The Human Story of the Unemployed During the Great Depression PDF Download

Author: Clifford H. Naysmith
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Unemployed
Languages : en
Pages : 1026

Get Book Here

Book Description
The "Great Depression" began slowly, spreading like a creeping pestilence. The stock market crash of 1929 seems to have accelerated a trend of increadsing unemployment already clearly evident. Unemployment figures fluctuated between eight and seventeen million during the Depression decade. The men and women who lost their jobs during the Depression represented a fair cross section of the employed population. The volume of business activity rather than the characteristics of individual unemployed persons was the decisive factor in creating the problem of unemployment. Most unemployed men searched dilligently for work. Unemployed persons usually postponed the trip to the relief office until they had exhausted alternative resources. Life on relief resembled, in many respects, life in a totalitarian state. THe normal standards of privacy and human dignity characteristic of personal relationships in American Society generally did not apply to persons on relief. Relief agencies generally failed to meet even the minimum needs of their clients for food, clothing, shelter, and medical care. Standards of relief were so low that many relief clients were chronically undernourished, ragged, cold, sick and insecure. If re-employment was a major goal of the relief program these relief standards and procedures were self-defeating. Unemployment tended to undermine the physical and mental health of unemployed persons. The greatest increase in mental diseases was in the category of "reacting depressions", a class of mental disorders linked to definite precipitating factors present in the environment of the patient. Few patients had given indication of emotional instability prior to the crisis. The persons who succumbed to mental breakdowns were those who had suffered the most severe and prolonged insecurity and privations. Unemployment restricted the range of free, creative, and rewarding experiences open to family members and there was a narrowing of family life into a sharply focused struggle for existence. Children in unemployed families generally suffered some degree of physical, mental, emotional or occupational impairment. As the Depression deepened, evidence of social decay became increasingly apparent. Some of the chief indications of social disintegration were: the shutting off of electric lights, gas and water, garbage eating, homelessness, Hoovervilles, and spontaneous riots and demonstrations. Unemployment impaired the effectiveness of the legal rights and privileges enjoyed by the average American citizen. Although unemployment organization received its initial impetus from the radical parties, the organizations of the unemployed evolved into ordinary pressure groups pressing pragmatic proposals within the framework of American democracy. The unemployed masses of America did not become politically conscious radicals. The frontier myth exerted a powerful influence on many depression-stricken Americans. Some manifestations of the frontier movement were: the back-to-the-land movement, Hoovervilles, pioneering in Alaska, a gold rush, subsistence homesteads, the C.C.C. and boom towns at the site of government construction projects. The tradition of self-reliance and self-help gave birth to numerous self-help schemes. As the months of unemployment lengthened into years, people on the relief rolls became increasingly a separate, distinct class set apart from the rest of the American people.