The Great Depression: A Nation’s Dream Turns to Nightmare

At first it was all a breeze, light and warm like a summer night, as soft as a caress.

A promise of good times to come.

After the First World War, the United States had become one of the great powers militarily, economically, technologically, and culturally.

We really were the new world.

Everything was modern.

The machines, the medicine, the toothpaste, the jazz.

Even the women were a little bit more free.

Even the workers were earning a little bit more.

That breeze was stirring the embers of prosperity.

On Wall Street, on the stock market, shares were booming.

We were all caught up in the rush.

Take a gamble.

Just believe we were all going to be rich and be happy.

But then that sweet music just seemed to stop.

It was 1929 and the crash had begun.

Me too.

I ended up on the street.

All that prosperity in the 20s had meant my parents could pay for my studies.

But with the collapse of the farming sector, they just couldn’t do it anymore.

I refused to go home, though.

I represented the American dream and all the promise of social emancipation.

I wasn’t going to have that dream turn into a nightmare for my folks.

What I remember was the hunger.

Terrible hunger.

Medieval hunger.

Like a weed growing in your guts and tearing them all up.

I remember the Hoovervilles, those shanty towns that sprang up in the big cities like New York and Washington.

Named in mockery of our president, Herbert Hoover.

The families thrown out of their homes by the banks.

The folks out of a job and me.

We all took refuge there.

They were a big mess of metal sheets with swinging storm lamps, all tied together with string.

A maze of little alleys that went round and round like a dog chasing its tail.

A village with no foundations.

And I remember the misery.

It’s not an easy thing to watch women giving their newborn babies bottles of melted pork fat because they haven’t got enough milk and they can’t buy any.

It takes just a few days for the babies to start turning blue then die.

The mothers weep, but in their hearts they know it’s better that way.

And I remember all the crowds of people in the streets, too.

The guys selling apples for 5 cents and all those men just waiting for what they didn’t know.

We weren’t even spare hands anymore.

We were nobodies.

A whole lot of nobodies.

I can still see the endless cues outside the soup kitchens.

At first, I used to wonder why they were pushing me ahead of everyone else.

They weren’t exactly being kind, though.

The soup was always thinner at the top because the vegetables were all at the bottom.

If you wanted to survive, you got the dregs.

I found that out pretty quick.

But I still went to the front of the queue.

A crust would do for me.

At least that way the bread wasn’t stale yet.

Back then we wouldn’t dream of asking for welfare.

It wasn’t in our culture or our character.

We’d always been taught to be the masters of our own destiny.

All that misery was just the way things were.

It wasn’t just me.

It was all of us.

But our distress turned to anger.

In March 1930, 35,000 people took to the streets of New York to demand work and food.

One year later, we marched on Washington, but the police prevented us from expressing our grievances to President Hoover.

The guy seemed completely overwhelmed by it all.

His fanatical optimism about the system, about the future, and his belief in a liberal economy, well, they were keeping his hands tied.

By 1932, things were getting worse and the anger was rising.

I was still in Washington when 20,000 World War I veterans came to town.

They called themselves the Bonus Army, and they wanted the bonus pay they had been promised by the government.

Hoover wouldn’t pay them because it would bankrupt the whole country.

The protests got nasty.

So Hoover sent in MacArthur and his troops to run those old soldiers out of town.

To disperse the crowds, they used tear gas for the first time.

The Hoover ration, folks called it.

I ran.

Two soldiers with bayonets fixed ran right over me as they charged.

The veterans paid a steep price.

Four dead, 55 gravely wounded, a thousand with minor injuries, two children suffocated, and one miscarriage.

That business with the Bonus Army sealed Hoover’s fate.

The man who four years earlier promised an end to poverty had become a symbol of depression, exclusion, stagnation, and gloom.

The old world.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the governor of New York, was the personification of change.

On the 8th of November 1932, he was elected the 32nd president of the United States with 57% of the vote.

At the same moment in Germany, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party won the general election.

Since the Berlin stock market crash of 1927, Germany had slid into a new economic recession.

The repatriation of American capital in 1930 sped up the Great Depression of Germany.

The Germans felt abandoned.

The traditional political parties couldn’t seem to bring down unemployment or ease the general tension.

In January 1933, President Hindenburg proclaimed Adolf Hitler Chancellor of Germany.

The Nazis were in power.

Two months later, I was there at President Roosevelt’s inauguration on the 4th of March, 1933.

I’d gotten a little job and bought myself a two-piece suit.

So, I got myself hired as a runner between the different administrations.

