Chapter 1: What was life like during the Great Depression?
We seek to leave you seeing the world anew.
Radiolab adventures right on the edge of what we think we know, wherever you get podcasts. This is America in Pursuit, a limited-run series from ThruLine and NPR. I'm Randa Abdelfattah. Each week, we bring you stories about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the United States that began 250 years ago. There are no jobs.
Most of us have had no breakfast. Some have had scant rations for over a year. Hunger makes a human being lapse into a state of lethargy, especially city hunger.
The Great Depression was one of the worst economic disasters in modern history. It started in 1929 and lasted through the next decade.
Is there any place else in the world where a human being is supposed to go hungry amidst plenty, without an outcry, without protest? Where only the boldest steal or kill for bread, and the timid crawl the streets.
It was marked by massive unemployment, hunger, homelessness, and a general sense that the country's future was in peril. It's too terrible to see this animal terror in each other's eyes. The Great Depression left a lasting imprint on the people who lived it. So today on the show, we want to immerse you in the era and let the people who lived through it tell their own stories.
Stories captured in oral histories, diaries, and essays brought to life through reenactment. Four people, four vastly different experiences from different ethnic and racial backgrounds from all over the United States.
Henry Wright went looking for adventure in the Great Depression.
Riding the rails from coast to coast, he learned things about himself and the world. With a certain amount of pride, he called himself a hobo, bouncing from city to city, seeking his fortune.
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Chapter 2: How did hunger affect people's lives during the Great Depression?
Fong spent the Great Depression in San Francisco's Chinatown. He experienced the era at the street level and the everyday minutia of economic struggle.
Hello, I'm Dorothy Haidt. In a strange way, everybody had a feeling of common suffering. There was a kind of sense that everybody's having a hard time.
Dorothy Height grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania. And when the Great Depression hit home, she was eager to escape to the big city for college. She moved to Harlem in New York. But as luck would have it, the Depression would follow her there.
Henry, Meridel, Fong, and Dorothy's stories, captured in oral histories, diaries, and essays, give us a window into what it was like to live through this time, a moment that often gets reduced to one archetype of American suffering. Their stories, their voices, are the ones we don't generally hear.
So with that, we give you Four Lives of the Great Depression.
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In a strange way, everybody had a feeling of common suffering. There was a kind of sense that everybody's having a hard time. You didn't have a feeling that some people were making it and some were suffering. But at the same time, everybody had to compete with everybody for the scarce things that there were.
My fellow citizens, this broadcast tonight marks the beginning of the mobilization of the whole nation for a great undertaking to provide security for those of our citizens and their families who through no fault of their own face unemployment and privation during the coming winter.
In the shadow of the elevated, a nickel is still a piece of money, and everything can be bought from a 10-cent necktie to a 30-cent flop, which means a place to sleep. The very fact that the young men and women of today have nothing easy to look forward to is a good thing for them. Because the very thing that is a stumbling block to one man is a springboard to another.
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Chapter 3: What were the key experiences shared by individuals during the Great Depression?
It's not a very fast way of getting rich. We celebrated Christmas in Oakland. It was on the main drag on New Year's Eve in Oakland that I got in another inevitable fight. It lasted nearly a block past a swell theater and ended up when a voice behind me said, beat it, the cops. I escaped down a side street and down an alley.
Dorothy Height was living in Harlem, New York at this time. She was a college student, and she knew she was lucky. She had food to eat, a roof over her head. So she wanted to find a way to do something to help where she could.
Well, there were all kinds of organizing efforts in the churches. One of the most significant ones, I think, was at the time that we realized that we were spending what little money we had and were getting nothing.
Chapter 4: Who were the four voices featured in the Great Depression stories?
And Adam Powell came into the picture. And he organized a people's committee. And what he called for was that we learn to spend no money where we could not work. And he taught us that no matter how little you had, your power was in what you did with it. And that, to me, was an indelible lesson.
Dorothy had also seen the Depression destroy her hometown. But it was in Harlem that she saw how resilient people could be in the face of utter desperation.
When Adam Powell called this group together, he said to us, you can take your own condition in your own hands. And that was the time that he started the movement to get jobs on 125th Street. In June 1933, Washington became the spawning ground for what was perhaps the most startling egg ever hatched by Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, the National Recovery Act.
Aim of the NRA was government control of major American industries through codes of fair dealing. Roosevelt come out and he created the word NRA. Gave work to people, a lot of guys. But later on, it got so sour. Like, they got jobs. For instance, I went in on one of them. A railroad job inside Elko. They paid $72, I think. And they gave you jobs like that so you can make a living.
And I worked there a few months. It was awfully hot. Hot like everything. In fact, you could see the blaze in the afternoon. When the sun shines so blazing, you can actually see the atmosphere of it. Just the blaze moving around hotly. And people come back working in the railroad. They come back for dinner.
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Chapter 5: What challenges did Maridel face while documenting the Great Depression?
They practically stink because their clothing been in the sunlight so damn long. And that's the way it is. In the working out of a great national program that seeks the primary good of the greater number, It is true that the tolls of some people are being stepped on and are going to be stepped on.
But these tolls belong to the comparative few who seek to retain or to gain position or riches or both by some shortcut that is harmful to the greater good. I lived out there. You don't go nowhere. It's right out in the middle of the desert, see? That's the way it is. I did almost any kind of work. But nevertheless, at that time, I was nothing but a helper, a waiter, dishwasher, and all that.
See, they're always trying to push you down to these jobs, no matter how much or how good you are. Like that NRA was like all the other things. At first, you don't realize, but nevertheless, in due time and in the long run, you find out it will never have any advantage toward the Chinese.
I met a fellow on the corner of Wall Street who, from casual observance, would have been taken for an office worker or a dapper salesman with his Panama hat, his nice suit, and his sports shoes. After I introduced myself, he said he wasn't having much luck.
I've been bumming them right and left since the morning rush, and I've only made $2.90.
I thought that seemed like a good day's work at 50 cents an hour.
Trouble with me is that they know me too well, and when they see me coming, they cross the street. It does give me pleasure, though, to bump some of those big financiers, but it seems to break their heart to jar loose a dime.
It is appalling to think that these women, sitting so listless in the room, may work as hard as it is possible for a human being to work, may labor night and day, wash streetcars from midnight to dawn, and offices in the early evening, scrubbing for 14 and 15 hours a day, sleeping only five hours or so.
doing this their whole lives, and never earn one day of security, having always before them the pit of the future. The endless labor, the bending back, the water-soaked hands, earning never more than a week's wages, never having in their hands more life than that.
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Chapter 6: How did Dorothy's experiences in Harlem shape her perspective on the Great Depression?
Venezuela's Machado walking a tightrope as she fights to return home. This week on NPR's Newsmakers, listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts.