The social impact of the Depression, including the Dust Bowl, internal migration, the unemployed, and the documentary record

What this dot point is asking

NESA expects you to give an integrated account of the social impact of the Depression on American society. Strong answers integrate the urban unemployment crisis, the Hoovervilles and the Bonus Army, the Dust Bowl as both ecological and social catastrophe, the Okie migration, the documentary record produced by the Farm Security Administration and major writers, and the cultural and political legacy.

The answer

Urban unemployment

The Depression's urban impact was severe. Unemployment rose from around 3 per cent in 1929 to around 25 per cent in 1933, around 13 million workers. Underemployment (short hours, low pay) added millions more. Industrial production fell around 46 per cent. The construction industry collapsed; new dwellings fell from 937,000 (1925) to 93,000 (1933).

The pain was distributed unequally:

• African American unemployment in northern cities reached around 50 per cent. The 1930s saw the formation of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (founded 1925 by A. Philip Randolph), the principal Black union, and the "Don't Buy Where You Can't Work" campaigns in Northern cities.
• Mexican American workers were targeted by the Repatriation drives (1929 to 1936) that returned around 1 million people to Mexico.
• Married women were forced out of federal jobs by Section 213 of the 1932 Economy Act.

Foreclosures averaged around 1,000 a day in 1932. Around 250,000 American families lost their homes. Hoovervilles (shantytowns of unemployed Americans, named after the President) sprang up on the edges of every major city: Central Park (New York), Riverside Park (Manhattan), Forest Hills (St Louis), Hooverville on the Hooverville Flats in Seattle.

The Bonus Army

The Adjusted Compensation Act (1924) had granted First World War veterans a bonus payable in 1945. As the Depression deepened, veterans pressed for early payment.

In May 1932 around 17,000 veterans and their families gathered in Washington as the Bonus Expeditionary Force, led by Sergeant Walter W. Waters. They camped on the Anacostia Flats and in vacant federal buildings. The House passed the Patman Bonus Bill (15 June 1932) for early payment; the Senate rejected it (17 June 1932) by 62 to 18.

Most veterans went home; around 2,000 stayed. On 28 July 1932 Hoover ordered General Douglas MacArthur to clear the encampments. MacArthur, with his aide Major Dwight D. Eisenhower and tank commander Major George Patton, exceeded orders by crossing the Anacostia River and burning the main camp. Press photographs of regular soldiers attacking First World War veterans destroyed Hoover's re-election.

A second Bonus march in May 1933 was met by Roosevelt with coffee, accommodation, and the offer of CCC enrolment.

The Dust Bowl

The Dust Bowl was the convergence of a severe drought (1931 to 1939) and decades of over-ploughing of the Great Plains. The First World War wheat boom had drawn farmers onto marginal land in the southern Plains; tractors and the disc plough broke the native grasses that had held the soil.

The drought began in late 1930 and reached the southern Plains by 1932. Major dust storms began in 1933. The worst affected counties were in the Oklahoma Panhandle (Cimarron, Texas, Beaver), the Texas Panhandle, western Kansas, and eastern Colorado. The geographer Hugh Bennett (head of the Soil Conservation Service) testified before Congress in March 1935 during a dust storm that drifted to Washington; the testimony helped secure passage of the Soil Conservation Act.

Black Sunday (14 April 1935) was the worst single storm. A wall of dust 200 miles wide and around 6,000 feet high travelled from Pampa, Texas, to Boise City, Oklahoma. The blackout lasted around 90 minutes. The Associated Press reporter Robert Geiger's dispatch that day coined the term "Dust Bowl".

Around 100 million acres of topsoil were degraded. Visibility was reduced to a few feet in major storms. Cattle and sheep died of dust pneumonia; children developed silicosis-like lung disease. The annual frequency of major storms in the southern Plains rose from 14 (1932) to 38 (1933) to 22 (1934) to 40 (1935) before falling.

The Okie migration

Around 2.5 million people left the Great Plains during the 1930s. Around 200,000 of these "Okies" (the term applied loosely to migrants from Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, and Missouri) reached California by 1940.

Migrants arrived in California on US Route 66 and faced wage rates of 75 cents to 1 dollar a day in seasonal agricultural work. They lived in roadside camps known as "Little Oklahomas". California's Indigent Act of 1933 (the "Anti-Okie Law") attempted to ban poor migrants; it was struck down by the Supreme Court in Edwards v. California (1941).

The Farm Security Administration built around 95 federal camps to house migrants, modelled on the Arvin Camp opened in 1936 in Kern County (the model for John Steinbeck's "Weedpatch" in "The Grapes of Wrath"). The camps offered showers, sanitation, and self-government.

Major labour conflicts of the era included the Tulare County strike (1934), the San Francisco general strike (May to July 1934, four dead on "Bloody Thursday" 5 July), and the 18,000-worker cotton pickers' strike (October 1933) in the San Joaquin Valley.

