# How Many People Died in the Depression?



## StatHaldol (Sep 1, 2006)

My kids were recently asking about what I remember my parents and grandparents told me about the Great Depression.

We have been reading lately about the Great Depression of the 1930's and trying to draw some similarities to what may lie ahead for us today.

I came across an interesting recent article while "Googling" although *I'm suspect of the source*.
http://www.russiatoday.com/features/news/32277

I've tried to find other information to substantiate or refute. :shrug:

Any thoughts?


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## Txsteader (Aug 22, 2005)

Good question. Here's one answer I found:
The Great Depression


> Although few people died from starvation, many did not have enough to eat. Some people searched garbage dumps for food or ate weeds. Malnutrition took a toll: A study conducted in eight American cities found that families that had a member working full time experienced 66 percent less illness than those in which everyone was unemployed.


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## wildhorse (Oct 22, 2006)

I don't know how many people died however we had a family member die of diphtheria.


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## Cyngbaeld (May 20, 2004)

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005131.html


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## Wisconsin Ann (Feb 27, 2007)

found this from course taught at new england college:
To humanity as a whole, therefore, the Great Depression brought hardships but it did not bring acute disaster. There was no sharp rise in deaths from starvation and disease. On the contrary, the world death-rate declined in the 1930's, and life expectancy continued to rise. These encouraging trends may be seen in the statistical table compiled by the League of Nations. But these tables also reveal certain negative effects in the 1930 for which the Depression was almost certainly responsible. Although the world population continued to drop, there was a perceptible decline in the world birthrate in the 1930's.

interestingly...some good advice from another site from people who went thru the great depression:
*Life during the Great Depression â Lessons Learned*
First-hand recollections of life during the Great Depression must not be disregarded. Those âchildrenâsâ voices now plead with us to recognize the symptoms of an economic CRASH and to react in time. 


[*] Credit mentality instead of paying cash. _âDonât spend money you donât already have in your pocket.â_
[*] Rich grew richer at the expense of others. _âDonât pay someone else to provide something that you can learn to do or to make yourself.â _
[*] Abandonment of traditional values and frugality. _âNever buy anything you can use â only what you canât live without.â_
[*] Self-Indulgence and self-gratification by immediate acquisition of possessions. _âDonât buy anything until you have twice the purchase amount.â_
[*] High Expectations by gambling in the stock market. _âItâs doesnât matter how much money you can make, but how much money you can save!â_


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## texican (Oct 4, 2003)

My grandparents on both sides of the family never mentioned anyone dying of starvation... most country folks didn't notice any difference in their lives... they had no money before, no money after... but plenty of food.


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## Ann-NWIowa (Sep 28, 2002)

I think it more likely people died from the extremes of weather. Huge blizzards, extreme heat waves, dust storms. My f-i-l and his sisters would have starved had not neighbors fed them. I think back then people were more willing to share whatever food they had with others than people are today. My f-i-l ate so much corn bread thru those years that he never ate it again the rest of his life. 

His family was an example of what happens when the wife/mother is not a good frugal cook...the family goes hungry. His dad was no great shakes either!! 

I have a friend 3 days younger than me. We grew up in the late 40's early 50's in rural area. My mom gardened, canned, planned, budgeted and was extremely frugal. My father was sober and hard working. We always had food (good food) on the table and never went hungry. My friend's mother thought she was too good to garden, can, etc. and they often went hungry also her parents both smoked and her dad drank. My friend had the swollen belly that goes with malnutrition for many years. I was at her home more than once when there wasn't any food until her father arrived home with a loaf of bread and package of bologna. That was their meal of the day two slices of unbuttered white bread and one piece of bologna. There was no excuse for this as they lived on a farm the same as I did. We had our own milk (butter, cream, cottage cheese), eggs, veggies, pork, chicken and beef and very few grocery store items. I think the same situation was true during the Depression and every decade since. You have some people who work, plan, learn, etc. to make sure their families thrive. Then you have the others who seem to work overtime to ruin any change their family might have.


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## StatHaldol (Sep 1, 2006)

My grandmother told me the same thing. She was raised on a farm and she said there was not much of a change in her life. They grew their own food and bartered for whatever goods they might need...


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## Gary in ohio (May 11, 2002)

StatHaldol said:


> My grandmother told me the same thing. She was raised on a farm and she said there was not much of a change in her life. They grew their own food and bartered for whatever goods they might need...


