News at Home

Remembering Past Hard Times

by by TH McGraw

T H McGraw was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1939 and is now retired in suburban Philadelphia. After military service he attended Temple University in the 1960’s and has written for Astronomy Magazine. He has traveled extensively in the U.S. and over a dozen foreign countries including China’s "New Territories" in the 1960’s.

You don’t have to take a shower every day. Good news? Your great-grandparents might have given a baffled look at any such declaration. Just whom, they might have asked, would want cold water poured on them in winter? Showers, hot showers with clean water were before modern times mostly reserved for royalty. Plenty of servants to draw and heat water, or time away from requisite peasant drudgery were needed. As late as the twentieth century, even in urban America a warm shower was not universally available. Bath water had to be drawn laboriously and heated to fill a large wash-tub, often in the middle of the kitchen floor. Then, with appropriate Victorian modesty, a familiar weekly ritual could begin. Generally speaking there was a strict “pecking order” to the bath. Customarily, the eldest bread-winner went first, followed by sons or working men, then women by age to the younger children who may have been less aware of the significance of water coloration.

By the early twentieth century, some of the rigors of getting gallons of water hot for a Saturday bath were lessened in homes with running water, either from city lines or attic tanks. Early coal-fired water heaters came into wider use. Sadly, many lacked reliable safety-valves and would occasionally blow like errant rockets through the roofs of unfortunate homeowners.

Other bath accoutrements we may take for granted are flush toilets and even toilet paper. Toilet paper first appeared in the last century with such rarity that some used it as writing paper, another scarce commodity. Prior to toilet paper, corn cobs were often allowed to soften in water to ready them for the required task.

So. To what remote history do we relegate these perhaps amusing accounts, and where do we lead with all this? The writer can even recall anecdotal recountings of them and not that very long ago. Rapid has been the reversal of hardships on the path to modernity. Common food poisoning, consumption (tuberculosis), slow death by any of dozens of now treatable diseases, malnutrition - today maybe summed-up with an insouciant shrug. We have, in developed countries, woven a tapestry of intricate, safe and comfortable systems into our continuum.

Could it even be conceivable that the assurance of employment might somehow slip from our inherent assumptions? Or that ongoing access to survival resources could well, no longer be taken for granted? Certainly, any but third world governments have in place assistance programs. Albeit short-termed. There has always been something for the job seeker though sometimes not highly compensated. Is it imaginable that our collective thirst for goods and services might ever rapidly diminish? Unexpectedly and drastically? That there might be no jobs even for those who are willing to endure harsh working conditions. Would many simply have to work at food production or the like? We will always need to eat.

In the 1820’s almost 80 percent of American workers were employed in farming or ancillary occupations. Naturally during the industrial revolution that percentage decreased. By 1930, only about 21 percent worked at producing food in America. In 1959, about 10 percent. 2008 saw less than 4 percent working at farming. The other 96 percent of our population, less some 6 percent unemployed, has enjoyed the assurance that at least tomorrow they would go to work or welfare and bring home some sort of resources to sustain life.

Most have seen the grainy black-and-white documentaries of displaced farm workers in the early 1930’s. Or perhaps viewed the piles of rotting fruit or vegetables held from market in protest over deflationary prices - payment that failed even to cover production costs. Movie shorts too, showed dairy farmers dumping milk by truckloads. One principal motive of the much maligned Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act in 1930 was to prevent foreign agricultural over-production from undercutting American farm prices. Farming, especially today’s giant corporate farms, doesn’t look like an especially hopeful employer in modern hard times.

Social programs or not, our great grandparents in the 1930’s seemed to have had a much less sanguine attitude about survival. Employed or not, most had some savings. Too, most rural and even suburban families had a garden and livestock – some chickens, fowl or a pig which could be butchered in winter to help sustain the family. They got by, obviously. Aside from an increase in the homicide and suicide rate between 1929 and 1933 of approximately 25 percent, the populace behaved in a rather stoic manner; some pulling toward spiritual values, others even blaming themselves for their misfortunes. Stories of the Depression years would make for a disquieting exposition.

Someone from “the thirties” seeing today’s consumerism might initially express surprise, maybe admiration. After seeing its magnitude they might tactfully inquire as to the means for all the affluence. Few of them would easily be aware of the associated dissipation of personal savings, reckless destruction of resources and environmental ravages. That seems to evade even modern comprehension as consumerism is suggested by most as the proper nostrum for current economic problems - using credit if need be. Not that people of the Depression years were unfamiliar with credit buying. We can find Woody Guthrie’s “Dollar Down and a Dollar a Week” in the pop-song offerings today. Generalizing from our readings, those in the “hard years” seemed a good deal more circumspect, less entitled, and indeed adept at material self-denial.

The brief nature of our article precludes reflection upon the 1930’s Weimar Republic or today’s Zimbabwe unlikely even in a hyper-inflated America. The bravest and brightest find a way - overconfidence notwithstanding. Yet, confidence may be that changeful key element needed to emerge from anything like a financial collapse. Moreover, spiritual faith.

In a younger day needing a job, I applied for work at a local fire and burglar alarm company. The owner seemed interested enough to launch his standard sales discourse in his office. Drawing attention to several black framed photographs of chalk body-outlines and burned-out homes - obviously not his customers - he said something I could never really quite forget.
“All these people…”, he began, “had one thing in common.” Then, after a practiced pause, went on, “They all thought…that it couldn’t happen to them.”