A Woman Who Defined the Great Depression | Hacker News Reader

A Woman Who Defined the Great Depression

newrepublic.com

50 pointssamclemens16 comments

A similar story is told by Florence Deeks regarding H.G. Wells' _Outline of History_ --- one wonders how many more instances of this sort of thing need to be brought to light.

It is unfortunate that every family hasn't preserved what the Great Depression was like in their oral history, but I'm glad to see that the specifics of this are being shared.

For my father's family, my grandfather drove the year's tobacco crop in to Richmond to sell, but what it sold for wouldn't even buy gas for the return trip, so he sold the truck and walked home.

A co-worker's family has preserved a _wonderful_ tradition rooted in the Great Depression --- each Christmas present is described by a riddle (of course, this was begun so as to afford a modicum of pleasure to gifting something practical such as a pack of razor blades), and when it is time to open gifts the entire family gathers in a circle, the recipient reads the riddle, and everyone takes a turn at guessing, and only after _everyone_ has chimed in is the gift finally opened. Opening gifts is an all-day affair.

Unfortunately, the original riddles, or even more recent ones have not been preserved --- I told him he should write his family tradition up in a book.

I think the lack of stories is somewhat related to how people will sometimes unfairly take bad things that happen to them as a personal failure, and how just brutal the depression can be ... so that they do not want to pass it on / relive it.

My grandparents told me that a lot of adults they knew at that time were never the same after the Great Depression. Many of those folks built lives, businesses, careers to be proud of ... and many were wiped out entirely.

The failure of farms, businesses, livelihoods took such a brutal toll, and I think some took the idea that they were responsible for failing to provide / etc so hard that it impacted them the rest of their lives.

Sharing it may not have been something they wanted to do.

I feel like my grandpa was a hoarder because of what he went through during the great depression as a kid.

The field of psychology has gone back and forth on that, but the bottom line is it's a socio-economic divide:

>Only the rich can afford to have nothing, because if they want something, they will just buy it.

but for folks on the other side of that divide, as my father often said:

>Better to have it and not need it, than need it and not have it.

and the calculus of kept object vs. potential storage space is far different.

My parents bought a house from a woman that survived the Depression and they found decades worth of stored food under the house. Grains, sugar, fruit preserves - pretty much anything that could be saved was. They bought the house a decade ago and still haven’t gone through everything.

I feel it’s a rather common response from the trauma of the Great Depression.

Man, that's genius, to create anticipation and shared joy over each present.

Not saving them is a dag nabbed tragedy.

Are the riddles hints as to what's in the package, or random or? Would love to hear some of them.

Hints as to what is in the package.

The only one which was related to me was:

Q: What was Colin Powell before he was promoted to General?

and the gift was black maize popcorn:

A: A black kernel (colonel)

I knew a man who grew up in the depression. One thing he said that stuck with me was that they had one pair of shoes...and they were for winter only.

That was actually pretty common in earlier times --- a notable line from a biography of Abraham Lincoln where it was related that poor folks would carry shoes to church and only put them on after arriving at the church grounds:

>Who wears out good shoe leather on walking?

Sometimes you really come across a scenario that expresses how unfathomably deep the tradition of sexism goes. The idea that Steinbeck would rather thank the man who literally just asked for the research papers for him, rather than the woman who literally wrote them is one of those scenarios. The fact that that was a totally unremarkable and natural thought process to go down is just so wild.

It's also unclear if she even agreed to share her notes. This article says she did, but other sources (https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/the-dust-bowl/sanora-babb) say her boss just gave her notes to Steinbeck without telling her.

It suggests to me that women were so low in status as to be effectively invisible in plain sight.

People still do this to me (a woman) in the workplace now, like a lot.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com