LewHisDepression
THE DEPRESSION YEARS–1929-1940
Joan Shaw
A familiar sight
during the 1930s--a WPA crew, this one excavating for and laying 8"
tile for the Newton drainage project
During the Great Depression that lasted
from the fall of 1929 to the early years of World War II, qualified
mechanics, engineers, and teachers were traveling the nation along with
common laborers in a desperate search for work. Any kind of work. They
were a familiar sight in Cache Valley. They’d come knocking on doors
asking for food in exchange for labor, and residents were mostly good
enough – the poorer ones often the
more generous – to make a sandwich or fill a bowl with hot stew,
whether they
had work to be done in exchange or not.
Meanwhile, from the stock market crash
of October 1929 to the early months of 1933, another familiar sight
were the headlines generated by government leaders, bankers, and
economists announcing bracingly that “recovery was just around the
corner.”
There were many who believed these
experts were right, running up accounts with farm suppliers and corner
grocery stores on the strength of an economic upturn they expected
would materialize in just
a few weeks or after the next growing season.
“There are indications that the
severest
phase of the depression is over,” said one headline a scant three
months
after the 1929 Crash. A premature announcement, true. But two years
later,
in1931, when optimism began to flag even among some economists, the
White
House was still saying it. “The economy is fundamentally sound,”
President
Hoover insisted again and again, adding the prediction of an upturn by
a
given date, and then another date, and then another.
By 1932, the nation’s economy was
essentially dead; it just hadn’t slid into rigor mortis yet. Countless
stories filled the newspapers and air waves of farm and home
foreclosures, proliferating bread lines, soup kitchens. Thousands of
desperate industrial workers were staging protest marches for jobs.
Mothers were carrying placards demanding milk for their children.
People had forgotten what a dollar bill looked
like. Never mind, the Hoover White House, the Mellons, the Rockefellers
and
DuPonts – they all continued to announce that an upturn would magically
appear
if only people would shuck off their gloom and gain some confidence.
The results of a WPA
project--USU's amphitheater on the west side of College Hill,
removed in the 1990s.
The historian, John Kenneth Galbraith,
in his classic book on this era, The Great Crash 1929,
described this type of pep talk as “recovery by incantation,” in which
as many important people as possible repeated as firmly as they could
that the economy itself was fundamentally sound, that the problem lay
in those who found themselves still out of work, dispossessed, or
experiencing foreclosures. Blame the victims – it started with
the Great Depression.
The hapless President Herbert Hoover
had
inherited this mess from Calvin “I do not choose to run”
Coolidge.
Though humorless and wedded to hopelessly out-of-date economic
theories,
Hoover was a basically humane man, who nevertheless appeared to the
public
as callously indifferent to their suffering. Inevitably, he
became
the butt of jokes from one end of the country to the other.
I remember my own mother wearing a
“Hooverall” or “Hoover Apron,” a kind of wrap-around house dress that
was handed out
by city relief agencies to families of the unemployed. Soup kitchens
were
called “Hoover Cafes,” shanty towns for the homeless were called
“Hoovervilles.” “Business is improving,” says the straight
man. The comedian responds: “Is Hoover dead?”
But recovery by incantation was not
confined to Wall Street and the White House. Salt Lake City’s Mayor
Brown, for instance, announced in 1931 that the hard times Utahns were
experiencing would soon pass and merge, as he put it, “into a period of
unprecedented prosperity.”
As it turned out, Utah was one of the
states hardest hit by the Great Depression and prosperity was nearly a
decade away. In 1933 – at the very bottom of the Great Depression years
– the unemployment rate in Utah overall was 35.8 percent, the fourth
highest in the nation. Thirty-two
of Utah’s 105 banks had failed, a third of the population was receiving
all
or part of their food, clothing, shelter, and other necessities from
government
relief funds, and farm foreclosures statewide had hit an unprecedented
high.
Agriculture’s struggle to exist is
reflected in Cache County’s delinquent tax rolls which grew from eight
to ten times its 1919 number during the 1920s and 1930s. Especially
hard hit were the
dryland grain farmers. A bushel of wheat, for instance, that cost 68
cents
to produce in a state-wide estimate during the 1933-34 season, was
selling
for 30 cents a bushel and dropping weekly.
“The dairies had it a bit better,”
reported former Lewiston Councilman and Mayor, Howard Shuldberg. “They
could always sell their milk, but grain – that went begging.”
