Life During The Great Depression

The USA Library of Congress has many first person accounts of life in the depression from The American Writers' Project, a program of the WPA. Here is the link to the reports from all kinds of people from New York City.... And here is one of those stories.

Mother and children shaecroppers

Sharecroppers - classic photo by Dorothea Lange


There were pine forests here a long time ago but they are gone. The bastards got in here and set up the mills and laid the narrow-gauge tracks and knocked together the company commissaries and paid a dollar a day and folks swarmed out of the brush for the dollar . . . . The saws sang soprano and the clerk in the commissary passed out the blackstrap molasses and the sowbelly and wrote in his big book, and the Yankee dollar and Confederate dumbness collaborated to heal the wounds of four years of fratricidal strife, and all was merry as a marriage bell. Till, all of a sudden, there weren't any more pine trees. They stripped the mills. The narrow-gauge tracks got covered with grass. Folks tore down the commissaries for kindling wood. There wasn't any more dollar a day. The big boys were gone, with diamond rings on their fingers and broadcloth on their backs. But a good many stayed right on, and watched the gullies eat deeper into the red clay. . . . — Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men, 1946, page 2-3.

Read "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" by James Agee and Walker Evans

Listen to Rudy Vallee Singing "Brother Can You Spare a Dime?"

The following photos are from the Library of Congress website - American Memory
and are of New York during the depression

Braddock and his family had to scramble for food and rent money
like millions of others during that time

A 30's Star - Carole Lombard



Breadline

Selling ties on the street

Children playing in gutter

A NY employment agency

Sewing for needed cash


Shanty town - the unemployed


Waiting at the docks for a job (Braddock worked on the docks)


A depression time menu


A merchant seaman

Another merchant seaman

A child's bed


The NY Times 1/9/04

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