Pinched (7 page)

In her classic sociology of the Depression,
The Unemployed Man and His Family
, Mirra Komarovsky vividly describes how joblessness strained—and in many cases fundamentally altered—family relationships in the 1930s. During 1935 and ’36, Komarovsky and her research team interviewed the members of fifty-nine white middle-class families in which the husband and father had been out of work for at least a year. Her research revealed deep psychological wounds. “It is awful to be old and discarded at 40,” said one father. “A man is not a man without work.” Another said plainly, “During the depression I lost something. Maybe you call it self-respect, but in losing it I also lost the respect of my children, and I am afraid I am losing my wife.” Noted one woman of her husband, “I still love him, but he doesn’t seem as ‘big’ a man.”

Taken together,
the stories paint a picture of diminished men, bereft of familial authority. Household power—over children, spending, and daily decisions of all types—generally shifted to wives over time (and some women were happier overall as a result). Amid general anxiety and men’s loss of self-worth and loss of respect from their wives, sex lives withered. Socializing all but ceased as well, a casualty of poverty and embarrassment. Although some men embraced
family life, most became distant. Children described their father as “mean,” “nasty,” or “bossy,” and didn’t want to bring friends around, for fear of what he might say. “There was less physical violence and aggression towards the wife than towards the child,” Komarovsky wrote.

Of course, even in the 1930s,
most people kept their jobs, and the period’s impact on family life varied greatly. “Many families have drawn closer and ‘found’ themselves in the depression,” wrote the sociologists Robert Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd in
Middletown in Transition
, their 1937 study of everyday life in Muncie, Indiana. With social options limited by thin wallets, some husbands, wives, and children gardened together and used their yards more in summer, and at night played cards or listened to the radio. Yet the Lynds acknowledged that in other families, the Depression had “precipitated a permanent sediment of disillusionment and bitterness,” born of hardship, anxiety, and fear for the future. It was difficult to say, they noted, where the balance lay between the two.

The Lynds had first studied Muncie, a typical middle-class city of the time, in 1924 and 1925, when the economy was booming. Upon their return six years into the Depression, they found that petty jealousies over material things had seemed to multiply between neighbors, and that what bonds still existed didn’t extend far. “In its relation to outside groups … Middletown seems recently to have been building its fences higher. The city is more antagonistic to [outsiders]; individuals in the city are seemingly more wary of one another; need of protection and security is more emphasized.”

Trust among strangers and loose acquaintances was eroding, and rising material insecurity had brought with it a “greater insistence upon conformity and a sharpening of latent issues.” An intense nationalism had arisen since 1925, the Lynds found, and along with it an increasingly critical attitude toward all things foreign. One op-ed in a local Muncie paper exhorted its readers to “return to the old, sturdy, clean, upstanding America, the America that faced disaster unafraid and that went forward with the Bible and the flag.”

Disillusionment among high-school and college graduates, many of them unable to find jobs, became common by the mid-1930s. Suspicions grew that higher education was no longer a sure path to prosperity and that ambition was pointless. Said one college president in a 1936 address, “How are we to teach thrift to those who have lost everything? Why teach youth to rise early when there are no jobs to go to?”

The Lynds interviewed a series of young men and women in their late teens and twenties about their lives and found a “growing apathy.” One college graduate who had a job delivering parcels said that many of his peers were “just accepting the fact of a lower station in life and not struggling any longer.” A high-school teacher observed of his students, “They’re just getting used to the idea of there being no job, and there isn’t much explosiveness.”

Many young adults who could not find footing in the job market were left permanently scarred. Glen Elder, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina and a pioneer in the field of “life course” studies, has spent much of his career tracking the various generations that lived through the Depression, to see how it shaped their lives. Some three decades after the Depression ended, and even after a long postwar boom, he found a
pronounced diffidence in aging men (though not women) who had suffered hardship as twenty- and thirtysomethings during the 1930s. Unlike peers who had been largely spared during those lean years, these men came across, Elder told me, as “beaten and withdrawn—lacking ambition, direction, confidence in themselves.”

