For many people in the 1930’s living conditions were not as adequate as they needed to be. The stock market had just crashed in 1928, and the US was in the midst of the Great Depression. Many people suffered from lack of money, and many others suffered from lack of food. One group of people who suffered greatly during this time period were the southern share croppers. Factors that caused the substandard living conditions of the southern share croppers in the 1930’s include lack of education, poor health care, and inadequate living facilities. The first factor that caused the substandard living conditions of the southern share croppers was their lack of education. There were several reasons the share croppers didn’t get the education they needed. One main reason was because many children didn’t go to school. Harold Walker writes that Southern cotton states ranked lower in rate of attendance for each student enrolled than any of the other states in the nation (4). A factor that contributed to this was their excessive mobility, which inhibited many children from going to school (Corder 27). It is common knowledge that any child who constantly moves around will not be able to attend school on a regular basis, and even if they go to a school when they get a chance they will be so far behind they would have a difficult time catching up. Another factor that impeded on a child’s attendance at school was the fact that they never went to school when there was cotton to be picked (Walker 8). This may not seem like a large task, but some times it could take weeks to pick all the cotton. These few weeks that a child spent picking cotton was valuable learning time, and missing it could put a child too far behind to catch up. Another reason share croppers didn’t get the education they needed was because many southern rural schools had short terms (Gentry 21). Because of this teachers would not be able to cover all of the material that they needed to cover, or they would have to rush through the material they did cover. A final reason the education of the southern cotton states was not as good as other states was because their teachers were not as good. This was reflected in the fact that the salaries of Southern teachers were not as high as the salaries of other teachers (Mckeon 98).
Farming was the major growing production in the United States in the 1930's. Panhandle farming attached many people because it attracted many people searching for work. The best crop that was prospering around the country was wheat. The world needed it and the United States could supply it easily because of rich mineral soil. In the beginning of the 1930's it was dry but most farmers made a wheat crop. In 1931 everyone started farming wheat. The wheat crop forced the price down from sixty-eight cents/ bushels in July 1930 to twenty-five cents/ bushels July 1931. Many farmers went broke and others abandoned their fields. As the storms approached the farmers were getting ready. Farmers increased their milking cowherds. The cream from the cows was sold to make milk and the skim milk was fed to the chickens and pigs. When normal feed crops failed, thistles were harvested, and when thistles failed, hardy souls dug up soap weed, which was chopped in a feed mill or by hand and fed to the stock. This was a backbreaking, disheartening chore, which would have broken weaker people. But to the credit of the residents of the Dust Bowl, they shouldered their task and carried on. The people of the region made it because they knew how to take the everyday practical things, which had been used for years and adapt them to meet the crisis.
(Worster 105). The droughts caused many unfavorable conditions throughout the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles and neighboring sections of Kansas, Colorado, and New Mexico. Thus, roughly one-third of Texas and Oklahoman farmers left their homes and headed to California in search of migrant work. The droughts during the 1930s are a drastically misrepresented factor in the Dust Bowl considering “the 1930s droughts were, in the words of a Weather Bureau scientist, the worst in the climatological history of the country.” (Worster 232)
After the devastation left from the Civil War, many field owners looked for new ways to replace their former slaves with field hands for farming and production use. From this need for new field hands came sharecroppers, a “response to the destitution and disorganized” agricultural results of the Civil War (Wilson 29). Sharecropping is the working of a piece of land by a tenant in exchange for a portion of the crops that they bring in for their landowners. These farmhands provided their labor, while the landowners provided living accommodations for the worker and his family, along with tools, seeds, fertilizers, and a portion of the crops that they had harvested that season. A sharecropper had “no entitlement to the land that he cultivated,” and was forced “to work under any conditions” that his landowner enforced (Wilson 798). Many landowners viewed sharecropping as a way to elude the now barred possession of slaves while still maintaining field hands for labor in an inexpensive and ample manner. The landowners watched over the sharecroppers and their every move diligently, with harsh supervision, and pressed the sharecroppers to their limits, both mentally and physically. Not only were the sharecroppers just given an average of one-fourth of their harvest, they had “one of the most inadequate incomes in the United States, rarely surpassing more than a few hundred dollars” annually (Wilson 30). Under such trying conditions, it is not hard to see why the sharecroppers struggled to maintain a healthy and happy life, if that could even be achieved. Due to substandard conditions concerning sharecropper’s clothing, insufficient food supplies, and hazardous health issues, sharecroppers competed on the daily basis to stay alive on what little their landowners had to offer them.
The period between 1880 and 1900 was a boom time for American Politics. The country was finally free of the threat of war, and many of its citizens were living comfortably. However, as these two decades went by, the American farmer found it harder and harder to live comfortably. Crops such as cotton and wheat, once the sustenance of the agriculture industry, were selling at prices so low that it was nearly impossible for farmers to make a profit off them. Furthermore, improvement in transportation allowed foreign competition to materialize, making it harder for American farmers to dispose of surplus crop. Mother Nature was also showing no mercy with grasshoppers, floods, and major droughts that led to a downward spiral of business that devastated many of the nation’s farmers. As a result of the agricultural depression, numerous farms groups, most notably the Populist Party, arose to fight what the farmers saw as the reasons for the decline in agriculture. During the final twenty years of the nineteenth century, many farmers in the United States saw monopolies and trusts, railroads, and money shortages and the loss in value of silver as threats to their way of life, all of which could be recognized as valid complaints.
