The Great Depression – Page 2 – Old Magazine Articles

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.

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.

WPA and the States
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1937)

In early March, numerous governors convened and agreed that the WPA was dropping too many dependents from their rolls who were then becoming burdensome to their respective states. The executives then wrote a telegram to the White House insisting that the Federal program stop this practice.

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 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 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 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,

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.

In Defense of President Hoover
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1948)

Attached is a small excerpt from the Pathfinder review of Eugene Lyons’ book, Our Unknown Ex-President (1948). The author outlined the various measures taken by the Hoover administration during the earliest years of the Great Depression in hopes that the flood waters would subside:

He fought for banking reform laws, appropriations for public works, home-loan banks to protect farms and residences. He asked for millions for relief to be administered by state and local organizations… A Democratic Congress refused to heed his suggestions.

Yet, regardless of the various missteps made by Hoover and FDR, the United States remailed an enormously wealthy nation…

Government Heath Care for California Migrants
(PM Tabloid, 1940)

This is a report on the 1939 government-sponsored medical outreach program for California’s Grapes of Wrath migrants:

The counties of San Joaquin Valley have well organized health departments… [Migrants] are entitled to drugs, special diets, eyeglasses and appliances if authorized by the medical director. Since many patients are in need not so much of medicines than of food, the Association may pay a medical grocery bill just as it pays the druggist. It also provides school lunches and nursery meals.

More on migrant laborers can be read here…

What Will Save Us?
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1932)

The author of this brief paragraph points out that prior to the Great Depression that commenced in 1929, there were as many as five other economic slumps that existed in America’s past. He remembered that in each case something unexpected has come along to not only put us back on our feet again but to boom things in addition.

Will it be the sudden perfection of television? Or further development of electrical appliances, particularly air-conditioning and cooling? Or some new novelty?

The WPA Symphony Orchestras
(Newsweek Magazine, 1941)

This article lays out the enormity of the WPA Music Projects in the City of New York during 1941 – It sponsors the most extensive musical organization ever assembled in one city: two symphony and eight dance orchestras, two bands, two choral groups and three ensemble employing some 500 musicians, not to mention 96 music centers with 188 teachers instructing 22,000 students.

The Blue Eagle
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1934)

Blue Eagle, symbol of the National [Industrial] Recovery Act, is probably one of the best known figures in the country today. Gripping bolts of lightening and a cog wheel in its claws it now hovers over 95 percent of industrial America advertising the success of the first major move of the New Deal… With only one year behind it, it has brought about the cooperation of 2,300,000 employers and 60,000,000 consumers.

– so runs the introductory paragraph for this 1934 article that marked the first anniversary of the National Recovery Administration. This short-lived agency was the brainchild of FDR’s administration that was shot down by the Supreme Court in 1935. Although this article is filled with praise for the NRA, it would not be very long before the editors of PATHFINDER MAGAZINE assumed a more suspicious approach when reporting on this president’s efforts to repair the damaged economy.

More on NRA problems can be read here…

Incompetence at the Helm
(New Outlook Magazine, 1934)

A columnist writing for the magazine New Outlook following the first nine months of the New Deal, weighed carefully all the assorted alphabet agencies and edicts that President Roosevelt created in hopes that the U.S. economy would once more spring to life. He concluded that there was nothing to look forward to and compared FDR to the con-men on the street corners who scam the passersby into playing their shell games; difference being that FDR’s shells were both empty.

Click here to read about the first 100 days of the Roosevelt administration.

Reform The Banks!
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1932)

Eight months before the Congress passed the Glass–Steagall Act (aka the Banking Act of 1933) this unsigned editorial appeared in a Washington-based news magazine pointing out that the economic downturn in the country had created a need for such legislation.

Click here to read another 1932 article about the banks.

Your Graduation Gift: Despair
(New Outlook, 1933)

This is a graduation commencement speech that was written simply to appear on the printed page of a 1933 magazine – it was far too depressing to have ever been recited before an audience of eager-eared graduates and their doting relatives.

You know, of course, that ‘times are hard’… You know that less than ten percent of the post-graduate professional men from last year’s class have found work. And you have heard from home. Allowances have been cut. Classmates have had to drop out of college. Old family friends have had grave misfortunes. Homes have been lost. You know all these things, but you can’t realize them fully at this moment. You will, unfortunately, realize them only too well when you yourselves try to find a place in the world.

Prosperity’s Return
(Newsweek Magazine, 1940)

A quick read about the return of prosperity by economist turned journalist Ralph Robey:

Majority opinion among government economists at present, according to all reports, is that the current decline of business has another six or eight weeks to run and then there will be an about-face which will start us on an upgrade that by the end of the year will wipe out all the recent losses and bring production back to the high level of the final quarter of last year.