To get things done, the die-hard wool conservative Roosevelt had surrounded himself with a team of experts with progressive ideas, most of them from Columbia University, like him and like me.

This brains trust wasn’t a formal institution, so it left him free to do what he liked.

Roosevelt gave his team 100 days to transform America.

They needed to act fast to show they were in control.

Ordinary citizens were asked for their opinions.

Their letters all got read.

Often times some idea that the new dealers thought was a good one would find itself enshrined in law within a matter of days.

The first to be reformed were the banks.

The Emergency Banking Act guaranteed deposits of up to $10,000 to protect small savers.

People were reassured.

They started banking their money again.

And the interest rates started to fall.

Money was being printed once again.

After the banks, it was business’s turn.

There, too, to regulate the economy seemed like the way to go.

The NRA, the National Recovery Administration, encouraged companies to respect fair competition and negotiate proper contracts with their employees.

It was promoted as a key point of the New Deal.

A public works plan was set up to fight unemployment. 4 million Americans found themselves back in work.

The New Deal was going to build hydroelectric dams, nearly a thousand miles of runways, 124,000 bridges, and 18,000 sports grounds.

New highways would open up the countryside.

The states were coming together.

Roosevelt looked like a president who kept his promises.

The time has come.

And yet to finance it all, he brought down the salaries of civil servants.

And he authorized heavy cuts to the armed forces, research, and education.

It still wasn’t enough.

So to raise new taxes on alcohol, in 1933, the Democrats put an end to prohibition, that symbol of the 1920s.

Like all Americans, I raised my glass to that.

Oh no.

Faced with its own great depression, Europe was trying to find its own solutions.

To reduce unemployment, Hitler’s Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s fascist Italy borrowed heavily to finance both public works and rearmament plans.

Social issues were what everyone was concerned about.

They created an ideological divide that was to prove crucial.

On the one hand, Republican Spain, France, Great Britain, and the USA would face up to the crisis by means of democratic values.

But the fascists, the Nazis, and the ultraists of Japan wanted to impose their totalitarian and racist regimes through discrimination, force, and violence.

In the Soviet Union, class struggle would bring more equality, but often at the price of loss of liberty and of bloody terror.

At first, US communism was strengthened by the crisis.

It didn’t really catch on, though.

There was too much arguing between pro and anti-Stalin factions and their ideas never got through to the down-to-earth American working man who liked his religious freedom too much and above all wanted a job.

Back then only the New Deal could provide them one.

For me, getting through the crash meant, above all, getting a steady job and starting a family with Alice.

We had met in 1935, and it was thanks to her that I got a position in the brand new Resettlement Administration, the brainchild of Rex G.

Tugwell.

It was formed to help both US farmers and migrant workers.

Roy Stryker was in charge of setting up a photography project to document the Great Depression.

Roy Stryker kind of liked it that we had the same name, so he took on young Jeff Stryker as his assistant.

Roy had gathered a terrific team of photographers around him.

Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Marion Post Wolcott, Jack Delano, Russell Lee, John Vachon, and of course, Arthur Rothstein.

Arthur was my pal, the son of a Jewish immigrant, a student at Columbia.

He was only 20 when Roy gave him his first mission in Cimarron County, way out in West Oklahoma.

In Washington, we all reckoned the crisis was a thing of the past.

Arthur made us see that it was still raging out in the sticks.

For years, dust storms had been settling on the Dust Bowl, the agricultural hardland of the US between South Dakota and Texas.

Arthur often spoke to me about the terror and the fascination that he had for this phenomenon.

First there would come this dull roar like a distant thunder.

Then the light would dim and disappear.

And then came a wind that built up like a whistling kettle.

While the streets resonated like tombstones with the running footsteps of the women, as the years went by, when the stormy season approached, a lot of people just went mad with fear and worry.

Others killed themselves.

This natural phenomenon had in fact been caused by men.

The land had been overworked throughout the 20s to keep up with rising consumerism.

So it became impoverished and started to erode.

So the thin layer of arable soil was simply blown away by those storms.

For Roosevelt, saving the farmers meant putting in place a federal environmental policy.

To stop those winds, the government set up a program of afforestation and created a lot of national parks.

And to carry out this enormous job, the Civilian Conservation Corps created jobs for 250,000 young unemployed men.

It was a success.

At the same time, engineers were trying to train farmers to cultivate their land along contour lines and even to practice direct sowing without plowing.

It was a giant step for the science of ecology, but for the farmers, the harm had already been done.

As a result of the fall in prices, the farmers were deep in debt, driven to bankruptcy, and they were forced to abandon their farms.

Some of them even tried to move their houses but ended up evicted by the banks who were busy building a vast and cheap property portfolio.

