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Victims of the Great Depression: Self-Blame/Non-Self-Blame, Radicalism, and Pre-1929 Experiences*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Bernard Sternsher
Bernard Sternsher*
Affiliation:
Bowling Green State University
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Extract

The first phase of New Deal historiography saw a clash between attackers from the right, who held that the New Deal went too far and did too much, and liberal-centrist defenders, who maintained that the New Deal was a practical, democratic middle way between left and right totalitarianisms. The second phase, from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, saw the triumph, among politicians as well as historians, of the liberal-centrists over the rightist critics. In the mid-1960s, radical or left historians launched an attack on the New Deal, claiming that it did not go far enough and did not do very much—that, in fact, it did very little to reduce enduring inequities in American life by effecting significant changes in the distribution of wealth, income, and power. The radical critics also went beyond the question of what the New Deal should have been—from their point of view essentially socialistic—to the question of what it could have been, insisting that it could have gone much further in reshaping American society. The liberal-centrists, who do not subscribe to the radicals’ socialistic prescription, have made substantial concessions to the radicals’ estimate of what the New Deal was by recognizing the New Deal’s limitations, but they reject the radicals’ judgment on the question of what the New Deal could have been. They continue to assert that the New Deal accomplished about as much reform as one could reasonably expect under the circumstances.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Science History , Volume 1 , Issue 2 , Winter 1977 , pp. 137 - 177
Copyright
copyright © Social Science History Association 1977 

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Footnotes

*

This essay is a revised version of a paper read at the Annual Metting of the American Historical Association in 1975 at a session sponsored by the Social Welfare History Group. The author wishes to thank the Faculty Research Committee of Bowling Green State University for a grant in the summer of 1973 which facilitated the initiation of this inquiry.

References

Notes

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22 Culver, “Transient Unemployed Men,” 523, 532-34. The Los Angeles Municipal Service Bureau for Homeless Men reported that 35 percent of applicants in 1932 had had high school or college training. Young, Pauline V., “The New Poor,” Sociology and Social Research, XVII (January-February 1933), 240Google Scholar.

23 Vincent, “Relief and Resultant Attitudes,” 31.

24 Cavan, and Ranck, , The Family and the Depression, 152, 160Google Scholar. In connection with this restless woman we may note that Rundquist and Sletto, Personality in the Depression, 334, 367, 370, found, in those pre-feminine liberation days, that women were less rebellious against authority than men, that thinking in the economic field was rare among women, that a relationship between unemployment and radicalism was almost entirely confined to men.

25 Bakke, E. Wight, Citizens without Work: A Study of the Effects of Unemployment upon the Workers’ Social Relations and Practices (New Haven, 1940), 275Google Scholar. Bakke found that these participants were mostly single men, which suggests a hypothesis advanced by Stouffer, Samuel A. and Lazarsfeld, Paul F., Research Memorandum on the Family and the Depression (New York, 1937), 62-63Google Scholar, that “the family man who has a job in a depression is less likely than a single man to take risks [such as participating in a strike], but that a family man who has lost his job and despairs of finding another may be more likely than a single man to take risks.” In any case, Stouffer and Lazarsfeld did not think their hypothesis was amenable to fruitful research.

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29 Jones, , Life, Liberty, and Property, 357-63, 372-74Google Scholar.

30 Ibid., 289-90.

31 Ibid., 300-301, 305-07.

32 Ibid., 304, 325, 330, 334, 339.

33 Ibid., 306-07, 337. This theme accords with “The Middletown Spirit” described by Lynd, Robert S. and Lynd, Helen Merrell, Middletown in Transition: A Study in Cultural Conflicts (New York: Harvest Book, n.d.), 407Google Scholar, which held that the social welfare results from “two . . . factors working together—the natural law of progress and the individual law of initiative, hard work, and thrift—and therefore: that any interference with either of the two is undesirable.” See also Klein, Philip, A Social Study of Pittsburgh: Community Problems and Social Services of Allegheny County (New York, 1938),290CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for a characterization of the aristocratically rooted but majority public opinion in Pittsburgh in the 1930s. Recent studies which stress the hold of traditional values on Americans in the 1930s are Alexander, Charles C., Nationalism in American Thought, 1930-1945 (Chicago, 1969Google Scholar); Bergman, Andrew, We’re in the Money: Depression America and Its Films (New York, 1971)Google Scholar; Jones, Alfred Haworth, Roosevelt’s Image Makers: Poets, Playwrights, and the Use of the Lincoln Symbol (Port Washington, N.Y., 1974Google Scholar); Jones, , “The Search for a Usable American Past in the New Deal Era,” American Quarterly, XXIII (December 1971), 710-24CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hart Mathews, Jane De, “Arts and the People: The New Deal Quest for a Cultural Democracy,” Journal of American History, LXII (September 1975), 325Google Scholar; Susman, Warren I., “The Thirties,” in Coben, Stanley and Ratner, Lorman, eds., The Development of an American Culture (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1970), 179-218Google Scholar; Chafe, William H., “The Paradox of Progress: Social Change Since 1930,” in Patterson, James T., ed., Paths to the Present: Interpretive Essays on American History (Minneapolis, 1975), 5-55Google Scholar; and Patterson, , “American Politics: The Bursts of Reform,” ibid., 57-101Google Scholar.

