Pinched (6 page)

Some of these critics were struck, in particular, by the helplessness of the urban unemployed, who could not fall back on the more generalized skills of previous generations, and who sometimes seemed too dispirited to try. Wrote one observer in
The Atlantic Monthly
in 1878:

Migration rose to unprecedented levels in the last quarter of the nineteenth century—the word
tramp
came into common usage—as masses of jobless men and families sought work. (Walking was the primary form of everyday transportation, so switching jobs usually meant changing residence too.) In the rootlessness and resettlement that characterized the period, one can find early glimmers of modern community life. Extended families split apart and never reunited;
communities became more transient, and the bonds within them weakened.

Both the economy and the material circumstances of American families have changed so much since those times that they are almost unrecognizable. (There was no government safety net to speak of then, and most families had meager savings at best.
To feed themselves, the urban unemployed sometimes bought table scraps from local eateries for a few pennies a day.) But certain echoes from that time can be heard today. Then, as now, blue-collar workers were vastly more vulnerable than white-collar workers to job loss. (In 1885, among Massachusetts men,
unemployment stood at 33 percent for longshoremen and at about 24 percent for general laborers, nail makers, lathers, masons, and ship carpenters. By contrast, it was just 3 percent for bookkeepers, clerks, and salesmen, and 2 percent for merchants and dealers.) Then, as now,
job loss was hardest to overcome for older workers, who typically had great difficulty finding work again. (Seniority was seldom an effective ward against layoffs, except in small towns.)

And then, as now, some of the most intense worries among the struggling and unemployed involved the future of their children. “
My oldest girl is fourteen and my boy twelve,” wrote T. T. Pomeroy, a shoemaker living in Haverhill, Massachusetts, in the 1890s, “and my wife was telling at the breakfast table this morning what she was going to do with them. The girl is going through the high school, and she is going to teach school. The boy is going through high school and is then going to the school of technology.” But this was just a fantasy, made bitter by its impending disintegration. “I was just thinking how hard it was that I couldn’t do this for them,” Pomeroy continued. “I have got to take my children out of school next year and hand them over to the task master.”

I
N HIS
2005
book,
The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth
, Friedman observed that as people struggled during the late nineteenth
century, many of them came to resent the status, opportunities, and progress of others. Politics and, indeed, all aspects of public life became meaner and less inclusive. Job riots spread and anti-immigrant sentiment swelled. In 1882, Congress subjected new immigrants to a head tax and banned Chinese immigrants altogether. In 1887,
a group of white nativists in Clinton, Iowa, founded the American Protective Association, an anti-immigrant group that also denounced Catholics; by 1894, its membership had swelled to 2.5 million people nationwide—or about one out of every fourteen adults.

Vigilante violence—lynching, beatings, arson, murder—rose sharply as the years went by. (According to one estimate,
one person was lynched every two days, on average, between 1889 and 1898.) By the end of the 1890s, wrote C. Vann Woodward, a historian of the South, that region had become a “
perfect cultural seedbed for aggression against the minority race,” one nurtured by a long agricultural depression culminating in the acute distress that followed the panic of 1893.

The deterioration in race relations was not only the worst consequence of the period’s economic weakness, but also its most enduring. “It is one of the most unfortunate coincidences of United States history,” wrote Friedman, “that what was at the time the most pronounced period of economic stagnation since the founding of the republic set in just as Reconstruction ended and the federal government finally withdrew its troops from the defeated southern states.… No one will ever know whether the country’s race relations, both in the South and elsewhere, would have taken a different course had economic times been better during this key period.”

Like other forms of intolerance, racial discrimination and violence built slowly, reaching full flower only after years of economic anxiety and disappointment had passed. Reconstruction had ended in 1879, but it wasn’t until the 1890s that most southern states began to enact the Jim Crow laws that would segregate society for generations, supported by a Supreme Court that had grown steadily less forceful in its support for equal rights. Demagogues gained traction;
“Pitchfork” Ben Tillman, for example, won the governorship of South Carolina in 1890, and then a U.S. Senate seat. He called for the repeal of black voting rights and openly defended lynching.

In nearly every aspect, American politics and government became more reactionary. The Populist movement, a predominantly rural movement that is today identified mostly as an effort to abandon the gold standard, was also highly insular, xenophobic, and at times tinged by racism (although it solicited and received support from black farmers, particularly in its early days). “The populists sought to preserve the agrarian and small-town economy, and the way of life based on it, that had been America’s past,” wrote Friedman.

The Populist movement was of course diffuse and dynamic, and reactionary thinking jostled with progressive ideas, support for women’s suffrage being perhaps the most notable. But neither women’s suffrage nor other policies that would have expanded individual rights actually advanced as long as hard times endured. Instead, many rights and freedoms were curtailed, and civic life diminished.

“T
HERE IS SCARCELY
a workman, whatever the present comfort of his life, who is not oppressed by the horrible nightmare of a possible loss of his situation,” reported the
Labor Leader
in 1893. “No faithfulness,
no skill, no experience can protect him against the danger of being cast adrift with his family at the next shift of the market. He is part of the grist in the great mill of demand and supply, and when his time comes it remorselessly crushes him between its iron rollers.”