My mom grew up in the coal mine country of WVA and paints a very different picture of the depression than my dad who grew up in ohio farm lands. 
Dad had little, but wanted for little. Mom Tells of going into the hills and hunting root plants to live.


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## MELOC (Sep 26, 2005)

my dad's family, he had 12 brothers and sisters, grew up on 1 acre. they definately felt a pinch. if they hadn't lived next to the forest, they probably would have had real problems. he told me they often had to eat skunk cabbage...can you imagine eating skunk cabbage? he always took me hunting, but he really didn't care for venison and mom could never trick him by putting it in chili, lol. he always knew. he said they, like others here have said, would wait on the chickens to lay so his family could have breakfast. they may have had a milk cow, but there is no real way to support livestock on one acre, so i wish he would have lived longer to tell me more about how they did it. i think grandpa was able to work sometimes and i know he had a smithy shop at home. dad once told me he worked in the fields of a local farm all summer one year just for a new pair of shoes and overalls for school in the fall. no wonder all of those boys jumped at the chance to serve in WW2.

one thing he always jokingly told me was to "never come home from the woods empty handed". i bet he heard that a lot as a kid.


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## Ann-NWIowa (Sep 28, 2002)

My aunt and her sister took turns going to high school. They had one coat and one pair of shoes between them. D went one year and I the next. 

My in-laws both quit school after 8th grade. M-i-l worked as a hired girl for the same old farm couple from that time until she married at age 21 in 1939. Work, work, work and hard work at that. 

My mom's family lived in town and were not affected much by those years. Her dad had a business that delivered kerosene, gas, ice and a filling station. They were mostly affected by lack of goods available for purchase and crunch from extending credit to those who didn't have money to pay. Granddad often told me that everyone he gave credit to during the Depression eventually paid him in full. He was proud of that. Even tho they lived in town they had a huge garden, orchard, cow and chickens. The cows were picked up from all the neighborhood and herded to graze along the roadsides then brought back for evening milking. There was an alley behind the house that was used for herding. They had town water for flushing and bathing but pumped water from their well for drinking and cooking. Mom said recently that during drought all the neighbors carried water from their well because it was the only one that did not go dry. They bought coal and had a coal stoker in the basement. Big victorian house must have burned thru tons of coal in a winter. Cobs were the fuel for the cookstove.

My dad's family were on the farm. Still farmed with horses. He & his brothers worked very hard, but still got to go to high school and play sports. No money but plenty of home produced food. I know he & his brothers worked off the farm for cash money which they turned over to their parents but I don't recall that he ever said what they did. They milked and sold cream and traded eggs for groceries. Used to be the farmers all went to town on Saturday night to "trade". Eggs and cream or butter for groceries. It was typical to have a cream separator and the skim milk would go to the pigs and cream was a cash crop whether sold/traded as cream or converted into butter first. I think old hens were also sold to customers in town. That was still a practice when I was little. Dad's family had timber and heated with wood. They lived on the highway and I believe got electricity quite early but just for lighting. They had a gravity flow tank in the attic that was pumped (by hand) full of water once a week. I don't think they had an inside toilet tho.


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## Oldcountryboy (Feb 23, 2008)

texican said:


> My grandparents on both sides of the family never mentioned anyone dying of starvation... most country folks didn't notice any difference in their lives... they had no money before, no money after... but plenty of food.


Purty much the same with my grandparents also. They were full blood Cherokee's living on the Cherokee Reservation. There were no jobs to be had before the depression and no jobs after the depression for many years. They farmed for much of thier own existance and only sold extras if they had plenty. 

What made it so rough for them during the depression is when the dust bowl hit the area. Then they suffered from not being able to raise a good garden and fodder for their animals. 

But they still managed to raise 11 kids all thru the hard times.


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## chickenista (Mar 24, 2007)

Ann-NWIowa said:


> My mom gardened, canned, planned, budgeted and was extremely frugal. My father was sober and hard working. We always had food (good food) on the table and never went hungry. My friend's mother thought she was too good to garden, can, etc. and they often went hungry also her parents both smoked and her dad drank. My friend had the swollen belly that goes with malnutrition for many years. I was at her home more than once when there wasn't any food until her father arrived home with a loaf of bread and package of bologna. That was their meal of the day two slices of unbuttered white bread and one piece of bologna. There was no excuse for this as they lived on a farm the same as I did. We had our own milk (butter, cream, cottage cheese), eggs, veggies, pork, chicken and beef and very few grocery store items. I think the same situation was true during the Depression and every decade since. You have some people who work, plan, learn, etc. to make sure their families thrive. Then you have the others who seem to work overtime to ruin any change their family might have.



