people accepted the proposition that ‘God intended the American middle class to be rich.’ ”
In Florida, land speculation was rampant in the mid-1920s, and buyers, attracted by the state’s weather and potential as a winter haven, swarmed in; nine in ten never planned to occupy their property.The real-estate mania may have been most intense in Florida, but it was hardly unique to the state. “It was our fault,” said one mid-western real-estate agent at the time, “for overselling [houses], and the banks’ fault for overlending.” In the go-go years of the 1920s, “everybody was buying a better home than he could afford.” Stories of homeowners who’d seen their house appreciate “tenfold in value over the past ten years” had fed a frenzy.
Many factors caused the Depression—too much leverage in the equity market; too much inventory in U.S. factories; Germany’s difficulty paying back war debt, and the cascade of problems that caused for the international financial system. Weak government response in the immediate wake of the crash—a failure to aggressively loosen either monetary or fiscal policy—contributed mightily to the catastrophe. And premature fiscal tightening in 1937 extended it.
But the Depression was also the result of a debt-and-consumption binge, and it unfolded, in part, as a real-estate crisis.Residentialconstruction imploded in the 1930s, and foreclosures multiplied manyfold. By 1933, local newspapers were filled with ads for distressed-property sales. To ward off foreclosure, families began “doubling up,” renting out rooms or portions of the house to lodgers. Many houses, vacant or inhabited by residents who could barely put food on the table, slowly fell into disorder and disrepair.
T HE ECONOMIC CONDITIONS of the 1930s deeply influenced every facet of life. Skirts famously lengthened, and many boys, fearful of the consequences of an unintended pregnancy, came to regard girls as “booby traps.” Marriage rates dropped sharply, but so did divorces; divorce was expensive, and government relief was easier to come by for families than for individuals.
In her classic sociology of the Depression,
The Unemployed Man and His Family
, Mirra Komarovsky vividly describes how joblessness strained—and in many cases fundamentally altered—family relationships in the 1930s. During 1935 and ’36, Komarovsky and her research team interviewed the members of fifty-nine white middle-class families in which the husband and father had been out of work for at least a year. Her research revealed deep psychological wounds. “It is awful to be old and discarded at 40,” said one father. “A man is not a man without work.” Another said plainly, “During the depression I lost something. Maybe you call it self-respect, but in losing it I also lost the respect of my children, and I am afraid I am losing my wife.” Noted one woman of her husband, “I still love him, but he doesn’t seem as ‘big’ a man.”
Taken together,the stories paint a picture of diminished men, bereft of familial authority. Household power—over children, spending, and daily decisions of all types—generally shifted to wives over time (and some women were happier overall as a result). Amid general anxiety and men’s loss of self-worth and loss of respect from their wives, sex lives withered. Socializing all but ceased as well, a casualty of poverty and embarrassment. Although some men embracedfamily life, most became distant. Children described their father as “mean,” “nasty,” or “bossy,” and didn’t want to bring friends around, for fear of what he might say. “There was less physical violence and aggression towards the wife than towards the child,” Komarovsky wrote.
Of course, even in the 1930s,most people kept their jobs, and the period’s impact on family life varied greatly. “Many families have drawn closer and ‘found’ themselves in the depression,” wrote the sociologists Robert
In Florida, land speculation was rampant in the mid-1920s, and buyers, attracted by the state’s weather and potential as a winter haven, swarmed in; nine in ten never planned to occupy their property.The real-estate mania may have been most intense in Florida, but it was hardly unique to the state. “It was our fault,” said one mid-western real-estate agent at the time, “for overselling [houses], and the banks’ fault for overlending.” In the go-go years of the 1920s, “everybody was buying a better home than he could afford.” Stories of homeowners who’d seen their house appreciate “tenfold in value over the past ten years” had fed a frenzy.
Many factors caused the Depression—too much leverage in the equity market; too much inventory in U.S. factories; Germany’s difficulty paying back war debt, and the cascade of problems that caused for the international financial system. Weak government response in the immediate wake of the crash—a failure to aggressively loosen either monetary or fiscal policy—contributed mightily to the catastrophe. And premature fiscal tightening in 1937 extended it.
But the Depression was also the result of a debt-and-consumption binge, and it unfolded, in part, as a real-estate crisis.Residentialconstruction imploded in the 1930s, and foreclosures multiplied manyfold. By 1933, local newspapers were filled with ads for distressed-property sales. To ward off foreclosure, families began “doubling up,” renting out rooms or portions of the house to lodgers. Many houses, vacant or inhabited by residents who could barely put food on the table, slowly fell into disorder and disrepair.
T HE ECONOMIC CONDITIONS of the 1930s deeply influenced every facet of life. Skirts famously lengthened, and many boys, fearful of the consequences of an unintended pregnancy, came to regard girls as “booby traps.” Marriage rates dropped sharply, but so did divorces; divorce was expensive, and government relief was easier to come by for families than for individuals.
In her classic sociology of the Depression,
The Unemployed Man and His Family
, Mirra Komarovsky vividly describes how joblessness strained—and in many cases fundamentally altered—family relationships in the 1930s. During 1935 and ’36, Komarovsky and her research team interviewed the members of fifty-nine white middle-class families in which the husband and father had been out of work for at least a year. Her research revealed deep psychological wounds. “It is awful to be old and discarded at 40,” said one father. “A man is not a man without work.” Another said plainly, “During the depression I lost something. Maybe you call it self-respect, but in losing it I also lost the respect of my children, and I am afraid I am losing my wife.” Noted one woman of her husband, “I still love him, but he doesn’t seem as ‘big’ a man.”
Taken together,the stories paint a picture of diminished men, bereft of familial authority. Household power—over children, spending, and daily decisions of all types—generally shifted to wives over time (and some women were happier overall as a result). Amid general anxiety and men’s loss of self-worth and loss of respect from their wives, sex lives withered. Socializing all but ceased as well, a casualty of poverty and embarrassment. Although some men embracedfamily life, most became distant. Children described their father as “mean,” “nasty,” or “bossy,” and didn’t want to bring friends around, for fear of what he might say. “There was less physical violence and aggression towards the wife than towards the child,” Komarovsky wrote.
Of course, even in the 1930s,most people kept their jobs, and the period’s impact on family life varied greatly. “Many families have drawn closer and ‘found’ themselves in the depression,” wrote the sociologists Robert
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