34 Bakke, , Citizens without Work, 271Google Scholar.

35 Cavan, and Ranck, , The Family and the Depression, 153Google Scholar.

36 Bakke, , Citizens without Work, 276Google Scholar. The incidence of such self-reliance should not be exaggerated; McMillen, Wayne, “Client ‘Fraud’ in Chicago,” Social Service Review, XIV (March 1940), 51Google Scholar, found the volume of client fraud “comparatively small”: 8,191 claims by the Restitution Department in the years 1932-1938 when the average monthly case load in Chicago was over 400,000 persons.

37 Cavan and Ranck, The Family and the Depression, 159.

38 Ginsburg, Sol Wiener, “What Unemployment Does to People: A Study in Adjustment to Crisis,” American Journal of Psychiatry, XCIX (November 1942), 444-45Google Scholar; Bakke, , Citizens without Work, 257-60, 281Google Scholar; Hall, O. Milton, “Attitudes and Unemployment,” 46Google Scholar; Roslow, Sidney, “The Attitude of a Group of Relief Workers toward Work Relief,” Psychological Bulletin, XXXII (October 1935), 576Google Scholar; Bristol, Margaret Cochran and Wright, Helen R., “Some Aspects of Work Relief in Chicago,” Social Service Review, VIII (December 1934), 64142, 645-46, 649-50, 652Google Scholar; Bristol, , “Changes in Work Relief in Chicago,” ibid., IX (June 1935), 243-55Google Scholar; Mack, Dorothy, “Psychological and Emotional Values in C.W.A. Assignments: A Study of Sixty-One Families on Relief before and after C.W.A.,” ibid., IX (June 1935), 256, 260-64, 266-67Google Scholar; Bristol, , “Personal Reactions of Assignees to the W.P.A. in Chicago,” ibid., XII (March 1938), 93, 100Google Scholar.

39 Charles, Searle F., Minister of Relief : Harry Hopkins and the Depression (Syracuse, N.Y., 1963)Google Scholar, passim; Bremer, William W., “Along the ‘American Way’: The New Deal’s Work Relief Programs for the Unemployed,” Journal of American History, LXII (December 1975), 638Google Scholar.

40 Cavan, and Ranck, , The Family and the Depression, 153Google Scholar.

41 Culver, “Transient Unemployed Men,” 534.

42 Reynolds, Rosemary, “They Have Neither Work Nor Money,” The Family, XII (April 1931), 36Google Scholar.

43 Cavan, and Ranck, , The Family and the Depression, 160Google Scholar.

44 Jones, , Life, Liberty, and Property, 336-37Google Scholar.

45 Letter, Lorena A. Hickok to Harry Hopkins, May 18, 1936, Hopkins Papers, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library.

46 Flinn, Thomas A., “Continuity and Change in Ohio Politics,” Journal of Politics, XXIV (August 1962), 543Google Scholar.

47 Piven, Frances Fox and Cloward, Richard A., Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), 89Google Scholar.

48 Kraditor, Aileen S., “American Radical Historians on Their Heritage,” Past and Present: A Journal of Historical Studies, XLVI (August 1972), 141-42, 153Google Scholar.

49 Piven, and Cloward, , Regulating the Poor, 88Google Scholar.

50 Diamond, Solomon, “A Study of the Influence of Political Radicalism on Personality Development,” Archives of Psychology, No. 203 (June 1936), 2-53Google Scholar.

51 Ibid., 5, 7-10, 30-31, 33.

52 Ibid., 7, 9, 31, 33, 44-45, 47, 49. Diamond’s analysis of the relationship between personality and political attitude is more probing than Warren Susman’s contention in Susman, ed., Culture and Commitment 1929-1945 (New York, 1973), 15, that active anti-capitalist protest movements were joined by many people not so much as the result of analysis and arrival at a doctrine to be implemented as out of a need for commitment to “an intense political, cultural, and even psychological experience wherein people might find themselves, might especially establish some kind of identity by working closely with others for the creation of a better world, sentimentally, perhaps. . . .”