This I think we will see alot of. sadly.
I know folks now that are too good to cook or even chop their own carrots, forget about gardening!.. or cleaning out a barn to use the manure on the <horrors> garden beds where food comes from.
I think there will be alot of unneccessarily hungry kids... if they wander over here I will feed them, but not their folks.
I will show their folks what to do in their own space though.


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## Ernie (Jul 22, 2007)

I went to the grocery store for some bananas the other day and for my monthly check on vegetable prices (to see what I _ought_ to be getting for my own crops.) In the vegetable aisle I saw something I'd never seen before ... PEELED onions. Yes, now the busy housewife no longer has to go through the extra effort of peeling her own onion. Price for unpeeled was $0.79/pound but the peeled ones were $2.19/pound. I felt like standing there with a sign: "Will peel your onions for $1 each."

Anyway, my family made out ok through the depression. I don't know that anyone starved, though my great-Uncle Roy was killed by Comanches south of Kerrville, Texas around that time. My great-grandfather on my mother's side died of tetanus during that time period as well, leaving behind a young Cherokee bride and an infant child (my grandmother). She quickly remarried an Oklahoma sharecropper who then fled the Dustbowl to south Texas, putting them in the proper vicinity. 

If you're curious about how people lived during the Depression, there's lots of books on the topic. _The Grapes of Wrath_ is a good classic and a very sobering read. Makes me angry each time I pick it up. There's a handful of others too written around that era and by people who saw it firsthand. That's better than second and third-hand family lore.


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## Freeholder (Jun 19, 2004)

I don't know about second and third-hand family lore, Ernie -- I live with my grandmother, age 95 -- she was married in 1931, and raising a family during the Depression. I think her information is pretty first-hand, actually. I read Grapes of Wrath (a long time ago, in high school), and all I can say is that different people, different areas, were affected differently. And that's likely how it will be this time around, also.

The area where Grandma's family lived (in the Oregon Coast Range) had been pretty poor even before the Depression; nothing much changed during the Depression for them. They had a farm; they hunted and fished for their meat (and Grandad ran a trap line for cash income -- he did better than most of his neighbors financially because of the trap line); they picked wild berries and made many quarts of jam. Grandma says that one year they only had $200 cash income the whole year, but they managed. They always ate well, they had firewood for heat, fresh water to drink, and plenty of both healthy work and play in the great outdoors. The neighbors were either family or long-time friends, and everyone helped one another. (That's one thing that we are going to be missing this time around, with families so spread out, and people moving so often that they hardly even know their neighbors a lot of the time.)

My Dad was born in 1928, the oldest of four children. His family moved around a lot, all up and down the West Coast, often as migrant farm labor. Sometimes his dad worked in logging camps, sometimes he worked on fishing boats, and many times they had nothing but corn to eat (Dad hated corn as a result). They survived, but they went through some tough times. 

My mother's family, and my father's family, both lived in West Coast states; Dad and Mom were both born here in Oregon, within a hundred miles of one another. But because Mom's family owned land and were settled in an area where they'd lived for nearly sixty years before the Depression started (my great-great grandmother was the first white woman to live in our valley over there), they did much better than my Dad's family, who didn't own land and had to keep moving around to find work. Both families had four children, who were close to the same ages; both fathers had nearly the same skills (one grandpa ran more to mechanics and farming, the other more to hunting and trapping); both mothers were frugal and skilled at growing and putting up food; both families were clean-living with good work ethics. Really the only difference was one was land-owning (debt-free) with close ties to the other land-owners around them. Makes you think.

