I’ve always wondered why there’s been no serious academic investigation of this. I think about the Grapes of Wrath, one of the most famous works of Americana, which vividly describes the hunger and the violence of the Dust Bowl and yet I’m supposed to believe nobody starved to death? No malnourished children died? People didn’t get in fights and die over resources? Apparently the Great Depression sucked but besides the banker that jumped off the fifth floor nobody died.
Even aside from academia, there isn’t much serious art about it either. Depression hobos are just taken as this whimsical character Ala O Brother Where Art Thou etc. Even media at the time leaned that way.
I guess I’ve reas autobiographies of people living through the time. Malcolm X’s childhood as a black kid in a rural place still rang the same even if it was technically after by less than a decade, it wasn’t ended overnight and certainly not if you were black. I think a big thing as well is that a lot of people who would have been of the age and in the places materially to write about the horrors of the depression, they either got killed in ww2 or those horrors kinda took over.
I don’t know if this is historically what happened, but it seems like Jack Kerouac contributed a lot to the whimsical way we see hobos. Maybe Harry Partch, too.
You need to go look again. There’s vast amounts of art from the Great Depression and New Deal period. Maybe write to some large libraries and ask the librarians for help. I’m fairly certain that just the Civilian Conservation Corps hired artists to go out with other workers and paint and take photographs of the wilder parts of America. There were a bunch of programs to financially support culture and the arts in that period, too.
There were also huge ‘community hall’ infrastructure projects, most of which were pulled down in privatization and redevelopment schemes in the 70’s and 80’s.
Fun fact, those ‘community centers’ that 80’s movies are always trying to protect are mostly 1930’s CCC projects, left to rot by age and defunding.
Believe me I want to go back in time and kill Reagan as much as anyone else but we’re having trouble sourcing elemental Oganesson for the time machine.
Well, it was more than just Reagan that caused it. Much like Trump was a symptom, not a cause, so was Reagan. Capitalists were consolidating control against labor and prohibiting the government from being able to directly compete against firms when they are monopolizing labor was a huge incentive for them to neuter those policies. It was an inevitability that only a general labor strike could have prevented, but the agreements made in the New Deal prevented that from happening.
Some people idolize FDR, but his assuaging and incorporation of the unions into the capitalist system was likely the biggest blow to their potential political capacity and long term viability for true social change. He was a screwd, smart bastard.
Nah, Reagan was secretly Balam, Duke of Hell, in command of forty legions of demons. When we get the time machine up and running I’m going to pop back to 1959, blast him with some buckshot made from melted down altar bowls, and that should fix everything.
omg we had a big lesson on pelagra in eighth grade that we all freaked out about! We also talked about protein deficiencies if your only source of protein is rabbits.
During famines people flood in to cities. There were vast numbers of unemployed people in American cities at the time. There wasn’t massive mortality because there wasn’t the same kind of massive loss of agricultural production that you saw in, for instance, the 1932 Ukraine famine. The Soviets were trying to bootstrap the USSR’s agriculture from medieval to modern, dealing with serious resistance from Kulaks and serious administrative and logistical problems, and then got hit with a drought that affected agricultural production across almost the entire USSR at that time.
In the USA, on the other hand, agriculture was already employing modern technology, there wasn’t an equivalent to the fight with the kulaks, and the US’s vast agricultural regions and the localized nature of the dust bowl droughts relative to all agricultural land mean that the loss of agricultural production had a less severe impact.
Roosevelt took power in 1933 and stayed in power until 1945 and that era is the closest the US has ever been to a centrally planned economy. The federal government undertook massive programs to employ people, distribute food and other relief, subsidize farms and industry, and so forth.
There wasn’t the kind of mass death you saw in European countries because the situation, the material circumstances if you will, were drastically different in the USA.
The various New Deal programs kept reams and reams of records, you can probably look them all up if you call around to a few big city libraries and start asking questions.
I read up on it in a German encyclopedia and it was claimed that less than 10 people were confirmed dying due to the Great Depression. Which obviously is a bit odd.
10s of thousands likely died from starvation, and millions within a decade from neglect, medical issues, etc. But as mentioned comparatively few actually completely starved rather than died from contracting consumption or dysentery in a refugee camp.
The SU had less technology, fewer food reserves, no infrastructure to get grain to areas, and of course it started disasterously late because it thought it was a hoarding issue. But it did technically have the food to solve the crisis, it was a matter of getting it there fast enough in an Eastern European season that was devastating to both agriculture and roads.
Finally, there was the fact that in the US famine people moved from the relatively undeveloped area of Kansas to the developed hubs of California, which could cope with the influx.
Attempts by starving people to flee Ukraine to other areas hit the issue that aside from Moscow and St Petersburg, everywhere in Russia was less developed, and many areas were marginal in food production. The Soviets decided to block migration out of the famine regions to prevent a cascade failure of food resources, but were unable to get food in to the areas fast enough.
I’ve always wondered why there’s been no serious academic investigation of this. I think about the Grapes of Wrath, one of the most famous works of Americana, which vividly describes the hunger and the violence of the Dust Bowl and yet I’m supposed to believe nobody starved to death? No malnourished children died? People didn’t get in fights and die over resources? Apparently the Great Depression sucked but besides the banker that jumped off the fifth floor nobody died.