53 Diamond, , “A Study of the Influence of Political Radicalism on Personality Development,” 45, 47-48Google Scholar.

54 Ibid., 10-12, 44-45. Chenoweth, , The American Dream of Success, 63-89Google Scholar, discusses the success ethic in the 1930s in a chapter entitled “The Depression: Shame, Guilt, and the Search for Self,” a provocative study primarily based on analysis of articles in the Reader’s Digest and The Saturday Evening Post and best-selling self-help books.

55 Almond, Gabriel and Lasswell, Harold D., “Aggressive Behavior by Clients toward Public Relief Administrators: A Configurative Analysis,” American Political Science Review, XXVIII (August 1934), 643-55CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The only place this writer has seen this study cited by a historian is Garraty, John A., “Unemployment during the Great Depression,” Labor History, XVII (Spring 1976), 156Google Scholar, an international comparative inquiry.

56 Cavan, and Ranck, , The Family and the Depression, 153Google Scholar.

57 Eisenberg, and Lazarsfeld, , “The Psychological Effects of Unemployment,” 372Google Scholar.

58 Almond, and Lasswell, , “Aggressive Behavior by Relief Clients toward Public Relief Administrators,” 655Google Scholar.

59 Ibid., 645-46.

60 Ibid., 654.

61 Mack, Dorothy, “Psychological and Emotional Values in C.W.A. Assignments,” 260; Shlionsky, Herman, M.D., Preu, Paul William, M.D., and Rose, Milton, Ph.D., “Clinical Observations on the Reactions of a Group of Transients to Unemployment,” Journal of Social Psychology, VIII (February 1937), 85Google Scholar; Rundquist, Edward A. and Sletto, Raymond F., Personality in the Depression, 366Google Scholar; Wright, Helen Russell, “The Families of the Unemployed in Chicago,” Social Service Review, VIII (March 1934), 21-22, 24, 26, 29Google Scholar; Groves, Ernest R., “Adaptations of Family Life,” American Journal of Sociology, XL (May 1935), 772CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Angell, Robert Cooley, The Family Encounters the Depression (New York, 1936), ixGoogle Scholar; Cavan, and Ranck, , The Family and the Depression, 146Google Scholar; Komarovsky, Mirra, The Unemployed Man and His Family: The Effect of Unemployment upon the Status of the Man in Fifty-Nine Families (New York, 1940), 49-65Google Scholar. Bakke, , Citizens without Work, 277, refers to the “variety in income, work, and institutional relationships which characterized the workers’ backgrounds,” and Stouffer and Lazarsfeld, Research Memorandum on the Family in the Depression, 48-49Google Scholar, stress the value to researchers of work histories.

62 Komarovsky, , The Unemployed Man and His Family, 4Google Scholar; Rogers, D. B., “Adjustments in the Competent Family,” The Family, XIV (January 1934), 322CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Angell, , The Family Encounters the Depression 4Google Scholar; Cavan, and Ranck, , The Family and the Depression, 12-13Google Scholar; Reinhardt, and Boardman, , “Insecurity and Personality Disintegration,” 240Google Scholar.

63 Ginsburg, , “What Unemployment Does to People,” 41Google Scholar.

64 Vincent, , “Relief and Resultant Attitudes,” 27-28Google Scholar.

65 Walker, Helen M., “Some Data Regarding 162 Families Affected by Unemployment Known to the Cleveland Associated Charities,” The Family, Supplement, XIV (June 1933), 131-35CrossRefGoogle Scholar. A companion study, Otis, Lillian L., “Unemployment and Its Treatment in Non-Resident Families: A Study of Fifty Non-Resident White Families Known to the Cleveland Associated Charities,” ibid., 142Google Scholar, classified families as “desirables” and “undesirables,” with 30 being placed in the latter category because of “irregular or unsatisfactory work record, domestic difficulty, previous court record, poor health of some member of the family, or previous dependency upon social agencies elsewhere than in Cleveland.”