The New Deal had done its best to prevent these seizures by allowing debts to be restructured or by offering low-interest loans.

But instead of going straight to the farmers, all that federal aid fell into the hands of the land owners.

The newly homeless farmers filled their old Chevys with filthy mattresses and old blackened cooking pots and set off for California.

And so was born the mythology of Route 66.

It was Westward Ho! all over again.

The poor and displaced may have lost their dreams, but they kept on hoping.

Those American migrants came to symbolize the whole Great Depression.

Novelists like John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath tried to tell their story.

But it was the photographer Dorothea Lange who was the first to document this human migration.

These images were proof.

They were testimony.

And that’s why it was important for her to create series and not necessarily works of art.

Her photos tell not so much of an era, but of a struggle.

That of an invisible people, the ones nobody really wanted to see.

Dorothea gave those people a face.

And it’s so striking how those faces all leap out at us from the other side of the lens.

They’re challenging us, both worried and glad that we’re at last showing some interest.

The photos were in the newspapers, and they really helped the New Dealers’ cause.

Roy Stryker made sure they were there to give a human face to every new government program—and to hell with any shots that didn’t speak to him.

He’d just stick a big hole in the negatives.

He really had it in for Walker Evans’ pictures.

I’d swear he took pleasure in it.My wedding to Alice was my last shot at a Bohemian blowout.

We figured the good times were back.

But nobody could forget those years of misery.

Like me, the New Dealers were all living in Georgetown, one of Washington’s oldest neighborhoods.

To start with, it was a kind of political gesture living there with the Blacks.

But we could afford to redo the houses, so the rents went up and the Blacks were all out of the picture.It came as quite a shock when I first saw Carl Mydans’ photos.

The shanty towns and slums he was photographing were all in Washington—some of them right next to the White House.

In one of those photos, I spotted the son of one of my Black neighbors who disappeared without leaving an address.

I’d lived right there in that street.

I was ashamed.In 1935, even though things were getting better, life was still very difficult for most Americans.

If they wanted to keep their jobs, workers were having to accept lower wages and higher productivity.

At the grassroots, the Wildcat strikes were on the rise.

United now in their misery, both Blacks and Whites took part.

A new development.

Instead of halting social progress, the 1930s strengthened the union movement.In 1935, the National Labor Relations Act defined the powers of the unions and of collective agreements.

And that led to the founding by John L.

Lewis of the CIO, the Congress of Industrial Organizations.

Lewis brought things to a showdown in Detroit at the Chevrolet and General Motors automobile plants in Flint.

With the support of the whole of America, strikers occupied their factories for two months.

The workers elected a mayor and organized community life.

Roy Stryker’s photographs immortalized their struggle.The governors decreed martial law and sent in the National Guard and the police to put a stop to it all.

The bosses were threatening to relocate the works and giving double pay to the Blacklegs who wouldn’t strike.

Their henchmen were even ready to kill hardcore strikers.

But the workers wouldn’t give in.

Their commitment had turned now to anger.

There were huge crowds demonstrating now.

The same folks who five years ago were queuing up at the soup kitchens.The victory of the Detroit strikers sparked off the idea that democratic progress was directly linked to social progress.

In 1936, the movement gained strength.

The Pacific Seamen came out on strike, as did the pipeline workers, the Minneapolis flour mills, the dry cleaners of Toledo, the truckers, and 125,000 New York elevator attendants who managed to block the elevators in all the skyscrapers.

What they were after was a 50-hour week and nothing less.It was all an echo of the actions of the Front Populaire in France.

There the new government of Léon Blum, inspired by Roosevelt, brought in a policy of economic recovery and the redistribution of wealth.

The New Deal was laying the groundwork for a welfare system.

The Front Populaire established a two-week paid holiday.

The US business world was getting edgy.

Would America start following this worrying trend?With elections approaching, Democrats in the southern states were concerned about the president’s anti-segregationist sympathies.

For their liking, the First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, was much too involved in the Black rights associations.

Every New Deal project had come out against discrimination.

And Roy Stryker had commissioned several of his photographers to take a look at the situation of the Blacks.

Their photos were a far cry from the image of poor submissive Black people, the Mammies of Hollywood, the Harlem Dandies.It was the first time these people had been photographed without either preconceptions or the desire to humiliate them.

Roy didn’t want them to be shown as minorities, a concept that always tended to treat them as inferiors.

The magic of these images transformed them from Negroes to African-Americans.

In short, Americans.

But they also opened up the whole debate about the question of race, which in its turn revived the forces of racism and the white supremacist movements.

