1938

There is little to no room for nuance on social media. Social sites are a catch-all for interaction, entertainment and distraction. They are, by design, for snippets and quickly digestible things. Yet, as is human nature, we still use them to make social or political points that usually beg for more details than a tweet or Facebook post allows. I’m as guilty as anybody, but I’m trying to do better. As such, I hope this exploration of a punchy social post about the state of affairs today as compared to the generation growing up in 1938 can at least demonstrate some of the nuance lost when we are posting to our echo chambers. And maybe even be entertaining and informative.  

A bit of background: Like a lot of people, I’m connected on Facebook to folks who have wildly different ideologies than my own. Some are family or old influences, some I’ve just been too lazy to delete, but they all grace my feed with occasional gems from “the other side.” This is equal parts frustrating and fascinating. I don’t exactly crave political debate in my downtime, but it is interesting to see what points are being made across the aisle and to echo chambers different from my own. Especially when more than one person shares it out so I know it has become somewhat viral. And so it happened, the following photo and caption has graced my feed a couple of times over the last day or so:

Captioned: “A young girl making biscuits in 1938. Look at this picture. We really think we have it bad in today’s world. This is the generation that did make America great. Tough as nails. Worked hard. Made the changes necessary to work their own way out of poverty. There was no welfare, food stamps, public housing. They had to pull themselves out of their own situations.”

So there are two major themes that I read from the post and the comments therein:

1. The girl in this photo and her family could work their way out of abject poverty without any help. The “big G” Government couldn’t help them with welfare or other SJW nonsense, just hard work.
2. Her generation created an America that was “great.” If only we can be more like them. 

I wanted to look at those claims as honestly and directly as possible. Like some of the comments called for, I wanted to dig into our history and the history of this snapshot of the late 1930s. That starts with the girl in the photo and what her life might have been like. A reverse image search brings up a lot of similar posts across different social media platforms (full of some well-formed and brilliantly articulated digs at BLM, Democrats, women, etc.), but no real origin to build from. For that, I had to use the nearly identical, but more well-sourced photo here: 

This photo from Marion Post Wolcott shows a similarly aged girl also making food in what looks to be a clapboard shack with loosely papered walls. Both children have a similar style dress, bare feet, and evidence of livestock living inside with them. The only difference is the Wolcott photo is from 1939. I’m calling that close enough. 

Could a family of migrant workers pull themselves up by their bootstraps? Both parents working through the night, the oldest child (10 years old, maybe?) taking care of the younger ones, could they “work their way out of poverty,” all on their own? I’m doubtful. The main picture is from 1938, coinciding with the appropriately named Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. This is one of the later New Deal programs aimed at helping America dig out from the Great Depression and, in this particular instance, help protect workers like those absent from home above. 

Because of those pesky government interventions, certain workers were beginning to be guaranteed a livable wage, predictable hours and overtime pay if they had to work outside of those hours. Something that, assuming by the state of the living conditions represented in the photos, the industry hadn’t been meeting previously. The heightened poverty and desperation from the Great Depression meant that workers were plentiful and replaceable, especially migrant workers chasing what work was available. 

While the FLSA of ‘38 didn’t help cover seasonal workers and others, it did open up options for families try and better themselves. It also gave a baseline for wages and an expectation of what work was worth, something that could give leverage for unions, something made possible a few years earlier with the National Labor Relations Act of 1935. Not to mention the alphabet agencies and their initiatives (the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Civil Works Administration, and the Farm Security Administration (which is who Wolcott was documenting families in poverty for)). 

So in general, the idea that families in the late 30’s could “pull themselves out of their own situation” is absurd. Decades worth of legislation aimed at supporting and protecting the everyday worker were beginning to take shape in the ‘30s, specifically because it was impossible to economically recover without them. Things were most definitely bad, much worse than today, and it took a literal act of Congress and several decades (and a World War that left our manufacturing centers intact while crippling the rest of the world’s) to stabilize. Left to its own devices, unregulated capitalism at the time would have been happy to let families live like the ones in the photos, with endless hours for nothing pay, keeping the bottom line as low as possible. 

But did they at least make a “great” America? There we might actually agree (but probably for different reasons). Thinking about the America those girls grew up in…

…and that they were likely of voting age in the early 50s, maybe they did start creating a better and greater America. One more a little more inclusive and representative of all Americans. Perhaps they voted in legislators and voiced their support for things like desegregation and the Civil Rights Act of 1957. Maybe their families or they themselves got steady jobs thanks to the New Deal and continued to support workers rights, seeing the difference it made for them. Maybe they used their knowledge of scraping by to help others get by during the war efforts the decade before. Maybe instead of taking away toughness for toughness sake they came away from their rough start with empathy and compassion. 

I suppose that’s my main takeaway. Not to discount the hard time people had in the 30s, or to downplay the fortitude they had, but hope to never be in such dire straits again as a country. To not look back at how bad it was then and how comparatively good life is now and say “good enough.” We can learn from their situation and, more importantly, the many different factors that have changed since their time. Let’s not mistake progress for weakness or a desire to improve for being whiny.