The documentary record

Roosevelt's Resettlement Administration (1935, under Rexford Tugwell, reorganised in 1937 as the Farm Security Administration under Will Alexander) created the most ambitious federal photographic project in American history. Roy Stryker directed the historical section; around 175,000 photographs were taken between 1935 and 1944.

Dorothea Lange photographed migrant labour. "Migrant Mother" (March 1936), of Florence Owens Thompson with three of her seven children in a Nipomo pea-pickers' camp, became the iconic image of the Depression. Lange and her husband, the agricultural economist Paul Taylor, produced "An American Exodus" (1939).

Walker Evans photographed Alabama tenant farmers for "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" (with James Agee, 1941) and produced the architectural studies that defined the FSA aesthetic.

Arthur Rothstein ("Fleeing a Dust Storm", April 1936) and Russell Lee photographed the Plains. Gordon Parks was the first Black FSA photographer.

John Steinbeck wrote his San Francisco News series on the migrant camps in 1936 (collected as "The Harvest Gypsies"). "Of Mice and Men" (1937) and "The Grapes of Wrath" (April 1939) brought the migrants to a mass readership. "The Grapes of Wrath" won the Pulitzer Prize in 1940 and was filmed by John Ford in the same year. It was banned in Kern County, California, and burned in St Louis.

The WPA Federal Writers' Project under Henry Alsberg employed around 6,600 writers between 1935 and 1939, producing state guidebooks and the slave narratives collection of around 2,300 oral histories of formerly enslaved Americans.

The WPA Federal Theater Project under Hallie Flanagan produced the Living Newspaper series and works including Orson Welles's all-Black "Macbeth" (1936). It was defunded by Congress in 1939.

The Federal Music Project, the Federal Art Project (Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko were on relief), and the Federal Writers' Project together provided employment for around 40,000 artists.

The cultural climate

Radio and cinema brought the Depression into every home. Cinema attendance reached 95 million a week in 1929 and held above 60 million through the worst of the slump.

Pop culture turned to escape (musicals, screwball comedies) and to social realism. Frank Capra's films ("Mr Smith Goes to Washington" 1939) modelled an idealised democracy. Warner Brothers' gangster films ("The Public Enemy" 1931, "Scarface" 1932) and prison films ("I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang" 1932) carried the darker mood. Disney's "Snow White" (1937), the first feature-length animated film, was the box-office success of the decade.

In music, the swing era (1935 onwards, beginning with Benny Goodman's Palomar Ballroom engagement in August 1935) gave the country an upbeat soundtrack. Woody Guthrie's Dust Bowl Ballads (1940) gave it a folk one.

Studs Terkel's "Hard Times" (1970) is the major oral history of the era.

Policy legacy

The Soil Conservation Act (27 April 1935) established the Soil Conservation Service under Hugh Bennett. By 1942 around 30,000 farms were enrolled in conservation programs. The Civilian Conservation Corps planted around 220 million trees along a 100-mile-wide shelterbelt from Texas to North Dakota.

The FSA built migrant camps, resettled around 200,000 families, and made around 1 billion dollars in loans to small farmers.

The Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenant Act (22 July 1937) provided 10 million dollars a year in low-interest loans to tenant farmers to buy land.

Historiography

Donald Worster (Dust Bowl, 1979) is the standard environmental history.

Timothy Egan (The Worst Hard Time, 2006) is the standard recent narrative.

James Gregory (American Exodus, 1989) is the standard study of the Okies in California.

Robert McElvaine (The Great Depression, 1984; Down and Out in the Great Depression, 1983, a documentary collection) is the standard American social history.

David Kennedy (Freedom from Fear, 1999) is the Pulitzer-winning synthesis.

Cara Finnegan (Picturing Poverty, 2003) is a major recent study of the FSA photographs.

Common exam traps

Treating the Dust Bowl as a purely natural disaster. Decades of over-ploughing and the Plough That Broke the Plains (the 1936 FSA film by Pare Lorentz) are part of the story.

Forgetting that the Okies were a small minority of Plains migrants. Most of the 2.5 million Plains migrants went to other rural states; 200,000 reached California.

Treating the FSA photographs as neutral records. Stryker briefed photographers; the archive was edited by political need.

In one sentence

The Great Depression reshaped American society through mass urban unemployment (25 per cent in 1933, 13 million workers), the foreclosure of around 250,000 homes and the Hoovervilles, the Bonus Army assault on 28 July 1932, and the ecological and human catastrophe of the Dust Bowl (Black Sunday 14 April 1935, 100 million acres degraded, 2.5 million Plains migrants, 200,000 Okies in California), recorded in the work of Dorothea Lange ("Migrant Mother" March 1936), Walker Evans, John Steinbeck ("The Grapes of Wrath", April 1939), and the Farm Security Administration archive, with policy responses through the Soil Conservation Service of April 1935 and the FSA migrant camps.