The Great Depression – Page 2 – Old Magazine Articles

The Increased Suicide Rate
(Literary Digest, 1933)

With the arrival of the Great Depression came an increase in American suicides. When this article appeared on the newsstands the Depression was just three and a half years old – with many more years yet to come. As the Americans saw 1932 come to a close, the records showed that 3,088 more acts of self-immolation had taken place than had been recorded the year before.

Read about the the mood of the Great Depression and how it was reflected in the election of 1932 – click here…

Prosperity Returns to Freeport, Texas
(Collier’s Magazine, 1940)

In 1940, when a defense plant moved into the Gulfport town of Freeport, Texas, the Great Depression came to a screeching halt. Within three months their population shot up from 3,100 to a whopping 7,500, and the economic blessing was not simply confined to that one region:

In Corpus Christi they have a nice little plum in the form of a $25,000,000 naval air base. Houston is getting a $2,000,000 refurbishing of Ellington Field. Randolph Field at San Antonio is getting a costly going over.

Life in Freeport was good. When a local shoeshine lad had found that his pockets were flush with cash after three day’s labor, he exclaimed –

We’re in high cotton now!

Threat of Nationalizing
(Liberty Magazine, 1938)

In the winter of 1938, when one of FDR’s anointed Brain Trusters made an off-the-cuff remark that the Federal Government would take over industry if the economy did not turn around, it must have alarmed many of the industry captains and sent the stock market through the floor. It also moved the eccentric Bernarr MacFadden (1868 – 1955) to put a fresh ribbon in his typewriter and have at it:

The present administration has made a ghastly failure of the business management of this government. It has increased the national indebtedness at the rate of five to ten million dollars every day. It has added more than twenty thousand million dollars to our national debt, and it probably has twenty million or more of our citizens on the dole, or in charity jobs, which is the dole in another form.

Youth at Risk
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1937)

By the year 1937 it became a concern that an eighth of all those admitted to the nation’s state-run mental hospitals were between the ages of 15 through 24. On a similar note, it was revealed that 40% of employable youth were entirely unable to secure positions during this this same period. These matters were made known as a result of the efforts put forward by the Youth Commission of the American Council of Education – a group that began compiling such data in 1935.

Public Relief for Young Men
(Literary Digest, 1933)

During the Spring of 1933 articles like this one began to appear in the magazines and newspapers across the country serving to inform their readers about the creation of an additional Federal agency that was designed to help take some of the sting out of the Great Depression. Roosevelt’s New Deal intended to take a hefty percentage of unmarried young men off the streets of 16 American cities, feed them, clothe them and line their pockets with $30.00 a month for their labor. W.W. II created a host of other demands requiring Federal funding, and so Congress voted to dissolve the C.C.C. in 1942.

Click here to read about the end of the Great Depression…

‘Soak the Rich”
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1935)

‘SOAK THE RICH!’ has been a popular slogan for generations. President Roosevelt knows the people and he knows that this cry is even more popular now than it ever was before. Taxes which increase the cost of living and hang so heavily on the poor cannot be popular… But pick some taxes that bear down on the rich and – and then you have something which everyone will hurrah for. The number of rich are comparatively few, and hence their votes and influence can be disregarded entirely.

President Roosevelt’s plan was to tax this minority for 75 percent of their income.

To read about the dwindling good fortune of the rich, click here…

‘The Forgotten Dollar”
(New Outlook Magazine, 1935)

Along with the host of other forgotten items in this historic age of trouble, to be classed with Sumner’s forgotten man and Uncle Sam’s forgotten Constitution, is the forgotten dollar.

– so saith Edwin Myers of NEW OUTLOOK MAGAZINE. His gripe was typical of most Americans who struggled to get by during the Great Depression – but FDR was not neglectful of the dollar; one of his first acts was to make American exports more attractive abroad – and he devalued the dollar to this end. Much to his credit, exports did indeed increase – but the decreased purchasing power of the dollar domestically contributed to the misery of the American consumer.

‘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.

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.

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.