Maybe you better try telling that to them...
My grandfather...who lived to be a hundred...commented once on the early 1930s, Alabama and the depression. As he said...it came and went...and no one locally noticed much of anything. Those in rural America and on farms...just kept growing and selling. They all found jobs to bring in money and no one starved to death. The few who did leave the area...all went to California...and three decades later...they were all enormously rich.
I suspect that we all have some magic feeling over the word “depression” and think of it as the pit. The only ones who truly suffered out of this period...were wealthy millionaires who gambled big and lost big.
I just can't let this nonsense go unchallenged.
The Great Depression caused enormous suffering throughout America.
Many people had no work and no money. That translated into no food. This was not just among the wealthy or in small pockets of the country. There were soup lines and many able-bodied men "rode the rails" looking for work somewhere.. anywhere.
My own grandmother in rural West Virginia would often see strangers show up offering to do any kind of chores for food because they were hungry.
Many farmers lost everything because they couldn't raise the money to continue paying even their small mortgages.
The Great Depression was a terrible time for millions of Americans.
My 81-year-old father-in-law said he remembers you could buy a bottle of soda pop for a nickel but NOBODY HAD A NICKEL.
America suffered more than 30% unemployment and the political upheaval was tremendous. The psychological devastation and feeling of despair and helplessness of that period affected everyone who experienced it for the rest of their lives.
We cannot face the truth about the future when denying the truth about the past.
Just because one Alabama farmer's recollection of the Great Depression was not painful does not mean the rest of the country did not suffer horribly.