66 Sutherland, Edwin H. and Locke, Harvey J., Twenty Thousand Homeless Men: A Study of Unemployed Men in Chicago Shelters (Chicago, 1936), 48Google Scholar; Vincent, , “Relief and Resultant Attitudes,” 27-28Google Scholar; Shlionsky, et al, “Clinical Observations on the Reactions of a Group of Transients to Unemployment,” 85Google Scholar. In addition to the Sutherland and Locke book, the Shlionsky article, and the articles by Culver and Locke cited above, see, for descriptions of shelter operations, Anderson, Harriet E., “The Philadelphia Shelter for Homeless Men,” The Family, XII (May 1931), 76-77Google Scholar; Nickel, George D., “Los Angeles Adopts the Work Camp,” Sociology and Social Research, XVII (September-October 1932), 72-78Google Scholar; and Wood, Samuel E., “Municipal Shelter Camps for California Migrants,” ibid., XXIII (January-February 1939), 222-27Google Scholar. Transient camps for male minors are discussed in Out-land, George E., “The Federal Transient Service as a Deterrent of Boy Transiency,” ibid., XXII (November-December 1937), 143-48Google Scholar, in which Outland answers allegations that diese camps encouraged vagrancy by pointing out that of 3,352 case studies in Los Angeles, only 100 (94 of whom were Mexican boys from El Paso and Phoenix) left home directly because of the influence of transient camps. McMillen, A. Wayne, “Migrant Boys: Some Data from Salt Lake City,”Social Service Review, VII (March 1933), 64-83Google Scholar, is an analysis of boys who applied for food and shelter in that locality during a summer month of 1932.

67 Young, Pauline V., “The New Poor,” Sociology and Social Research, XVII (January-February 1933), 234, 236-37Google Scholar. See also Slocum, Flora, “Lost Resources in Life Insurance: A Study of Dependent Families in St. Louis,” Social Service Review, VII (December 1933), 619-39Google Scholar; and Slocum, , “A Study of Life Insurance Adjustments in 275 Relief Families,” ibid. VIII (June 1934), 302-25Google Scholar.

68 Young, Pauline V., “The Interviewing Approach to the New Poor,” Sociology and Social Research, XIX (January-February 1935), 239Google Scholar.

69 Hill, Frances L., “Disaster Philosophy and Technique in Unemployment Work,” The Family, XII (February 1932), 307-9Google Scholar.

70 Sutherland, and Locke, , Twenty Thousand Homeless Men, 70-93Google Scholar.

71 Bristol, and Wright, , “Some Aspects of Work Relief in Chicago,” 631, 651Google Scholar; Luten, Wilhemina, “A Survey of 1200 Families: Detroit Department of Public Welfare,” The Family, XIII (June 1932), 127CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wright, “The Families of the Unemployed in Chicago,” 26.

72 Ginsburg, “What Unemployment Does to People,” 440.

73 Almond and Lasswell, “Aggressive Behavior of Clients toward Public Relief Administrators,” 654.

74 Sobczak is a graduate student in history at Bowling Green State University. For the sampling procedure see Floud, Roderick, An Introduction to Quantitative Methods for Historians (Princeton, N.J., 1973), 162-65Google Scholar; and Clark, Charles E., comp., Random Numbers in Uniform and Normal Distribution (San Francisco, 1966), 67ffGoogle Scholar.

75 Clague, Ewan, Couper, Walter J., and Bakke, E. Wight, After the Shutdown: The Readjustment of Industrial Workers Displaced by Two Plant Shutdowns; Former L. Candee Workers in the Depression (New Haven, 1934), 110-11Google Scholar.

76 Almond, and Lasswell, , “Aggressive Behavior of Clients toward Public Relief Administrators,” 651Google Scholar.

77 Cavan, and Ranck, , The Family and the Depression, 123Google Scholar.

78 Reinhardt, and Boardman, , “Insecurity and Personality Disintegration,” 240Google Scholar.

79 Cavan, and Ranck, , The Family and the Depression, 123Google Scholar.

80 Young, “The New Poor,” 242.

81 Bakke, , Citizens without Work, 245Google Scholar; Stouffer, and Lazarsfeld, , Research Memorandum on the Family in the Depression 60Google Scholar; Bristol and Wright, “Some Aspects of Work Relief in Chicago,” 632; Vincent, “Relief and Resultant Attitudes,” 33; Slocum and Ring, “Industry’s Discarded Workers,” 525-26; Tidd, Martha U., Sciver, Eva Van, Clark, Florence, and Tilden, Arnold, “Family Problems of Today,” Sociology and Social Research, (July-August 1936), 528-33Google Scholar; Young, , “The New Poor,” 238Google Scholar. Bakke cited others’ misgivings but was himself optimistic about the unemployed workers’ retention of self-reliance: Clague, Couper, and Bakke, After the Shutdown, 110, and Bakke, Citizens without Work, 260, 265-76, 282.

