[HN Gopher] A Woman Who Defined the Great Depression
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A Woman Who Defined the Great Depression
Author : samclemens
Score : 45 points
Date : 2024-11-14 05:59 UTC (5 days ago)
(HTM) web link (newrepublic.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (newrepublic.com)
| WillAdams wrote:
| A similar story is told by Florence Deeks regarding H.G. Wells'
| _Outline of History_ --- one wonders how many more instances of
| this sort of thing need to be brought to light.
|
| It is unfortunate that every family hasn't preserved what the
| Great Depression was like in their oral history, but I'm glad to
| see that the specifics of this are being shared.
|
| For my father's family, my grandfather drove the year's tobacco
| crop in to Richmond to sell, but what it sold for wouldn't even
| buy gas for the return trip, so he sold the truck and walked
| home.
|
| A co-worker's family has preserved a _wonderful_ tradition rooted
| in the Great Depression --- each Christmas present is described
| by a riddle (of course, this was begun so as to afford a modicum
| of pleasure to gifting something practical such as a pack of
| razor blades), and when it is time to open gifts the entire
| family gathers in a circle, the recipient reads the riddle, and
| everyone takes a turn at guessing, and only after _everyone_ has
| chimed in is the gift finally opened. Opening gifts is an all-day
| affair.
|
| Unfortunately, the original riddles, or even more recent ones
| have not been preserved --- I told him he should write his family
| tradition up in a book.
| inanutshellus wrote:
| Man, that's genius, to create anticipation and shared joy over
| each present.
|
| Not saving them is a dag nabbed tragedy.
|
| Are the riddles hints as to what's in the package, or random
| or? Would love to hear some of them.
| WillAdams wrote:
| Hints as to what is in the package.
|
| The only one which was related to me was:
|
| Q: What was Colin Powell before he was promoted to General?
|
| and the gift was black maize popcorn:
|
| A: A black kernel (colonel)
| Ccecil wrote:
| I knew a man who grew up in the depression. One thing he said
| that stuck with me was that they had one pair of shoes...and
| they were for winter only.
| WillAdams wrote:
| That was actually pretty common in earlier times --- a
| notable line from a biography of Abraham Lincoln where it was
| related that poor folks would carry shoes to church and only
| put them on after arriving at the church grounds:
|
| >Who wears out good shoe leather on walking?
| duxup wrote:
| I think the lack of stories is somewhat related to how people
| will sometimes unfairly take bad things that happen to them as
| a personal failure, and how just brutal the depression can be
| ... so that they do not want to pass it on / relive it.
|
| My grandparents told me that a lot of adults they knew at that
| time were never the same after the Great Depression. Many of
| those folks built lives, businesses, careers to be proud of ...
| and many were wiped out entirely.
|
| The failure of farms, businesses, livelihoods took such a
| brutal toll, and I think some took the idea that they were
| responsible for failing to provide / etc so hard that it
| impacted them the rest of their lives.
|
| Sharing it may not have been something they wanted to do.
| robotnikman wrote:
| I feel like my grandpa was a hoarder because of what he went
| through during the great depression as a kid.
| WillAdams wrote:
| The field of psychology has gone back and forth on that, but
| the bottom line is it's a socio-economic divide:
|
| >Only the rich can afford to have nothing, because if they
| want something, they will just buy it.
|
| but for folks on the other side of that divide, as my father
| often said:
|
| >Better to have it and not need it, than need it and not have
| it.
|
| and the calculus of kept object vs. potential storage space
| is far different.
| throwup238 wrote:
| My parents bought a house from a woman that survived the
| Depression and they found decades worth of stored food under
| the house. Grains, sugar, fruit preserves - pretty much
| anything that could be saved was. They bought the house a
| decade ago and still haven't gone through everything.
|
| I feel it's a rather common response from the trauma of the
| Great Depression.
| helboi4 wrote:
| Sometimes you really come across a scenario that expresses how
| unfathomably deep the tradition of sexism goes. The idea that
| Steinbeck would rather thank the man who literally just asked for
| the research papers for him, rather than the woman who literally
| wrote them is one of those scenarios. The fact that that was a
| totally unremarkable and natural thought process to go down is
| just so wild.
| adamc wrote:
| It suggests to me that women were so low in status as to be
| effectively invisible in plain sight.
| burkaman wrote:
| It's also unclear if she even agreed to share her notes. This
| article says she did, but other sources
| (https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/the-dust-bowl/sanora-babb) say
| her boss just gave her notes to Steinbeck without telling her.
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