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.
Scrip (sometimes called chit) is a term for any substitute for legal tender and is often a form of credit – so reads the Wikipedia definition for those items that served as currency in those portions of the U.S. where the bucks were scarce.
The attached news column tells a scrip story from the Great Depression – the sort of story that was probably most common on the old frontier.
A single paragraph from the late Forties explains who was behind the rise and fall of the oft-photographed sidewalk apple vending stands in New York City.
Click here to read about the end of the Great Depression…
A single paragraph from the late Forties explains who was behind the rise and fall of the oft-photographed sidewalk apple vending stands in New York City.
Click here to read about the end of the Great Depression…
This magazine article from 1935 documented the Federal aid that was made available for America’s poorest children. The malnutrition visited upon the boys of America’s indigent would render some of them unfit for military service in World War II.
With nearly one-sixth of the nation’s child population in families dependent upon emergency relief, welfare agencies call for a solution of their grave problem.
The problem was laid before the recent National Conference on the 1935 Needs of Children held under the auspices of The Parent’s Magazine in New York City. Before them Katherine F. Lenroot, Chief of the United States Children’s Bureau, made one of her first public appearances since taking office:
…These children have a right to expect that Federal, State, and community relief policies of 1935 will provide more adequately for essential items in the family budget.
Another article about children of the Great Depression can be read here…
Some people have maintained that doctors weren’t hit so hard by the economic slump. The claim was that people couldn’t help getting sick and their misfortune was the doctor’s gravy. But the Committee on the Cost of Medical Care, a non-governmental committee, of which Secretary Wilbur is chairman, reports a rapid decline in the income of doctors during the Depression… In 1930, the first [full] year of the Depression, physician’s incomes decreased 17% and they have been decreasing ever since.
The author also included some other elements gleaned by the committee – such as the average sum paid by the families in their study, the approximate cost of the nation’s medical bills and an approximation concerning the number of medical professionals at work in 1931.
During the Depression, many doctors and nurses worked entirely for free; to read about that, click here…
The New Deal’s Works Progress Administration, with its millions of employees and billions of dollars in relief funds, has long been recognized as a potential cesspool of graft where the unscrupulous are concerned. Last week, in the fierce heat of the 1938 campaign’s closing days, the stench of scandal began to penetrate the WPA administrations of two states…
This 1939 magazine article addressed the matter of the communist organization Workers Alliance perverting the arts organizations that operated within the Federal Works Projects Administration (WPA), thus forcing the government agency to close:
When the arts projects of the WPA were instituted, many capable and culturally progressive individuals throughout the country hailed them as a banner raised against the gloomy depression sky to form a rallying point for youthful and ambitious artists whose task it was to carry the torch of aesthetic advancement on to that future time when we envisaged the return of ‘prosperity’…yet the obvious control of the arts projects by the communist party through its stooge, the Workers Alliance has forced the hand of Congress to abolish the agency.
CLICK HERE to read about African-Americans during the Great Depression.
This 1938 editorial by the artist Philip Evergood (1901 – 1973) stated that the Federal Arts Project of the Thirties had not simply made the lives of artists a little better, but had also created a far better society:
The Federal Arts Project has pointed the way to an American Culture. It has set a weight in motion, it has let loose a force that has affected hundreds of thousands of lives. It has made murals depicting the history of our country and the lives of our people have been placed on the walls of our schools, hospitals, libraries and public buildings making them of greater beauty and of greater community interest – monuments and small sculpture have been added in equal numbers, easel paintings and prints now hang in thousands on the walls of public buildings…
Evergood likened this government funding to the Renaissance, when the church served as the artist’s patron and culture flourished.
Novelist Taylor Caldwell (Born Janet Miriam Holland Taylor Caldwell: 1900 – 1985) recalled the bleak days of the Great Depression – and the perpetual appearance of American socialist who seemed always to be in recruitment mode.
Open or crypto-Communists, they had one unwavering theme: Communism was a System with a Heart. Communism was the new Christianity. Communism was the savior of the working people. America must become Communistic, if it was to pull out of the Great Depression. The Light of the World was not in my church. It was in Moscow.
Click here to read further about American Communists during the Great Depression…
In 1887 the NEW YORK TIMES reviewed the first english edition of Das Kapital by Karl Marx, click here to read it…
This is an interesting article that assesses the financial abilities of each of the 48 states in 1935 in an effort to illustrate that the ten richest states, as a result of their minority status on Capitol Hill, were in no position to cry out about majority tyranny when the insolvent 38 states rigged a deliberately unfair tax code that would see to it that they alone would pay the nation’s bills.
The ‘rich’ people may howl and growl and moan at having to foot the bills for everything, but there’s no remedy for it… The reason is this: our parade of poor states totals 38, while the rich states number only ten. The figures show that these rich states, which have only one-third the population, have to pay two-thirds of the taxes. The 10 richest states have only 20 Senators in the Senate, while the 38 poor states have 76. The rich are decidedly in the minority and there is no way for them to change the set-up.
