Social Effects of the Depression

The Great Depression had complex effects on society. First, life was not uniformly bleak, and despite the slump, modernization continued. Bordering English slums, one traveler in the mid-1930s noticed, were “filling stations and factories that look like exhibition buildings, giant cinemas and dance halls and cafés, bungalows with tiny garages, cocktail bars, Woolworth’s [and] swimming pools.” Municipal and national governments continued road construction and sanitation projects. New factories manufactured synthetic fabrics, automobiles, and electrical products such as stoves—all of them in demand. With government assistance, eastern European industry developed: Romanian industrial production, for example, increased by 55 percent between 1929 and 1939. Second, the majority of Europeans and Americans had jobs throughout the 1930s, and people with steady employment benefited from a drastic drop in prices. Service workers, managers, and business magnates often prospered. In contrast, towns with heavy industry often saw more than half the population out of work, spreading fear beyond the unemployed. (See “Document 26.1: A Family Copes with Unemployment.”)

Economic catastrophe upset gender relations and weakened social ties. Women often found low-paying jobs doing laundry and cleaning house, while unemployed men sometimes stayed home all day and took over housekeeping chores. Some, however, felt that this “women’s work” demeaned their masculinity, and as many women became breadwinners, albeit for low wages, men could be seen standing on street corners begging—a change in gender expectations that fed discontent. Young men in cities faced severe unemployment; with nothing to do but loiter in parks, they became ripe for movements like Nazism. Demagogues everywhere attacked democracy’s failure to stop the collapse of traditional life, clearing the way for Nazi and Fascist politicians who promised to create jobs and thus restore male dignity.

Politicians drew attention to the declining birthrates. In difficult economic times, people chose to have fewer children than ever before. In addition, compulsory education, enforced more strictly after the war, reduced the income once earned by children, who now cost their families money while they went to school. Family-planning centers opened, receiving many clients, and knowledge of birth control spread across the working and lower middle classes. The situation, leaders believed, would lead to a national collapse in military readiness as “superior” peoples selfishly failed to breed and “inferior” peoples waited to take their place. This racism took a particularly violent form in eastern Europe, where political parties also blamed Jewish bankers for farm foreclosures and Jewish civil servants (of whom there were actually very few) for inadequate relief programs. Thus, population issues along with economic misery produced discord, especially in the form of ethnic hatred and anti-Semitism.