Unemployment, hunger and food shortages affected millions during the Great Depression

Between the autumn of 1931 and the following spring, the casualty lists of the Great Depression grew like those of the First World War. More that 10 million people were unemployed but only a quarter of them were receiving any relief from the government or charitable organizations. Approximately 30 million Americans were without any income at all.

Two million vagrants, many of them minors, roamed the country looking for work. 20% percent of the nation’s school children were malnourished and underweight. In the poorest communities - among the share croppers of Alabama or the coal miners of Pennsylvania, Kentucky and West Virginia, over 90 per cent were affected.

For those in work average wages fell from 1929 levels by a fifth, to $22.64, thought in Tennessee mills and New York sweatshops women were paid anything from $2.39 to $0.50 a week. Half a million Americans moved from the city to rural areas to try and make a subsistence living off the land.

During the 1930’s, for the first time in the Republic’s history, more people left the USA than arrived (although) this was partially affected by Hoover’s immigration laws). Between 1929 and 1932 the birth rate fell from 18.8 to 17.4 per 1000 and the suicide rate rose from 14 to 17.4 per 100,000.

Prices fell so low that food production was affected. In Montana thousands of acres of wheat went uncut because they would not pay for the price of harvesting - 16 bushels would earn enough to buy a 4 dollar pair of shoes. In Iowa a bushel of corn was worth less than a packet of chewing gum. Apple and peaches rotted in the orchards of Oregon and California, just as cotton did in the fields of Texas and Oklahoma.

Western ranchers killed their cattle and sheep because they could not pay to feed them.

Yet their was hunger amid abundance. Bread lines stretched under choking grain elevators. Malnutrition and associated diseases like rickets and pellagra were commonplace. President Hoover insisted that

“Nobody is actually starving”

However, Congressman George Huddleston claimed that the numbers ran into the thousands:

” I do not mean to say that they are sitting down and not getting a bite of food until they actually die, but they are living such a scrambling, precarious existence, with suffering from lack of clothing, fuel, and nourishment, until they are subject to be swept away at any time, and many are now being swept away”

Half of Chicago’s working population of 1.6 million were idle and many city employees went unpaid for long periods, including teachers.