The Ku Klux Klan in particular had its ear turned to Europe and didn’t hide its sympathies for Hitler.For a lot of Americans, the Nazis were both worrying and fascinating.

In 1936, Fritz Kuhn created the German American Bund.

Demonstrations and holiday camps for the young all copied the Hitler Youth movement that in Germany all kids between 10 and 18 were obliged to belong to.

At first, Hitler kept his distance from the German American Bund.

He needed a free hand in Europe, and that meant America sticking to its principle of neutrality.

He didn’t forget that it had been America coming into the war that had brought about the downfall of Germany in 1918.International conflicts and tensions were making their mark on America.

A lot of young Americans signed up to the International Brigades that went to the aid of the Spanish Republicans.

In its hasty attempts to reform, Spain’s democratic government had been unable to control all the social, economic, cultural, and political ills.

Led by General Franco, civil war raged.

Following Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1936, the Negus, or king of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie, became for African-Americans the symbol of Black resistance to white colonization.Roosevelt wasn’t going to let external conflicts stir up divisions in American society.

It was a pacifist society, against any US interventions.

To calm things down, the president signed the first law on neutrality which forbade the supply of any arms to the warring factions.

Its main aim though was to preserve national unity.

And don’t forget that in 1936, President Roosevelt was up for reelection.

Ladies and gentlemen, the president of the United States of America.It was time to take stock.

Roy Stryker’s photographers’ mission was to draw attention to all the progress being made to help the New Dealers find political and especially financial support.

Dorothea Lange photographed the rural rehabilitation colonies.

There were sometimes trailer parks, sometimes little houses.

They were like a bunch of little estates, all self-sufficient and self-governing.

Folks there could find their bearings again, find some hygiene, health, the odd laugh, a bit of dignity, perhaps even a future.

And they were all hoping to put enough money away to buy themselves a new farm.

The American ideal of the self-made man still meant something.One of the New Deal’s great successes was that it gave folks their confidence back.

In 1936, industrial production levels went back up to 90% of what they’d been in 1929.

There was still a lot of pressure on the market, though.

The federal programs had indeed reduced unemployment but at quite a price.

So Roosevelt decided to start dismantling them.

There were a lot of polls, journalists, and bookies all predicting defeat for the president.

Indeed, his New Deal was in a bad way.

The United States Supreme Court, very liberal and consequently in favor of free market economy, overturned several of the New Deal’s flagship measures, such as the NRA.Roosevelt’s adversaries all complained of his impetuousness, his recklessness.

They went on about the New Dealers’ reliance on propaganda and personality cults.

The right-wing opposition compared him to a new Stalin.

And the left reckoned he was a new Hitler.

Never for a moment, though, had Roosevelt ever tried to either muzzle or eliminate his opponents.

The United States had never been so democratic, and there’d never been so high a turnout as these elections.On the 3rd of November 1936, I was in New York with Alice.

We were awaiting the results feverishly.

I had my fingers crossed.

They said it’d be a long night.

In fact, it was all over quickly.

A landslide majority, a difference of 11 million votes.

Roosevelt had taken 46 of the 48 states.

Alice was jumping for joy.

Now she wanted a baby.

No, two.

I was hugging her.

I was so happy.

Two days later, on the 1st of November, the Rome-Berlin Axis was proclaimed.

The dictators were ganging up.With the mandate for his reelection and with an overwhelming Democrat majority in Congress in 1937, Roosevelt resumed control.

He got several reforms passed on a minimum wage for women, on union rights, and on social security.

The foundations were laid for the welfare state.

Government agencies were maintained and expanded.

The ministry where I was working was merged with the Farm Security Administration, the FSA.

Roy Stryker’s information division was maintained and I got a promotion.However, a lot of the photographers from the old days left.

Dorothea Lange had a book to do.

And as for Walker Evans, he was preparing his own exhibition at the New York Museum of Modern Art.

His leaving was what pushed the FSA into a more political stance.

Walker Evans’ photos though sure left their mark on the agency’s image.

The way he kept his distance and stayed neutral, his attention to everyday details, his desire to show the things people never noticed, they were the total definition of what it was to be a typical American.

But what exactly was a typical American?The New Dealers were peacemakers.

They were always looking to reconcile people.

That’s why they had to find an identity that was both modern and for everyone.

One in which every American could recognize him or herself.

One we could all identify with.

Mainstream culture, the day-to-day culture of ordinary people, the language of jazz, gangster movies, and folk music.

It was like two riverbanks.

Cowboys on one side, Indians on the other.

Like the four heads of American presidents that we were busy carving out on Mount Rushmore.

It was the rodeo.

It was Tom Sawyer.

It was America itself.

It was the smell of cornbread on a Sunday morning, opening a can of sodas, your lips freezing up in winter.

It was New York hot dogs and California hamburgers.

It was Mickey Mouse and all the Disney characters.

It was bowling, baseball, basketball, American football.

Most of all, it was a way of life, an attitude, the way you move, a way of hanging out, and just being.But it all got shook up in 1937 when there was a big new economic crisis.

Once again, it was a stock market thing, and once again, it was really serious.

Shares fell by almost 50%.

Everything the New Deal had achieved was just wiped out.

The whole mess resulted in a reduction of federal aid and public spending and by taxes going up to fight inflation.

Unlike back in 1929, this time the government acted fast.

Roosevelt decided to massively increase public spending by $5 billion.

He wanted to send agriculture shares up by cutting down on production.

The milk, pork, tobacco, and cotton producers were the hardest hit.

Out in the sticks, folks were furious.

We were also convinced that the crisis had been overcome thanks to the New Deal.

But this sudden recession showed how fragile we really were.

Back in ’29, I was on my own.

This time, I was worried my whole family would be in the street.What’s more, news from abroad wasn’t good.

In 1937, Hitler aligned himself with General Franco.

In Spain, German and Italian planes bombed the town of Guernica.

Japan attacked China.

The massacres of civilian populations outraged international opinion, but nobody did anything.

Roosevelt said he wanted to quarantine all the aggressor countries.

A revision of the 1937 Neutrality Acts, the cash and carry clause authorized aggressed countries to come and buy merchandise and then arms from the United States on condition they paid for them in cash.

Even if he looked good, the 1937 crash profoundly shook Roosevelt’s convictions.

The president declared to his secretary of the treasury, Henry Morgenthau, that the war spreading through Europe could be beneficial to the United States.

Directing the US economy towards military production would reduce unemployment as well as providing a deterrent.

So Roosevelt launched a top secret program to build long range submarines.

And his intuition was right.In 1938, thanks to a massive injection of dollars and loans, the economic situation of the US improved.

In Europe though, things were escalating.

Hitler united Austria with the German Reich without a fight.

Then he set his sights on Czechoslovakia.

At the Munich conference, the French and the English allowed the Nazis to annex their territories of the Sudetenland.

Trouble is, preserving peace at any price plays into the hands of the aggressor.

Hitler’s success also influenced American public opinion.

After the crash of 1937, more and more worried Americans were drawn to radicalism.On the 20th of February 1939 at Madison Square Garden, 20,000 people gave the Nazi salute during a German American Bund rally.

Its leader, Fritz Kuhn, even described the New Deal as a Jew Deal.

Outside, communist and democrat protesters came to blows with the police.

I was among them.

At the FSA, I could feel the wind was changing.

Roy Stryker was directing his photographers at the preparations for war.

More than ever, they were turning out propaganda.

As a sign of the new times, color film now made its appearance.

It was used by photographers mainly in their reports on the war industry.

It looked to me like a turning point.

The world of the dirty 30s had been a black and white world.

Although there were still shades of gray, the 40s were all in color as seen in the first Technicolor film, Gone with the Wind.I was trying not to show how worried I was.

The atmosphere in Washington was a heavy one.

The young communists were demonstrating in front of the White House for peace.

All the same, Stalin and Hitler signed on the 23rd of August, 1939 a mutual non-aggression pact.

Right away, the Nazis invaded Poland.

The two hereditary enemies had been longing to tear it apart.

France and England just couldn’t stand by anymore.

War was declared in Europe.On the 5th of November 1940, Roosevelt was elected for the third time.

America was now the arsenal of democracy.

The Lend-Lease Act of 1941 allowed the US to sell military material on credit to nations it supported.

That meant that we now had our hands on 70% of the world’s gold reserves.

The Great Depression was over.

And then Japan launched a lightning strike against the American fleet based at Pearl Harbor.

The United States entered the war.

The 6 million unemployed, all lined up under the flag.The FSA was replaced by the Office of War Information, the agency now in charge of propaganda.

Fearing he might lose his photo collection, Roy Stryker did his utmost to have it transferred to the Library of Congress.

I set to work categorizing and listing the 270,000 negatives.

I looked at all the portraits by Dorothea Lange, John Vachon, Walker Evans, Jack Delano, Arthur Rothstein.

Those anonymous faces all looked like me.

I recognized myself in them.

They’re my family.

They’re my doubles.

They’re all my fears and my hopes.

Maybe I’ll make it back from the war alive, too.

Who knows?