The twenties brought a great shift for framing, overreaching during the war causing severe economic circumstances for farmers. The war was the first time in American history that many farmers were not growing for subsistence, but instead they were growing on a production scale for the war. Since the first humans began to rely on agriculture 10,000 years ago, farming has always been used as a form of subsistence, growing what a family needed to survive, and selling any extra you managed to grow. Humans require a variety of foods and cannot only live on a single crop. This meant the c...
One of the major impacts that the Great Depression had on many families was salary income. The economic collapse of the 1930’s was overwhelming in the way that it was affecting the citizens. “Unemployment jumped from less than 3 million in 1929 to 4 million in 1930, 8 million in 1931, and 12.5 million in 1932.” In just one year, a quarter of the nation’s families did not have any salaries entering their household, and during the first three years, an average of 100,000 workers was fired each week. When it became too difficult for the men to find work it became more popular for women and children to enter the work force. The women began to find it easier to find jobs working ask: clerks, maids, and other simple jobs to bring some sort of income into their home. There was a huge decline of food prices, but many families did without things like milk and meat and unless they could grow their food they would not buy it. In order to save the little money that they had many families started ignoring medical care, began growing and producing their own food, canning the food that they grew, and buying used bread. Although the women were able to bring a small amount of money home with them, something was better than nothing in this case. The average family income had tumbled to 40 percent, from $2,3...
One form of punishment, a master would use often would be to threaten to sale a slave to get them submissive. When he could not break them or to make an example for the other slaves, he would sale them. Enslaved people knew if the master died as well as if the master was under financial stress, they could be sold. Profit was another reason slaves were auctioned. $1000 to $2000 could be attained for a health male slave before the start of the Civil War. Female slaves that were health usually went for a couple hundred dollars less than the male slaves did.
The 1930s was a bad time for public schooling, because with the Great Depression occurring at the same time, most kids could not afford the necessary clothes, shoes, textbooks, or supplies (American Cultural History). For example in To Kill a Mockingbird, Walter Cunningham’s family was so poor they had to pay with goods rather than actual money and because of that I bet they did not have proper school supplies. In today’s society, the school systems make sure kids can get what they need, through fee waivers or charities giving out supplies. Another example of the hard times i...
The Great Depression brought a whole new wave of poverty in the 1930’s for the average African – American. The white population was subjected
In American society today, childhood is considered a time for learning, exploration, and a chance for a child to make his or her mark on the world. Leading up to the Great Depression, however, childhood for working class children was seen in a different light. Working class children felt pressure to provide for their family, which inhibited them from getting an education and branching out on their own, while middle class children had a greater prospect for education because of the difference in wealth. The Great Depression brought hard times for all Americans and expanded the working class while shrinking the middle class. Because the working class children held close ties and responsibilities to their families and faced more poverty than the middle class, they had a lesser chance to move out of the working class as they had a commitment to work to support their families, or children without families had to support themselves, and had dimmer opportunities for education.
Another example of their poverty is when the family goes to the slumps to pick up a plow that Mr. Slump had borrowed. The author explains that the Slumps just left their tools where they unhitched but, the little girl’s family had a shed where they put the machinery when it was not being used. Obviously the Slumps are not as openhanded as the little girl’s family, and are being treated as inferior because of this.
The Roaring Twenties approached and the citizens in Colorado were facing rough times. In 1920, many people such as farm owners, manufacturers, and even miners were having a hard time making a living due to an economic downfall. The farmers especially, where facing the toughest of times. The price of various farm-grown goods like wheat, sugar beets, and even cattle was dropping because their goods were no longer needed by the public. Wheat had dropped in price from $2.02 in 1918 to $0.76 by the time 1921 came around. Sadly, the land that they were using to grow wheat became dry and many farmers had to learn to grow through “dryland farming” which became very popular in the eastern plains from 1910 to 1930 (Hard Times: 1920 - 1940). Apple trees began to die due to the lack of desire for apples, poor land, and decreased prices. Over the course of World War I, the prices of farm goods began to increase slowly. Farmers were not the only one facing this economic hardship while others in big cities were enjoying the Roaring Twenties.
Sadly, the children had no choice but to work for very little pay. Their mothers and fathers made so little money in the factory system that they couldn’t afford to let their children enjoy their childhood: “Other working children were indentured—their parents sold their labor to the mill owner for a period of years. Others lived with their families and worked for wages as adults did, for long hours and under hard conditions” (Cleland). The child had no other choice, but to work for these big businesses.
The story is told through the eyes of seven year old Luke Chandler. Luke lives with his parents and grandparents on their rented farmland in the lowlands of Arkansas. It takes place during the harvest season for cotton in 1952. Like other cotton growers, these were hard times for the Chandlers. Their simple lives reached their zenith each year with the task of picking cotton. It’s more than any family can complete by themselves. In order to harvest the crops and get paid, the Chandlers must find cotton pickers to help get the crops to the cotton gin. In order to persevere, they must depend on others. They find two sets of migrant farm workers to assist them with their efforts: the Mexicans, and the Spruills - a family from the Arkansas hills that pick cotton for others each year. In reading the book, the reader learns quickly that l...
rural lifestyle and moving to cities where they could find work, but lived substandard lives.