82 Analyzing 79 cases handled by the Jewish Social Service Bureau in Baltimore, Swerdloff, Esther S., “The Effect of the Depression on Family Life,” The Family, XIII (January 1933), 314Google Scholar, expressed the fear that in the future the children of the unemployed would fill our jails and asylums; pertinent to her inquiry is Bloodgood, Ruth, “Public Care of Dependent Children in Baltimore,” Social Service Review, VIII (March 1934), 79-108Google Scholar. Eisenberg and Lazarsfeld, “The Psychological Effects of Unemployment,” 379, “deal with children and youth separately because although unemployment has the same effect on them as it does on adults, they also present special problems.” On children see also Williams, James Mickel, Human Aspects of Unemployment: With Special Reference to the Effects of the Depression on Children (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1933Google Scholar), Powell, Ruth, “The Effect of Long-Continued Unemployment upon Private Child-Caring Agencies in the Chicago Area,” Social Service Review, VII (March 1933), 49-63Google Scholar, and Bossard, James H. S., editor, Children in a Depression Decade (Philadelphia, 1940Google Scholar; Arno Press Reprints Arno Press has also reprinted five publications of White House Conferences on Child Health and Protection: The Home and the Child: Housing, Furnishing, Managment, Income, Clothing (New York, 1931), Organization for the Care of Handicapped Children, National, State, Local (New York and London, 1932), Dependent and Neglected Children: Report of the Committee on Socially Handicapped; Dependency and Neglect (New York and London, 1933), The Adolescent in the Family: A Study of Personality Development in the Home Environment (New York, 1934), and The Young Child in the Home: A Survey of Three Thousand American Families (New York, 1936). An extremely valuable study which shows where some Oakland children actually came out is Glen Elder, Jr., Children of the Great Depression: Social Change in Life Experience (Chicago, 1974).

83 Tidd, et al., “Family Problems of Today,” 528Google Scholar. Obviously, among those citizens who were down, one group who mostly remained down were those who were too old—considerably older than 45—to benefit from economic recovery.

84 Ginsburg, “What Unemployment Does to People,” 446.

85 Ingalls, Robert P., Herbert H. Lehman and New York’s Little New Deal (New York, 1975), 60-61Google Scholar.

86 Much has been written about concentration of income in the 1920s. Heilbroner, Robert L., The Future as History (New York, 1961), 121Google Scholar, states that “in 1929 no system of distribution would have yielded completely satisfactory results. For the overriding actuality of that age of great ‘prosperity’ was an economic inability to produce enough for a good standard of living for all. In 1929 had the nation’s disposable income been divided equally among all thirty-six million households, the result would have been an income of about $2,300 per household—about halfway between a living standard of bare necessities and one of minimal comfort.”

87 Williams, , Human Aspects of Unemployment, 23-24Google Scholar.

88 Reed, Ellery, “Family Dependency Rates,” The Family XII (April 1931), 54-60Google Scholar. Reed cites dependency rates published for the first time through the Registration of Social Statistics sponsored during 1928 and 1929 by the Association of Community Chests and Councils and the University of Chicago.

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90 Terkel, Studs, Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression (New York, 1970)Google Scholar.

91 This writer is engaged in oral history in connection with an onion weeders’ strike in the summer of 1934 in Hardin County, Ohio, the site of the largest onion-growing field in the world at that time.

92 New York Times, October 24, 1976, Section 4, 6.

93 Meltzer, Milton, Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? : The Great Depression, 1929-1933 (New York, 1969), 3Google Scholar.

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97 Burnham, Walter Dean, “Jimmy Carter and the Democratic Crisis,” New Republic, 174 (July 3 & 10, 1976), 17-19Google Scholar, is a recent article on this subject by a political scientist who has been writing about it for at least a decade.

98 Toledo Blade, September 26, 1976, 1.

99 Sternsher, , ed., Hitting Home, 27-34Google Scholar; Sternsher, , Consensus, Conflict, and American Historians (Bloomington, Ind., 1975), 304-07Google Scholar.

100 Anthony Carter Tucker, “Some Correlates of Certain Attitudes of the Unemployed, “Archives of Psychology, No. 245 (February 1940), 3-72.

101 Ibid., 14-15,22.

102 Ibid., 43, 47-48, 66.

103 Ibid., 43.

104 Ibid., 13-14.

105 Sternsher, , Consensus, Conflict, and American Historians, 89-112, discusses these analysesGoogle Scholar.

106 Nimmo, Dan and Ungs, Thomas D., American Political Patterns: Conflict andConsensus (Boston, 1967), 42-43Google Scholar.

107 Garraty, “Unemployment during the Great Depression,” 157.