and the entire set-up in Washington… He would be startled. Mr Roosevelt is growing exceedingly unpopular – not so much the President himself as his Administration.


More about New Deal problems can be read here…

The Unhappy Constituents (New Outlook Magazine, 1933) Read More »

The Great Depression Reduced the Number of Marriages (The Pathfinder, 1933)

We were interested to learn that two of the most semi-popular queries on Google are, 1930s wedding theme decorations and 1930 wedding dress styles – yet to read the attached article is to learn that the most accurate step that any contemporary wedding planner assigned this theme can recommend is that the happy couple forego the nuptial ceremony entirely and simply move in together. During the Great Depression very few couples could afford to get married, much less divorced.

The Great Depression Reduced the Number of Marriages (The Pathfinder, 1933) Read More »

The Great Depression and American Communists (Click Magazine, 1939)

This photo-essay tells the story of the radical elements within the United States during the later period of the Great Depression – all of them were directed and financed by Georgi Dimitrov (1882 – 1949) in far-off Moscow. The leaders of the American Communist Party USA (CPUSA) were William Z. Foster, Earl Browder, and Ella Reeve Bloor.


In 1944, the city of Seattle, Washington elected a communist to the U.S. House of Representatives, click here to read about him…


Click here to learn how thoroughly the FBI had infiltrated the CPUSA.


Click here to read about an American woman who grew heartily sick of the socialists who pontificated on every street corner during the Great Depression…


Click here to read about the tactics that American Communists used in Hollywood during the Great Depression…


From Amazon: Demagogues in the Depression: American Radicals and the Union Party, 1932-1936,style=border:none

The Great Depression and American Communists (Click Magazine, 1939) Read More »

Labor Abuses in the South (Focus Magazine, 1938)

Many of the back-handed dealings that would be addressed in John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel, The Grapes of Wrath are illustrated in the attached photo-essay titled, Slavery in America. This article is about the cruel world of the Deep South that existed in the Twenties and Thirties. It was an agrarian fiefdom where generations of White planters and factory owners practiced the most un-American system of exploitation and feudalism that developed and was perpetuated from the chaos wrought by the Civil War and Reconstruction. It was a nasty place where the working people of both races labored under conditions of peonage and bone-crushing poverty with no hope in sight.


Click here to read more about the American South during the Great Depression.

Labor Abuses in the South (Focus Magazine, 1938) Read More »