The Great Depression

At the time, everything seemed so hopeful and secure for my family. My husband and I had all of our finances settled, our son had just started school, and we had just found out that we had another baby on the way. Living on a farm in Kansas, our lives had always been peaceful and undisturbed. This peacefulness ended abruptly in the late October of 1929. When the stock market crashed, my husband and I began to really struggle financially. This caused the prices of our crops to decrease tremendously. This was not a good thing for my family at all. My husband had to grow twice as many crops so we could attempt to pay all of our taxes and living expenses. While this was very difficult for us, we still considered ourselves blessed because we could grow our food and still provide for our family, unlike the people living in city areas. Although things were getting tough, I knew I had to keep a happy face for my family, especially my son. He was only five years old at the time and he didn’t really understand what was going on but I could tell that he knew things were changing in our household. My husband and I were just trying to figure out how we would provide for all four of us when the baby arrived.

After our daughter was born, those next four years slowly went by. Even though we were still struggling just as much, we were still making it. We tried to live off of just our crops but we eventually couldn’t afford to do that anymore. We started going to a soup kitchen in town twice a week, every week. Things weren’t easy then, but we took it one day at a time. Living in a rural area, we had always had occasional dust storms but lately they seemed to be getting more frequent. For a while my husband had been keeping track of how many days it had been since it had rained but he stopped counting after it had been a very long period of time. The crops were dying and the soil was very dry. It seemed like each day the high winds were getting more intense and it would pick up all of the dry soil out of the fields and blow it everywhere. We had never seen dust storms this bad in our lives. The farm was basically ruined and our home was covered in dust. I made the children start wearing masks that covered their noses and mouths so they wouldn’t breathe in as much of the dust and get sick. Even though I took those precautions with them, I could still tell that their lungs were full of it and there was nothing we could do about it. I tried sweeping the floors as much as I could but it was pointless. The dust was covering everything and it wasn’t going anywhere for a while. We would see an occasional rain cloud in the sky and become slightly hopeful again, but it would eventually just go away and it would never rain. This was the worst condition my family and our home had ever been in.

During this time, our president was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Despite all of America’s issues he was always so encouraging for families in similar situations as ours. He had always been a huge inspiration for me because of his condition. He began to suffer with polio as he entered adulthood but he never let it get in the way of his political career. A lot of people didn’t realize that he struggled with this disease because the press corps would always assist him so that his paralysis wasn’t as apparent. My husband always talked about how much he appreciated that President Roosevelt was so hopeful even when everything seemed hopeless. He was constantly trying to make his people feel like their futures were secure in America and that was very motivational for us at the time. Although we were all suffering, his leadership was a tremendous thing for our country during this terrible time. After a month-long run on banks, President Roosevelt declared a nationwide Bank Holiday that shut down all the banking systems. My husband and I discussed this idea that President Roosevelt had and didn’t quite understand how exactly it would benefit us and other Americans.

As a distraction from all the stress we had, my family would gather around and listen to our radio every Sunday night for hours at a time. We enjoyed this time because we always seemed to forget about our financial problems and the dust issue we had for a little while. It was basically an escape from all the bad things going on in our lives since we couldn’t afford to go anywhere. One Sunday evening as we were tuning in we noticed that our regular program wasn’t on. Instead, the President introduced himself and began to talk about his plan with the banks. At first we were in shock that President Roosevelt had been so direct with his communication to us and all of the other American people, but we really enjoyed this direct communication. It made us feel a lot more comfortable with the idea of not making any deposits from the bank for a whole week. It eventually became a regular thing for President Roosevelt to have these programs on the radio on Sunday evenings. These programs made me grow even fonder of the president than I already was and my husband felt the same way. We had always admired his encouraging ways during this awful time, but when he started actually talking to us through the radio it was so much more personal. Every time he had a new idea of how to end this economic crisis, he would thoroughly explain it to us through these programs. Even though those years of the Great Depression seemed to drag by slowly and painfully, President Roosevelt helped us through them and eventually our lives became peaceful and undisturbed again.