Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd in
Middletown in Transition
, their 1937 study of everyday life in Muncie, Indiana. With social options limited by thin wallets, some husbands, wives, and children gardened together and used their yards more in summer, and at night played cards or listened to the radio. Yet the Lynds acknowledged that in other families, the Depression had “precipitated a permanent sediment of disillusionment and bitterness,” born of hardship, anxiety, and fear for the future. It was difficult to say, they noted, where the balance lay between the two.
The Lynds had first studied Muncie, a typical middle-class city of the time, in 1924 and 1925, when the economy was booming. Upon their return six years into the Depression, they found that petty jealousies over material things had seemed to multiply between neighbors, and that what bonds still existed didn’t extend far. “In its relation to outside groups … Middletown seems recently to have been building its fences higher. The city is more antagonistic to [outsiders]; individuals in the city are seemingly more wary of one another; need of protection and security is more emphasized.”
Trust among strangers and loose acquaintances was eroding, and rising material insecurity had brought with it a “greater insistence upon conformity and a sharpening of latent issues.” An intense nationalism had arisen since 1925, the Lynds found, and along with it an increasingly critical attitude toward all things foreign. One op-ed in a local Muncie paper exhorted its readers to “return to the old, sturdy, clean, upstanding America, the America that faced disaster unafraid and that went forward with the Bible and the flag.”
Disillusionment among high-school and college graduates, many of them unable to find jobs, became common by the mid-1930s. Suspicions grew that higher education was no longer a sure path to prosperity and that ambition was pointless. Said one college president in a 1936 address, “How are we to teach thrift to those who have lost everything? Why teach youth to rise early when there are no jobs to go to?”
The Lynds interviewed a series of young men and women in their late teens and twenties about their lives and found a “growing apathy.” One college graduate who had a job delivering parcels said that many of his peers were “just accepting the fact of a lower station in life and not struggling any longer.” A high-school teacher observed of his students, “They’re just getting used to the idea of there being no job, and there isn’t much explosiveness.”
Many young adults who could not find footing in the job market were left permanently scarred. Glen Elder, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina and a pioneer in the field of “life course” studies, has spent much of his career tracking the various generations that lived through the Depression, to see how it shaped their lives. Some three decades after the Depression ended, and even after a long postwar boom, he found apronounced diffidence in aging men (though not women) who had suffered hardship as twenty- and thirtysomethings during the 1930s. Unlike peers who had been largely spared during those lean years, these men came across, Elder told me, as “beaten and withdrawn—lacking ambition, direction, confidence in themselves.”
Yetthe period’s adolescents were shaped differently. McElvaine observed, “Although the children of the thirties lived through the same economic hardship as their parents did, it meant different things to the new generation. For one thing, children were largely free from the self-blame and shame that were so common among their elders.… The Depression’s most significant psychological problem was generally absent in the young.”
Hardship caused adolescents to take on more responsibilityearlier in life. “There were no working-class ‘teenagers’ in the 1930s,” wrote McElvaine. Boys took jobs after school wherever they could
Middletown in Transition
, their 1937 study of everyday life in Muncie, Indiana. With social options limited by thin wallets, some husbands, wives, and children gardened together and used their yards more in summer, and at night played cards or listened to the radio. Yet the Lynds acknowledged that in other families, the Depression had “precipitated a permanent sediment of disillusionment and bitterness,” born of hardship, anxiety, and fear for the future. It was difficult to say, they noted, where the balance lay between the two.
The Lynds had first studied Muncie, a typical middle-class city of the time, in 1924 and 1925, when the economy was booming. Upon their return six years into the Depression, they found that petty jealousies over material things had seemed to multiply between neighbors, and that what bonds still existed didn’t extend far. “In its relation to outside groups … Middletown seems recently to have been building its fences higher. The city is more antagonistic to [outsiders]; individuals in the city are seemingly more wary of one another; need of protection and security is more emphasized.”
Trust among strangers and loose acquaintances was eroding, and rising material insecurity had brought with it a “greater insistence upon conformity and a sharpening of latent issues.” An intense nationalism had arisen since 1925, the Lynds found, and along with it an increasingly critical attitude toward all things foreign. One op-ed in a local Muncie paper exhorted its readers to “return to the old, sturdy, clean, upstanding America, the America that faced disaster unafraid and that went forward with the Bible and the flag.”
Disillusionment among high-school and college graduates, many of them unable to find jobs, became common by the mid-1930s. Suspicions grew that higher education was no longer a sure path to prosperity and that ambition was pointless. Said one college president in a 1936 address, “How are we to teach thrift to those who have lost everything? Why teach youth to rise early when there are no jobs to go to?”
The Lynds interviewed a series of young men and women in their late teens and twenties about their lives and found a “growing apathy.” One college graduate who had a job delivering parcels said that many of his peers were “just accepting the fact of a lower station in life and not struggling any longer.” A high-school teacher observed of his students, “They’re just getting used to the idea of there being no job, and there isn’t much explosiveness.”
Many young adults who could not find footing in the job market were left permanently scarred. Glen Elder, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina and a pioneer in the field of “life course” studies, has spent much of his career tracking the various generations that lived through the Depression, to see how it shaped their lives. Some three decades after the Depression ended, and even after a long postwar boom, he found apronounced diffidence in aging men (though not women) who had suffered hardship as twenty- and thirtysomethings during the 1930s. Unlike peers who had been largely spared during those lean years, these men came across, Elder told me, as “beaten and withdrawn—lacking ambition, direction, confidence in themselves.”
Yetthe period’s adolescents were shaped differently. McElvaine observed, “Although the children of the thirties lived through the same economic hardship as their parents did, it meant different things to the new generation. For one thing, children were largely free from the self-blame and shame that were so common among their elders.… The Depression’s most significant psychological problem was generally absent in the young.”
Hardship caused adolescents to take on more responsibilityearlier in life. “There were no working-class ‘teenagers’ in the 1930s,” wrote McElvaine. Boys took jobs after school wherever they could
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