Yet
the period’s adolescents were shaped differently. McElvaine observed, “Although the children of the thirties lived through the same economic hardship as their parents did, it meant different things to the new generation. For one thing, children were largely free from the self-blame and shame that were so common among their elders.… The Depression’s most significant psychological problem was generally absent in the young.”

Hardship caused adolescents to take on more responsibility
earlier in life. “There were no working-class ‘teenagers’ in the 1930s,” wrote McElvaine. Boys took jobs after school wherever they could get them. Girls took the place of their mother, who was herself often working, as the custodian of smaller children and keeper of the home. “Ironically,” he noted, “the same family hardship that might weaken the self-reliance of a father could strengthen that quality in his child.”
That’s in fact exactly what happened, writes Elder in
Children of the Great Depression
. As adolescents who suffered hardship during the ’30s grew into adulthood and middle age, Elder found, they showed no sign of the fatalism and reticence that marked people who were just a few years older. In fact, they became especially adaptable, family-oriented adults.

O
N THE ROSTER
of history’s truly crippling downturns—both inside and outside the United States—the Great Depression as experienced in America stands out for the extent to which society as a whole remained unified and refused reactionary measures. Perhaps the very depth and breadth of the crisis inspired that togetherness. The middle class identified with the poor more than the rich during that time—and generally supported steps to help those brought low in the downturn. And to a large degree, the federal government with one hand protected the rights and interests of the downtrodden, and with the other, the property of the wealthy.

Nonetheless,
extremism and rancor did grow stronger throughout the period. Race-based job discrimination became fiercer, and lynchings, as they had in the 1880s and ’90s, became more commonplace. A
New Republic
story in 1931 noted that “[d]ust had been blown from the shotgun, the whip, and the noose, and Ku Klux practices were being resumed in the certainty that dead men not only tell no tales but create vacancies.”

Father Charles Coughlin, known as “The Radio Priest,” regularly spoke to some 30 million or 40 million Americans—the largest radio audience in the world at the time—about the depravity of
Communists, international financiers, and Jews. Coughlin praised Adolf Hitler and other Fascists, seeing in them a strength and moral purity absent from capitalist democrats; as the Depression stretched on, Coughlin became more strident. The Louisiana governor, senator, and presidential hopeful Huey Long, a champion of the poor and the working class, grew in stature. He denounced “imperialistic banking control” and preached a radical populism, rooted in aggressive wealth redistribution, with little respect for democratic principles.

With the onset of World War II and the industrial production that it required, the Depression finally ended (conditions had been improving slowly in the years before the war). But it left the United States ineffably changed. In some respects, the Depression accelerated the evolution of the economy. Innovation was in fact extremely rapid throughout the 1930s, and the period saw an end to the widespread use of domestic servants and the beginnings of an appliance revolution. (
John Maynard Keynes wrote at the time that one of the problems of the Depression was “technological unemployment,” due to the “discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour.”)

More important were the cultural and political changes that resulted from the social and economic environment of the Depression. Family crowding and the deprivations of city life eventually catalyzed a burst of suburbanization after growth returned. Political reforms—including the Glass-Steagall Act and other banking measures—reshaped the country’s business and labor environment, and provided a foundation for decades of growth and social peace. A Democratic political majority, for better or worse, was cemented into place for decades. And the culture was imbued with a spirit of thrift that would last a generation.

The troubles and turbulence of the 1970s stemmed from many sources. Amidst presidential scandal and military retreat, the United States seemed to have lost its confidence, its moral compass, and much of its luster. But “
more than Watergate and Vietnam,” wrote the historian Edward Berkowitz in
Something Happened: A Political and Cultural Overview of the Seventies
, “the economy was the factor that gave the seventies its distinctive character.”