Kathleen


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## Wisconsin Ann (Feb 27, 2007)

Ernie said:


> I went to the grocery store for some bananas the other day and for my monthly check on vegetable prices (to see what I _ought_ to be getting for my own crops.) In the vegetable aisle I saw something I'd never seen before ... PEELED onions. Yes, now the busy housewife no longer has to go through the extra effort of peeling her own onion. Price for unpeeled was $0.79/pound but the peeled ones were $2.19/pound. I felt like standing there with a sign: "Will peel your onions for $1 each."


thought my SO would fall off the couch laughing the other night....he saw the ad for the 'frozen peeled and chopped potatoes" for the first time. Lady arrives home just exhausted. oh my...poor lady. She tries to peel a potato...can't do it. oh my...poor lady. HAPPY SMART lady goes to the freezer and gets a bag of peeled chopped potatoes to put in the pot to make boiled potatoes for supper! ooo!! happy lady!!

good god. in Artificer's words, "takes 5 seconds to peel a potato and no skill. I wonder if she has trouble pushing the buttons on the dishwasher, too?"


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## MorrisonCorner (Jul 27, 2004)

I think for many of us who grew up on "Depression Stories" there is a blurred, very blurred, line between "Great Depression" and "WW2." I know in my family the advent of the Depression as heralded by the stock market crash was a non-event.  There are, as the depression ground on, stories of making do with not enough shoes for everyone, making do with clothes, not enough money for school books, etc.. but remember... we go from Depression to WW2.  And in my family men are not the keepers of history. Women are. So yes, my father has stories of seeing his brothers ship out.. and they were fortunate to have made it back..

But it seems like the women's stories of Hard Times begin with WW2. The women clearly remember rationing. And they'd lost the hunters and fishermen in the family. If you weren't running a commercial farm, but instead keeping a large garden and some stock on the side, your men went to war, and those chores fell on the wife. Not only those chores, but suddenly it was you patriotic duty to go to work... if not an absolute economic necessity.

Economic Depression is one thing... but layer War on top of it and it gets very ugly.


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## Wisconsin Ann (Feb 27, 2007)

There's a very distinct line between the depression/dustbowl years and the WW2 in our family. both my parents were early teens when the stock market crashed, and they spent their teen years hearing parents worry about the banks and where the money was going to come from to pay for shoes. 

Dad's family was in North Dakota at the time, but in the city...so they got hit with the economic problems...no work. So the kids did all kinds of jobs to help out. My mother was on the farm in Wisconsin..and not much changed except when Grandpa needed seed...he had a hard time getting it. My great uncle (wisconsin again) talked about how they all moved back into the family farm after leaving because there just wasn't any work to be found...so they came home and worked the land. they always had plenty to eat, but no money to buy goods like a tractor or tires for the truck.

both of my parents recounted the time spent at the movie theater as about the only fun they had.

WW2...totally different story. The country and the world were starting back up again. there was work to be found and life was good. They married in 1939, moved to Los Angeles, daddy had good work, my mother decided to do the secretary thing...and then it was war....totally different times from the depression era. Different thinking. Different economics. Food was rationed, tires, rubber, etc....you had the money, you just couldn't BUY anything with it


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## Cyngbaeld (May 20, 2004)

Mom and Dad both finished 8th grade and then went to work when they were 14, in 1937. Mom went into the Cotton Mill and Dad in the Coal Mines. Dad was able to get on with CCC though and stayed with them till he was old enough to join the Army Air Corp. After the war Mom was working for the phone company and Dad was in college. He dropped out after Mom got pg with me and tried to find work, but there really wasn't much to be had (1952). By the time they had kid no 3 Dad decided to re-enlist in the Army. That didn't pay well in those days, but it was an income. We were dirt poor and it was really hard. Even through the sixties things were rough. When I got out of high school in 70 there were no jobs either. I finally was able to get into nursing school and worked really hard to make it through because I knew I had nobody to count on but myself to take care of me.

It seems to me that any time can be "hard times" for at least part of the population. REmember that 3/4 of the folks still had jobs in the Depression. The secret is to learn to adapt, be frugal, work hard and work smart. Don't mortgage your tomorrows for the things you think you want today.


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## chickenista (Mar 24, 2007)

Some of my family did ok and others were very hungry.
The mountain folk did just fine and didn't really know the difference. Still had milk and eggs and veggies and meat.. nothing changed too much.
My StepD's family was hungry. They were cotton picking sharecroppers in upstate SC and he tells stories of hunger.. used to hop the fence to steal raw veggies from the neighboring farms to eat right there...and used to sneak down to the station to pop the tops off of pickle barrels to drink the juice and snag a few pickles.
I think the secret is to have your own place and space...


