B
eral, Americans believed in traditional values and empha-
sized the importance of family unity. At a time when
money was tight, many families entertained themselves by
staying at home and playing board games, such as
Monopoly (invented in 1933), and listening to the radio.
Nevertheless, the economic difficulties of the Great
Depression put severe pressure on family life. Making ends
meet was a daily struggle, and, in some cases, families broke
apart under the strain.
MEN IN THE STREETS
Many men had difficulty coping
with unemployment because they were accustomed to
working and supporting their families. Every day, they
would set out to walk the streets in search of jobs. As
Frederick Lewis Allen noted in Since Yesterday, “Men who
have been sturdy and self-respecting workers can take
unemployment without flinching for a few weeks, a few
months, even if they have to see their families suffer; but it
is different after a year . . . two years . . . three years.” Some
men became so discouraged that they simply stopped try-
ing. Some even abandoned their families.
During the Great Depression, as many as 300,000 tran-
sients—or “hoboes” as they were called—wandered the
country, hitching rides on railroad boxcars and sleeping
under bridges. These hoboes of the 1930s, mainly men,
would occasionally turn up at homeless shelters in big
cities. The novelist Thomas Wolfe described a group of
these men in New York City.
A PERSONAL VOICE THOMAS WOLFE
“ These were the wanderers from town to town, the riders of freight trains, the
thumbers of rides on highways, the uprooted, unwanted male population of
America. They . . . gathered in the big cities when winter came, hungry, defeated,
empty, hopeless, restless . . . always on the move, looking everywhere for work,
for the bare crumbs to support their miserable lives, and finding neither work nor
crumbs.
”
—You Can’t Go Home Again
During the early years of the Great Depression, there was no federal system
of direct relief—cash payments or food provided by the government to the
poor. Some cities and charity services did offer relief to those who needed it, but
the benefits were meager. In New York City, for example, the weekly payment was
just $2.39 per family. This was the most generous relief offered by any city, but it
was still well below the amount needed to feed a family.
WOMEN STRUGGLE TO SURVIVE
Women worked hard to help their families
survive adversity during the Great Depression. Many women canned food and
sewed clothes. They also carefully managed household budgets. Jeane Westin, the
author of Making Do: How Women Survived the ’30s, recalled, “Those days you did
everything to save a penny. . . . My next door neighbor and I used to shop togeth-
er. You could get two pounds of hamburger for a quarter, so we’d buy two pounds
and split it—then one week she’d pay the extra penny and the next week I’d pay.”
Many women also worked outside the home, though they usually received less
money than men did. As the Depression wore on, however, working women became
the targets of enormous resentment. Many people believed that women, especially
married women, had no right to work when there were men who were unemployed.
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