Even aside from academia, there isn’t much serious art about it either. Depression hobos are just taken as this whimsical character Ala O Brother Where Art Thou etc. Even media at the time leaned that way.
Okay, you gave me my next Historical Special Interest. I
I guess I’ve reas autobiographies of people living through the time. Malcolm X’s childhood as a black kid in a rural place still rang the same even if it was technically after by less than a decade, it wasn’t ended overnight and certainly not if you were black. I think a big thing as well is that a lot of people who would have been of the age and in the places materially to write about the horrors of the depression, they either got killed in ww2 or those horrors kinda took over.
I don’t know if this is historically what happened, but it seems like Jack Kerouac contributed a lot to the whimsical way we see hobos. Maybe Harry Partch, too.
You need to go look again. There’s vast amounts of art from the Great Depression and New Deal period. Maybe write to some large libraries and ask the librarians for help. I’m fairly certain that just the Civilian Conservation Corps hired artists to go out with other workers and paint and take photographs of the wilder parts of America. There were a bunch of programs to financially support culture and the arts in that period, too.
There were also huge ‘community hall’ infrastructure projects, most of which were pulled down in privatization and redevelopment schemes in the 70’s and 80’s.
Fun fact, those ‘community centers’ that 80’s movies are always trying to protect are mostly 1930’s CCC projects, left to rot by age and defunding.
Word. The US did have some real social welfare and social infrastructure before the Reaganites took power and started austerity.
In a sane society, they would have been pulled down and reconstructed, but we have to have our malls and gated communities.
Believe me I want to go back in time and kill Reagan as much as anyone else but we’re having trouble sourcing elemental Oganesson for the time machine.
Well, it was more than just Reagan that caused it. Much like Trump was a symptom, not a cause, so was Reagan. Capitalists were consolidating control against labor and prohibiting the government from being able to directly compete against firms when they are monopolizing labor was a huge incentive for them to neuter those policies. It was an inevitability that only a general labor strike could have prevented, but the agreements made in the New Deal prevented that from happening.
Some people idolize FDR, but his assuaging and incorporation of the unions into the capitalist system was likely the biggest blow to their potential political capacity and long term viability for true social change. He was a screwd, smart bastard.
Nah, Reagan was secretly Balam, Duke of Hell, in command of forty legions of demons. When we get the time machine up and running I’m going to pop back to 1959, blast him with some buckshot made from melted down altar bowls, and that should fix everything.
Uh… kill kill kill blood shoot stab
deleted by creator
omg we had a big lesson on pelagra in eighth grade that we all freaked out about! We also talked about protein deficiencies if your only source of protein is rabbits.
During famines people flood in to cities. There were vast numbers of unemployed people in American cities at the time. There wasn’t massive mortality because there wasn’t the same kind of massive loss of agricultural production that you saw in, for instance, the 1932 Ukraine famine. The Soviets were trying to bootstrap the USSR’s agriculture from medieval to modern, dealing with serious resistance from Kulaks and serious administrative and logistical problems, and then got hit with a drought that affected agricultural production across almost the entire USSR at that time.
In the USA, on the other hand, agriculture was already employing modern technology, there wasn’t an equivalent to the fight with the kulaks, and the US’s vast agricultural regions and the localized nature of the dust bowl droughts relative to all agricultural land mean that the loss of agricultural production had a less severe impact.
Roosevelt took power in 1933 and stayed in power until 1945 and that era is the closest the US has ever been to a centrally planned economy. The federal government undertook massive programs to employ people, distribute food and other relief, subsidize farms and industry, and so forth.
There wasn’t the kind of mass death you saw in European countries because the situation, the material circumstances if you will, were drastically different in the USA.
The various New Deal programs kept reams and reams of records, you can probably look them all up if you call around to a few big city libraries and start asking questions.
I read up on it in a German encyclopedia and it was claimed that less than 10 people were confirmed dying due to the Great Depression. Which obviously is a bit odd.
If you don’t record the data, can’t have bad news.
10s of thousands likely died from starvation, and millions within a decade from neglect, medical issues, etc. But as mentioned comparatively few actually completely starved rather than died from contracting consumption or dysentery in a refugee camp.
The SU had less technology, fewer food reserves, no infrastructure to get grain to areas, and of course it started disasterously late because it thought it was a hoarding issue. But it did technically have the food to solve the crisis, it was a matter of getting it there fast enough in an Eastern European season that was devastating to both agriculture and roads.
Finally, there was the fact that in the US famine people moved from the relatively undeveloped area of Kansas to the developed hubs of California, which could cope with the influx.
Attempts by starving people to flee Ukraine to other areas hit the issue that aside from Moscow and St Petersburg, everywhere in Russia was less developed, and many areas were marginal in food production. The Soviets decided to block migration out of the famine regions to prevent a cascade failure of food resources, but were unable to get food in to the areas fast enough.
Nobody important died. Every suit out the window a tragedy.