The language of a budding labor movement was at times drenched in Marxism by the 1890s, prompting revolutionary fears among some members of the American elite. Other elites—troubled by society’s unbridled greed; or by the dissipation that characterized city life in hard times; or even by the closing of the American frontier, and with it, the presumed loss of the pioneer spirit—feared the onset of American decline.

Of course, none of this came to pass. The discovery of new gold deposits and better mining techniques increased the gold supply and put an end to deflation. Bad harvests in Europe helped American farmers. And manufacturing technology continued to advance, providing new job opportunities and rising wages. What followed was nearly two decades of almost uninterrupted growth, the Progressive Era, which took some of the roughest edges off of laissez-faire capitalism, and the continued rise of America as the world’s predominant power. Indeed, when we look back on the late nineteenth century today, what stands out is not the hardship and uncertainty of the period, but rather the utter transformation of the American economy—and of American life.

The United States emerged from the nineteenth century with an increasingly urban, industrial economy and a transient population, centered on immediate families, with weaker connections to extended family. It also emerged with an educated workforce that was the envy of the world (American farmers, cognizant of the decline of their profession, had pushed society to expand the education system, and had pushed their children through it). But this molting of the U.S. economy was disruptive, anxious, and, above all, bewildering to those who lived through it. It is only with the benefit of hindsight that we see it as a success.

Among all American economic calamities, the Great Depression of the 1930s stands alone in the pain that it levied, and it should be invoked cautiously as a comparison to our own times. From peak to trough,
the nation’s real output fell by 30 percent and the stock market lost nearly 90 percent of its value. Unemployment neared 25 percent in 1933, and didn’t fall below 14 percent until World War II began. For more than a decade, until the war perversely lifted the U.S. economy, the economic environment was bleaker than any the country had experienced before or has experienced since. Still, the ways in which society changed in the ’30s as initial panic gave way to years of grinding anxiety are in some respects instructive. In the Depression, one can see several of the same forces that are again reshaping the American family and culture today.

The Depression began with the stock-market crash of 1929, but the pattern of economic growth before the crash is telling. In the national memory,
the 1920s stand out as a time of heady growth and dizzying gains in wealth, but in fact most Americans didn’t experience the decade that way.
Farmers still made up a quarter of the workforce in 1929, and they had missed out on the boom entirely; a crop glut following World War I had caused an agricultural depression.
In America’s towns and cities, unemployment was generally low, but in many industries, wages were stagnant or declining; along with agriculture, oil and textiles were known as “sick sectors.” Even in heavy manufacturing, where wages for skilled workers grew quickly, the introduction of new, labor-saving technologies shrank the ranks of the workforce.

From 1920 to 1929,
disposable per capita income grew by only about 1 percent a year, and even this low figure is misleading. Among the top 1 percent of earners, incomes rose 75 percent across the decade. A large proportion of families, however, saw scant income growth. Productivity gains showed up mostly in higher corporate
profits, which rose 62 percent between 1923 and 1929. Dividends rose by roughly the same amount, but only a tiny fraction of Americans had any money in the stock market.

One thing that made the twenties roar—in addition to the conspicuous consumption of the moneyed—was the
willingness of ordinary people to outspend their incomes, taking on debt to do so. The installment plan became a fixture of society in the latter part of the 1920s. By the end of the decade, 60 percent of all cars and 80 percent of all radios were being purchased on installment. Many Americans shared an infectious optimism, born of strong growth, even though most of that growth wasn’t actually making its way into their paychecks. In his classic history of the era,
The Great Depression: America, 1929–1941
,
Robert McElvaine wrote, “[A] growing number of people accepted the proposition that ‘God intended the American middle class to be rich.’ ”

In Florida, land speculation was rampant in the mid-1920s, and buyers, attracted by the state’s weather and potential as a winter haven, swarmed in; nine in ten never planned to occupy their property.
The real-estate mania may have been most intense in Florida, but it was hardly unique to the state. “It was our fault,” said one mid-western real-estate agent at the time, “for overselling [houses], and the banks’ fault for overlending.” In the go-go years of the 1920s, “everybody was buying a better home than he could afford.” Stories of homeowners who’d seen their house appreciate “tenfold in value over the past ten years” had fed a frenzy.

Many factors caused the Depression—too much leverage in the equity market; too much inventory in U.S. factories; Germany’s difficulty paying back war debt, and the cascade of problems that caused for the international financial system. Weak government response in the immediate wake of the crash—a failure to aggressively loosen either monetary or fiscal policy—contributed mightily to the catastrophe. And premature fiscal tightening in 1937 extended it.

But the Depression was also the result of a debt-and-consumption binge, and it unfolded, in part, as a real-estate crisis.
Residential
construction imploded in the 1930s, and foreclosures multiplied manyfold. By 1933, local newspapers were filled with ads for distressed-property sales. To ward off foreclosure, families began “doubling up,” renting out rooms or portions of the house to lodgers. Many houses, vacant or inhabited by residents who could barely put food on the table, slowly fell into disorder and disrepair.

T
HE ECONOMIC CONDITIONS
of the 1930s deeply influenced every facet of life. Skirts famously lengthened, and many boys, fearful of the consequences of an unintended pregnancy, came to regard girls as “booby traps.” Marriage rates dropped sharply, but so did divorces; divorce was expensive, and government relief was easier to come by for families than for individuals.