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## smurfhuts (Sep 5, 2008)

I remember my dad tellin' me about how my grandfather worked on a truck farm around Dallas, seven days a week, dawn till dusk, for a dollar a day. And my grandmother had a friend who was a butcher at the A & P grocery store who would give her small packages of bones from time to time to help flavor the soup. He told me how my grandpa drove his Model T truck to Houston to move his brother's family to Dallas, and how they had to pull over 2 times both going down and coming back to replace the pork skins he used for piston rod bearings in the engine. They were never fortunate enough to own any land of their own.


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## bee (May 12, 2002)

My great great grandfather(dad's side) used to cut fence posts and railroad ties for cash income, fence posts were a penny a piece and he cut 100 a day; ties were 25 cents each and he did 4 a day--he used to say if he could not feed his family on a dollar a day he would not work...my grandmother(mother's side) used to take in washing to feed her children, mom remembers skimming the worms off a pot of beans soaking to cook. Sad to say, I don't think the majority of today's population would be able to make the adjustment to doing what is needed to survive, not when I know multiples of people that can't even consider butchering a chicken.


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## Razorback21 (May 13, 2003)

I have been lurking on this thread the past couple of days and a pretty scary thought as occurred to me: you all mentioned how your grandparents made it through the depression without dying. 

We will have people die in a severe downturn/financial collapse this time I believe, because most folks don't have the ag skills our grandparents did. They lived a lot closer to the land. Someone on here one time mentioned the 1% group; The 1% of the American population that can be self sufficient. The group most of us on this forum are included in.

The rest will have to know someone who can provide, steal or starve. Eventually others will learn how to grow their own food. But I work in a town of 7500 and I bet nearly all of the people under 35 could maybe get a garden going from bedding plants but that is about it. Livestock-no, planting from seed-no, canning and freezing-I don't think so. It is them a depression would hurt the most.


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## jimarh (Feb 21, 2005)

My parents lived through the great depression and mom always told us growing up that if we would follow the rule........


use it up
wear it out
make it do
or do without

that we would be ok if troubled times hit this country again. I think I should add to that saying of mom's, prepare for the worst at all times so you will be ready when the rough times hit.


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## Ann-NWIowa (Sep 28, 2002)

What is particularly sad is that most farm families today do not have a chicken, milk cow, garden, orchard, etc. Unless they have grandma's jars and canner in the corner of the basement, they don't have the means to can. Most people are educated enough to learn from reading books or the Internet to do most anything they set their minds to, but that will be little use AFTER the crunch. You need to be prepared ahead. Have the knowledge, the equipment, supplies, practice to actually be able to do. I know a lot of those farm families already have the knowledge but have gotten rid of the equipment and livestock that would allow them to get back into self-sufficiency.


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## fordy (Sep 13, 2003)

................Very interesting thread ! One difference between today and the depression era , in so far as owning land goes , is that , the Property taxes assessed on rural land seem to be much higher than back then . One potential problem , even for those who have no mortgage , is that should your cash flow be interrupted , you could loose your land to the tax authority . This will vary , obviously , depending upon the area of the country where you are residing . , fordy


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## Spinner (Jul 19, 2003)

Both of my parents families came thru the depression fine. The only deaths were from accidents, not starvation. They were country people who had gardens, animals, orchards, and were pretty much self sufficient. 

They worked hard to instill that way of life in their children. I'm the only one who took it to heart. All my siblings now live in town with no food production of their own. My sis recently told me there's no way she could live without instant foods & her microwave. (she sure wasn't raised that way!) 

If we go into a depression today, I plan to have several years worth of tax money on hand to protect my property from tax foreclosure. I also plan to have my gardens, animals, and the fruit trees to feed us. We might have to do without a few of the things we take for granted now, baring any unforeseen disasters such as forest fire or being overrun by zombies, we'll be just fine.


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## BeagleMommy (May 21, 2008)

Well, my grandparents (but not g-grands) all made it through the Great Depression, but with different results.
Grandma's family was well off before since her dad owned the local ice plant, but he got sick during the depression and died and her mother remarried and they were not so stable.
Grandma never threw anything away that MIGHT be useful someday.

On the other side of the family, my great-grandfather was a doctor who survived by barter and extending credit. He wound up with THOUSANDS of acres of land by WWII.
He told a story of a young man coming into his office to pay him. Doc didn't know what for. He didn't know the man. The man said he was there to pay for Doc delivering him 18 years before!
Doc also said that he was paid eventually by all the folks to whom he extended credit.


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