Howard’s father,
for instance, stored his entire 1932 wheat crop in a Preston Co-op
elevator
for more favorable prices, using it as collateral for a loan to get him
and
his family through the winter. The guaranteed price accepted by the
Co-op’s
bank was nineteen cents a bushel, which at the time was considered to
be
as low as it could get.
His father then took a farm-related
business trip to Washington, D.C. “During the short time he was
away,” reported Howard, “the price of wheat fell like a stone to
nineteen cents a bushel, and the bank ordered it sold.” The
family’s small, stop-gap loan therefore became its income for the year,
and this type of loss was seen again and again
in grain-farming communities throughout the nation as prices per bushel
fell
to near zero.
“There just wasn't any money
circulating
then,” recalled long-time Lewiston resident, Edis Taggart. “The
people
around here without land or livestock of their own went out to work for
other
people and took whatever they could get for it, whatever people had to
pay
them – a jug of milk, a basket of carrots or potatoes, some flour – and
that's the way they got by.” Cove's Florence Allen agreed.
“Store-bought bread was only a nickel a loaf, but we didn't have any
nickels, so we passed around (yeast) starts and made our own bread; or
we made baking powder biscuits, or hot cakes.”
“Mother had to close her store,”
recalled Eva Orchard Layne, speaking of the little grocery by
their house on Main Street in Lewiston. “She'd extended so much
credit, she just couldn't stay in business any more.” Eva’s
father, Bert Orchard, was the town barber, holding forth in the
building now owned and operated by Vaughn Blair. “My father did
all right,” Eva said. And Eva herself had a job clerking in Van
Orden’s drug store across the street from her house. “It didn't
pay much,” she said, “but it was a job and I was lucky to have it.”
There were many in Cache Valley who
were
not so lucky. By 1932, the valley had 1,500 unemployed wage
earners.
To help alleviate suffering, the valley's citizens responded with a
church
and civic cooperative effort, accumulating food, clothing, and other
necessities to be distributed to those in want through church
storehouses and community distribution centers. Vacant lots became
garden plots for the destitute,
and hot lunches were made available to school children. The Red Cross
also
became active in distributing necessities after the drought of 1931.
When the valley's economic situation
continued to worsen, the Logan Chamber of Commerce created an
employment program funded by a two percent tax on the wages of business
and municipal employees, and the county augmented the funding of this
program by taxing admission charges to local entertainment. These
efforts managed to put approximately 200 men to work building
sidewalks, curbs and gutters, school playgrounds, and roads throughout
the county. In addition, President Hoover's Reconstruction Finance
Corporation (RFC) made loans to banks who were, in turn, expected to
make money available to various livestock growers.
“In reality,” writes F. Ross Peterson,
in his book, A History of Cache County, “...
conservative Utah bankers refused to extend much credit and expand
debt.” Additionally, he adds, local action and community taxes
simply could not handle the valley's extreme economic problems.
Clearly, drastic measures were called for, and many in the nation
expected nothing less from the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt to
the presidency.
In his first hundred days in office,
President Roosevelt initiated and Congress approved an unprecedented
number of relief bills, injecting much needed currency into the
nation's economy. Among the many projects affecting Cache County
was the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), in which young men were put
to work improving federal land.
The Cache National Forest had three
such
camps, with the men receiving a dollar a day plus board and room. Their
work
included the building of forest camps, trails, and roads, plus
reforestation and flood-control. These camps were duplicated throughout
the nation and were
one of the most popular and most enduring of the work programs coming
out
of Washington.
Utah State University received special
funding to assist in supporting cultural activities, and a temporary
New Deal agency, the Civil Works Administration (CWA), employed nearly
1,200 Cache citizens during the winter of 1933-34.
Among the many Cache County projects
funded by federal emergency dollars during this period were USU’s
George Nelson
Fieldhouse, the amphitheater on Old Main Hill, the construction
of
Hyrum Dam, and an increase in size and capacity of Newton Dam. Two
other
programs influencing the valley were the Agricultural Adjustment Act
(AAA)
which allowed farmers to borrow money directly from the federal
government
to pay bank mortgages and the Domestic Allotment Plan which created
artificial
scarcity and thus higher prices by reducing crop and animal production.
By far the most influential of the
federal agencies, however, was the Works Progress Administration (WPA)
which, between 1935 and 1939, spent nearly two million dollars on
improvements and buildings in Cache County. Among these projects were
additions to the South Cache
High School and construction of the Family Life Building on the USU
campus.
There were many people, especially
among
bankers and industrialists, who strongly disapproved of
Roosevelt's
deficit spending to revive the nation's economy and branded the New
Deal
a gateway to communism. On the other hand, there were many within the
Roosevelt
administration itself who didn't feel the president was spending
enough.