The seventies saw two major recessions, one beginning in 1973 and the other in 1978. Each involved a sudden spike in the price of oil. Incomes, after rising strongly for decades, were flat, factoring out inflation—even for married couples, and even though married women were entering the workforce in record numbers. Inflation averaged nearly 9 percent a year for the decade as a whole.
A third recession, induced by the Fed to arrest inflation as the 1980s began, brought the unemployment rate into the double digits. The economy had mostly recovered by 1983, but prosperity remained elusive for many until the mid-1990s.

The economic challenges that America faced in the 1970s bear some faint resemblance to those the country faces today. Exports failed to keep pace with rising imports (1971 was the first year in the twentieth century in which the United States ran a trade deficit), and American industrial workers felt the sting of international competition. But for the most part, both the origins of the period’s economic weakness (oil and agricultural shocks, slowing growth in productivity) and the particular manifestations of weakness (“stagflation”) were different from those of today.

Nonetheless, the 1970s are the only other modern period in which the United States experienced long stagnation, punctuated by punishing setbacks. They are instructive primarily for the long-lasting social and political changes that stagnation eventually produced.

In
Something Happened
, Berkowitz describes the burst of civil-rights legislation in the 1960s, following John F. Kennedy’s death. But, he notes, that “
hopeful legacy began to sour after 1972,” as the economy began to sink. The ’60s were hardly innocent of white anger over civil rights, but in the ’70s, white grievances intensified and spread throughout the country. Conflict grew over busing to achieve racial balance in schools, and protests in Boston turned violent. (One iconic newspaper photo showed young white men trying to impale a black man with an American flag.)

Legal challenges to civil-rights policies began to meet with success. In 1978, the Supreme Court ruled in
Regents of the University of California v. Bakke
that race-based affirmative action was, in some cases, illegal. At the beginning of the ’70s, writes the historian Bruce J. Schulman in
The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics
, most blacks said they wanted to live in integrated neighborhoods and send their children to integrated schools. By the decade’s end, more than two-thirds said they felt more kinship with black Africans than with white Americans.

In previous decades, writes Schulman, “American politics and culture had acted like a universal solvent: dissolving ethnic and regional loyalties, diluting sectarian strife and religious enthusiasm.” But in the ’70s, he says, these same forces acted as a centrifuge, spinning people and communities further apart. Rising individualism, the decline of the WASP social order, and a sexual revolution—themselves inseparable, it might be argued, from the economic transition away from industry and corporate hierarchy and toward a flatter, more creative information age—sowed confusion and concern. Years of economic stagnation, meanwhile, leached away respect for political leaders.

Throughout the ’70s, anti-immigrant groups grew stronger. In his 1978 novel,
The Turner Diaries
, William Pierce imagined violent revolution and the extermination of nonwhites. The novel drew a large following across the next decade, as white-supremacist
movements and antigovernment militias proliferated. The extremism that hard times nourished in society’s darker corners left a long legacy. In 1995, as the economy was beginning a remarkable period of growth, Timothy McVeigh bombed a federal office building in Oklahoma, killing 168 people. But the antecedents of McVeigh’s ideology can be traced clearly to the anomie and paranoia of the 1970s.

Reactionary violence was by no means limited to whites. In 1992, black residents of South-Central Los Angeles burned, looted, or otherwise damaged some 800 Korean-owned businesses during the riots that broke out after a jury acquitted four white police officers of beating a black motorist. These riots, too, had roots in the ’70s, when manufacturing jobs disappeared from inner cities, chronic unemployment rose, neighborhoods began a steep decline that became self-reinforcing, and racial tensions of all sorts grew stronger.

T
HE
1970
S
SAW
the beginnings of a major shift in economic power, one that irrevocably altered family dynamics, and one that is becoming more pronounced today.
Women entered the workforce in great numbers, pushed by economic necessity and pulled by a rising service sector in which physical strength mattered little. In 1970, 43 percent of women in their prime working years held jobs; by 1980, 51 percent did. (Among married women with young children, the increase was sharper still.) In between came the women’s-rights revolution—arguably the only major advance of individual rights in that decade. New laws and court decisions put women on more-equal footing in universities and in the workplace, and gave them more-equal access to lending. Many previously all-male colleges went coed.