Remembering The Great Depression In The Rural South

This collection of more than 600 oral histories recalls the Great Depression and provides a rich personal chronicle of the 1930s. The Depression altered the basic structure of American society and changed the way government, business, and the American people interacted. Capturing this historical era and its meaning, the stories in Remembering the Great Depression in the Rural South reflect the general despair of the people, but they also reveal the hope many found through the New Deal.

Joe, George, and Richard Youngblood, three white brothers growing up in the rural South during the Great Depression, live in a world of paradoxes: love and hate; doubt and faith; and sadness and humor. In his poignant memoir I Must Remember This: A Southern White Boy's Memories of the Great Depression, Jim Crow, and World War II, author George Youngblood shares stories about everything from the brothers' first awareness of death, sex, and race to the truth about Santa Claus. They smoke rabbit tobacco, tremble at ghost and snake stories, watch haircuts for excitement, get baptized, and gawk at locomotives and alligators. Hard times draw the Youngblood family closer to their father's black farm workers. With one family in particular they form a symbiotic relationship in the hostile world of poverty, disease, and segregation. I Must Remember This is Youngblood's family story as they hope, work, and laugh with little cause-and succeed with basic honesty, respect, and an astounding sense of humor.

The New Deal shaped our nation's politics for decades, and was seen by many as tantamount to the "American Way" itself. Now, in this superb compact history, Eric Rauchway offers an informed account of the New Deal and the Great Depression, illuminating its successes and failures. Rauchway first describes how the roots of the Great Depression lay in America's post-war economic policies--described as "laissez-faire with a vengeance"--which in effect isolated our nation from the world economy just when the world needed the United States most. He shows how the magnitude of the resulting economic upheaval, and the ineffectiveness of the old ways of dealing with financial hardships, set the stage for Roosevelt's vigorous (and sometimes unconstitutional) Depression-fighting policies. Indeed, Rauchway stresses that the New Deal only makes sense as a response to this global economic disaster. The book examines a key sampling of New Deal programs, ranging from the National Recovery Agency and the Securities and Exchange Commission, to the Public Works Administration and Social Security, revealing why some worked and others did not. In the end, Rauchway concludes, it was the coming of World War II that finally generated the political will to spend the massive amounts of public money needed to put Americans back to work. And only the Cold War saw the full implementation of New Deal policies abroad--including the United Nations, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. Today we can look back at the New Deal and, for the first time, see its full complexity. Rauchway captures this complexity in a remarkably short space, making this book an ideal introduction to one of the great policy revolutions in history. About the Series: Oxford's Very Short Introductions offers concise and original introductions to a wide range of subjects--from Islam to Sociology, Politics to Classics, and Literary Theory to History. Not simply a textbook of definitions, each volume provides trenchant and provocative--yet always balanced and complete--discussions of the central issues in a given topic. Every Very Short Introduction gives a readable evolution of the subject in question, demonstrating how it has developed and influenced society. Whatever the area of study, whatever the topic that fascinates the reader, the series has a handy and affordable guide that will likely prove indispensable.

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Good War: A masterpiece of modern journalism and “a huge anthem in praise of the American spirit” (Saturday Review). In this “invaluable record” of one of the most dramatic periods in modern American history, Studs Terkel recaptures the Great Depression of the 1930s in all its complexity. Featuring a mosaic of memories from politicians, businessmen, artists, striking workers, and Okies, from those who were just kids to those who remember losing a fortune, Hard Times is not only a gold mine of information but a fascinating interplay of memory and fact, revealing how the 1929 stock market crash and its repercussions radically changed the lives of a generation. The voices that speak from the pages of this unique book are as timeless as the lessons they impart (The New York Times). “Hard Times doesn’t ‘render’ the time of the depression—it is that time, its lingo, mood, its tragic and hilarious stories.” —Arthur Miller “Wonderful! The American memory, the American way, the American voice. It will resurrect your faith in all of us to read this book.” —Newsweek “Open Studs Terkel’s book to almost any page and rich memories spill out . . . Read a page, any page. Then try to stop.” —The National Observer

Down and Out in the Great Depression is a moving, revealing collection of letters by the forgotten men, women, and children who suffered through one of the greatest periods of hardship in American history. Sifting through some 15,000 letters from government and private sources, Robert McElvaine has culled nearly 200 communications that best show the problems, thoughts, and emotions of ordinary people during this time. Unlike views of Depression life "from the bottom up" that rely on recollections recorded several decades later, this book captures the daily anguish of people during the thirties. It puts the reader in direct contact with Depression victims, evoking a feeling of what it was like to live through this disaster. Following Franklin D. Roosevelt's inauguration, both the number of letters received by the White House and the percentage of them coming from the poor were unprecedented. The average number of daily communications jumped to between 5,000 and 8,000, a trend that continued throughout the Rosevelt administration. The White House staff for answering such letters--most of which were directed to FDR, Eleanor Roosevelt, or Harry Hopkins--quickly grew from one person to fifty. Mainly because of his radio talks, many felt they knew the president personally and could confide in him. They viewed the Roosevelts as parent figures, offering solace, help, and protection. Roosevelt himself valued the letters, perceiving them as a way to gauge public sentiment. The writers came from a number of different groups--middle-class people, blacks, rural residents, the elderly, and children. Their letters display emotional reactions to the Depression--despair, cynicism, and anger--and attitudes toward relief. In his extensive introduction, McElvaine sets the stage for the letters, discussing their significance and some of the themes that emerge from them. By preserving their original spelling, syntax, grammar, and capitalization, he conveys their full flavor. The Depression was far more than an economic collapse. It was the major personal event in the lives of tens of millions of Americans. McElvaine shows that, contrary to popular belief, many sufferers were not passive victims of history. Rather, he says, they were "also actors and, to an extent, playwrights, producers, and directors as well," taking an active role in trying to deal with their plight and solve their problems. For this twenty-fifth anniversary edition, McElvaine provides a new foreword recounting the history of the book, its impact on the historiography of the Depression, and its continued importance today.

Jimmy Carter re-creates his boyhood on a Georgia farm.

Nowhere was the transition from church-based aid to federal welfare state brought about by the Great Depression more dramatic than in the South. For a moment, the southern Protestant establishment turned to face the suffering that plantation capitalism pushed behind its image of planter's hatsand hoopskirts. When starving white farmers marched into an Arkansas town to demand food for their dying children and when priests turned away hungry widows and orphans because they were no needier than anyone else, southern clergy of both races spoke with one voice to say that they had done allthey could. It was time for a higher power to intervene. They looked to God, and then they looked to Roosevelt.When Roosevelt promised a new deal for the "forgotten man," Americans cheered, and when he took office, churches and private agencies gratefully turned much of the responsibility for welfare and social reform over to the state. Yet, argues historian Allison Collis Greene, Roosevelt's New Dealthreatened plantation capitalism even while bending to it. Black southern churches worked to secure benefits for their own communities while white churches divided over loyalties to Roosevelt and Jim Crow. Frustrated by their failure and fractured by divisions over the New Deal, leaders in the majorwhite Protestant denominations surrendered their moral authority in the South. Although the Protestant establishment retained a central role in American life for decades after the Depression, its slip from power made room for upstart Pentecostals and independent evangelicals, who emphasized personalrather than social salvation.