The economy was stalled and unemployment still high during the latter
part
of the 1930s, they argued, only because of the President's
business-oriented
conservatism and his timid use of federal funds to jolt the country
into
prosperity.
The necessary military buildup of
1940-41 changed all that when the Roosevelt administration was forced
to inject
huge quantities of money into the economy to enlarge the Allied war
machine.
As McElvaine points out in his book, The Great Depression,
the earlier deficit spending approach that Roosevelt's New Deal had
used
timidly during the years 1933-39 was shown to work wonders when used
boldly.
“Rather than representing a reversal of the New Deal prescription,” he
writes,
“the military spending of 1940 and subsequent years represented a much
larger dose of the same medicine.”
For many today, the Great Depression is
something that happened long before they were born, perhaps before
their parents were born, something found only in history books.
But historians find it difficult to include in their accounts the utter
hopelessness of the ordinary, everyday people who suffered through this
devastating period in the nation's life, especially those living in the
cities or those who had lost their land and were without the
possibility of even a garden plot to help feed themselves. These people
– farmers, laborers, machinists, miners, small businessmen, and
factory workers, people who had always paid their bills on time and
never expected to be beholden to anyone – suddenly found themselves
destitute, caught
in a situation they didn't understand and could do nothing to alter,
yet
about which they felt deeply ashamed. Some of them never got over it
and
some, like my parents, died from it. Those of us who were too young to
be
greatly affected, but remember our parents’ anguish quite clearly,
simply hope it will never happen again.
The State's Utah
Symphony grew from an orchestra funded by the WPA Federal Music Project
in 1935,
with Reginald Beale as principal second violinist and conductor. Here,
the
group is shown posing before a 1940 concert. Under the Federal Music
Project,
thirty new orchestra were credted in as many cities across the nation,
along
with scores of smaller orchestras, bands, ensembles, and choral groups.
A
Wellsville violinst, William Douglas, was reported to be a member of
the
Utah orchestra 1940 group.
Thanks to Florence
Allen, Eva Layne, Geniel Pond, Harold Shuldberg, and Edis Taggart for
their generous contributions to this paper. For those interested in
reading about the Great Depression of the 1930s, the very best book to
start with is John Kenneth Galbraith’s seminal work, The Great
Crash, 1929, which is fun to read and has never gone out of print
since its initial publication in 1954. Another excellent study is
Robert S. McElvaine’s The Great Depression
written in 1984. The Utah History Encyclopedia, which can
be
found in the Lewiston library, has an excellent account of the
Depression in Utah, as does Ross Peterson's A History of Cache
County and The History of a Valley edited by Joel
Ricks. Other works consulted for this paper were “Cache Valley's
Triumph over Adversity,” Hurren;
The Uncertainty of Everyday Life, Green; and Five Thousand
Concerts:
a Commemorative History of the Utah Symphony, Harrison.
Illustration
Credits:
All photos courtesy of the
USU Special Collections
This history
and the ones following were initiated by Russell N. Hirst, Jr., MD,
Mayor of Lewiston,
to coincide with Utah's Centennial Year. An advisory board was created
consisting
of a number of North Cache Valley's older citizens, the mayor himself,
and
Joan Shaw as writer and researcher.The object was to get as much as
possible
of these older citizens' memories recorded for future readers. The
results
were distributed to the people of Lewiston in their montly water
bills.These
histories are now available in their original form at
http://www.lewiston.lib.ut.us/the_history_of_lewiston.htm .
Following is the list of people who make up the LEWISTON-NORTH
CACHE VALLEY HISTORICAL BOARD, headquartered at 29 South Main
Street, Lewiston, Utah 84320. The Board is still in effect and is still
contributing raw material to this series.
Steering Committee
Mayor Russell
N. Hirst, Writer Joan Shaw, Research Associate Melanie Shaw,
Consultant
Anne Buttars, Acting Curator/Head, Utah State University's
Special Collections & Archives
Board members
Florence Allen, J.
Arbon Christensen, Dorothy Gilbert, Wells Jackson, Rosa Melartin, Theon
Nielsen, Julia Rawlins, Howard Shuldberg, Estelle Smith, Sadie
Sorenson, Guy Swendsen, Edis Taggart, Virginia Van Orden, Lloyd Walker
Links to buy books mentioned in this
essay:
The
Great Crash 1929
A History of Cache County
The Great Depression
Link for books to browse on the
subject of The United States in the Twentieth Century
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Farm in Idaho
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