Survival

• loss of the basic necessities of life: food, clothing, home, job
  
• 34m unemployed by 1932 - 25% of population
  
• "invisible scar" of shame - believed failure was own fault - common image of bent man, sagging shoulders, shuffling, face turned away - lack of ability to control affairs - you took it and kept quiet
  
• "clutch of cold fear" (Jane Addams) - for 1st time in 3 centuries, population growth reversed, families had fewer children, marriage and divorce rates declined but desertion increased ("poor man's divorce") - increase in birth control - 746 clinics by 1939
  
• role reversal increased as more women required to work and support family - half of the female workers were employed in domestic service or the garmet trade
  
• incomes dropped 40% - meat declined but increase in jello and home-grown food such as spinach - 4 hospitals in New York reported 95 deaths from starvation - by 1933, 1 in 5 of the nation's 21m children suffered malnutrition
  
• physical appearance of country changed - air cleaner, less noise, new construction fell to 15% of 1929, more vegetable gardens planted, more flowers planted by people weary of plainness, fewer mail deliveries
  
• hoboes - Woody Guthrie Bound for Glory - 200,000 vagrant children on the roads - 50% increase in orphanage population
  
• John Steinbeck survived near ocean at Pacific Grove - fished, grew vegetables
  
• Audie Murphy - family of Texas sharecropper with 11 children - father deserted and mother died - had to hunt for his supper - enlisted in Army at age 19
  
• many forced to turn to charity - Community Chest
  
• emphasis on self-sufficiency - start own business such as gas stations, beauty schools, Albert Fuller Brush Co.
  
• Cesar Chavez - was born 1928 in Arizona in North Gila River valley - family lost farm near Yuma in 1934 - hit the road like the Joads of the Steinbeck novel working as migrant farm labor "following the crops" in California for $10 per week - attended 37 schools in 8 years - Latino population of California quadrupled, of Arizona doubled, to 300,000 in SW, plus growing number of nonresident "bracero" workers that had begun in the 1920's numbering 1.5m by 1930 - encountered segregation - farm strikes in the Imperial Valley were crushed - "we were trapped" - 1931 "repatriation" back to Mexico