My Great Aunt Marge: A Life During The Great Depression
Q: Based upon your interview, what was life truly like on a daily basis during the Depression? (Minimum 50 lines) During the Great Depression, life was not soft. It was survival of the fittest, and only the strongest and hardest-working Americans lived to tell the tale. For people born and raised during the Great Depression, it was not about poverty, family struggles, corrupted politics, and starvation. It was simply life. It was all they knew. My Great Aunt Marge was born in 1928, just before the Great Depression really set in. All she remembers of her childhood, however, is the Great Depression. It seemed relatively normal and tolerable for her simply because she had never known any other way of life. She and her brother led a
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As people stopped buying the products, the employers had less money to pay their workers and would have no choice but to lay them off. During my interview, I asked my Great Aunt if she remembered much about her town. She said she did not go there very often since they could rarely afford anything, but when she did go into town with her family with the team and wagon, she remembers lots of shops closing earlier and earlier every day, and eventually shutting down altogether. She remembers having some friends at school, but never doing anything outside of school with her friends since everything either cost money or required a lot of walking around. Her family was able to endure the Great Depression without much death or misfortune, since they were already pretty independent to begin with. They did not rely on electricity, and they had no servants or farmhands to pay. In fact, her family rarely dealt with paying people at all. Her father was a farmhand and would receive a portion of the crops each year, and an infinitesimal salary. The amount of money her family received was negligible, really, but they did not rely on it to stay alive, so the consequences of the poverty were not fatal. When the Great Depression hit, it was much more difficult for her father to
As people stopped buying the products, the employers had less money to pay their workers and would have no choice but to lay them off. During my interview, I asked my Great Aunt if she remembered much about her town. She said she did not go there very often since they could rarely afford anything, but when she did go into town with her family with the team and wagon, she remembers lots of shops closing earlier and earlier every day, and eventually shutting down altogether. She remembers having some friends at school, but never doing anything outside of school with her friends since everything either cost money or required a lot of walking around. Her family was able to endure the Great Depression without much death or misfortune, since they were already pretty independent to begin with. They did not rely on electricity, and they had no servants or farmhands to pay. In fact, her family rarely dealt with paying people at all. Her father was a farmhand and would receive a portion of the crops each year, and an infinitesimal salary. The amount of money her family received was negligible, really, but they did not rely on it to stay alive, so the consequences of the poverty were not fatal. When the Great Depression hit, it was much more difficult for her father to