THE GREAT DEPRESSION

THE GREAT DEPRESSION IN KANSAS

When I chose this subject, however, I did not realize how much I had bitten off. It could well be a good subject for a book, but never again will I try to condense so much material into a blog.

The great depression which began in the fall of 1929 affected Kansas just as it did every other part of the country, but on top of it there was superimposed almost a decade of drought and duststorms. In other words, Kansas and neighboring Great Plains states got a double dose of misery and calamity.

During the decade in question agriculture was relatively a more important industry in Kansas than it is today. The decrease in agricultural income which came as a result of drought and low prices was a serious blow to the entire economy.

The decade of the 1920's had been a rough one for farmers, although most of the rest of the economy was booming. It will be remembered as a time when all farm organizations were imploring congress to pass relief legislation in order to save farmers from bankruptcy.

The desperate situation of Kansas farmers in the 1930's can be judged by the fact that the total farm value of Kansas agricultural production in that decade was only 63 percent of what it was during the very lean 1920's.

Farmers in the 1930's suffered from both short crops and low prices. While the 1931 wheat crop of 251 million bushels was the largest grown up to that time, the average farm price was only 33 cents per bushel, and less than that in western Kansas. Toward the middle of the decade prices were higher but yields were low. Very much the same thing happened in the case of corn. Toward the end of the decade yields were somewhat better but both crops, but prices were down again. 

Dust storms as such were nothing new in the Great Plains. They were noted and commented on by the early explorers and travelers on the Santa Fe trail. Dr. James C. 

I have mentioned the huge Kansas wheat crop of 1931. Almost three-fifths of it was grown west of the 98th meridian, frequently accepted as the dividing line between eastern and western Kansas. There may be many who wonder how such a productive area could become a potential, if not an actual wasteland within a period of two or three years.

This calls for some explanation. Although wheat production in Kansas had been gradually moving west during the 1920's, the big move took place during the three or four years prior to 1931. For example, in my own county of Finney wheat acreage increased from 69,000 acres in 1927 to 222,000 in 1931 and production increased from 276,000 bushels to 4,905,230. In Hamilton county wheat acreage was 3,545 in 1927. By 1931 it had increased to 103,787 acres, yielding 1,868,166 bushels. In Gove county 51,685 acres yielding 103,370 bushels in 1927 had grown to 182,369 acres with a yield of 3,647,300 in 1931. In general this expansion resulted from a combination of mechanized farming and a period of higher than normal rainfall.

This great 1931 crop made a lot of happy and optimistic people, They thought that Western Kansas had really come into its own. Some attributed it to climatic changes--others gave new machinery and methods the credit. A sort of madness pervaded the atmosphere and I fell for it just like everyone else. I bragged about that crop to everyone who would listen, in Washington and elsewhere. But viewed in the light of what has happened since, this big crop was more of a disaster than anything else. For one thing it substantially increased the supply of wheat when we already had a surplus and a declining export market, and drove the price far below the cost of production. But even worse, it was a disaster because it encouraged farmers and others to believe that the reckless and haphazard type of farming which brought about this expansion could continue without a day of reckoning.

The drought and dust blowing of 1933 did not alarm Plains people particularly. They were used to dry years and hopefully waited for the rains, which they were sure would come next year. But this time they didn't come. In 1934 the winds started early and the loose unprotected topsoil began to move in a wide area. Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Colorado, Kansas, and other states in the Great Plains were all involved.

The year 1935 is generally considered the worst, as far as dust blowing was concerned. In 1936 the drought area expanded to include most of the states between the Appalachians and the Rockies. However, blowing in Kansas was less severe than it had been. During the next four years the blowing area gradually receded. However, a new recession developed in 1937 and this brought about a severe decline in farm prices for the remainder of the decade. Both wheat and corn averaged around 50 to 60 cents per bushel during the period 1938-1940.

How did people live in the dust-bowl area during the worst years when the wind blew for days at a time? Looking back on it now, one wonders. 

Sometimes meetings had to be postponed when the storms were at their worst. It might be necessary to close the schools for a day or two after a long, hard storm to clean out the dust and debris, but that was accepted as just one of the things to be endured. School and Church activities went on about as usual. The women's clubs held their regula rmeetings. The chambers of commerce and service clubs continued to function.

Frequently the storms were so bad that travelers had to pull off the roads and wait them out. There were stories of people who got lost in their own farm yards and there were a few instances where school children as well as adults lost their lives. 

The decade of the 1930's is the only one in which Kansas suffered a population loss. The figures for 1930 were 1,851,024, for 1940 they were 1,778,248, or a loss of 72,776. During this period 17 counties gained population and 88 lost.

The distribution of these gains and losses is rather interesting. Most of the rural counties lost. But that was true of many metropolitan areas also. 

Although Kansas industry and agriculture languished during the 1930's, this was not true of politics. There has never been a decade in the state's history when it had as many stars in the national political firmament as it did in this period.

During the first two years, the Vice-President of the United States was Charles Curtis, a Kansas, who reached the position after more than 30 years in public life. The Republican candidate for President in 1936 was Kansas' Gov. Alf Landon. The chairman of the Republican national committee in that year was anotherKansas, John D. M. Hamilton. Harry H. Woodring was secretary of war in President Roosevelt's cabinet. Guy Helvering occupied the position of commissioner of internal revenue for several years, during the Roosevelt administration. Arthur Capper was one of the most influential men in the United States senate.

I do not have time to go into political campaigns as such, with one exception. That is the general election race for governor in 1930. It turned out to be the most astonishing, dramatic, and colorful race in Kansas history.

The Kansas Board of Medical Registration and Examination revoked his license to practice. Why they hadn't done it years before I do not know. The Federal Radio Commission refused to renew his broadcasting license, after a hearing on June 20-22, 1930. His attorneys appealed to the courts, which delayed the suspension until the appeal could be heard. Although he finally lost his license this maneuver enabled him to keep broadcasting during his campaign for governor.

At first his candidacy was taken as a joke by both Republicans and Democrats. He seemed to have one insuperable obstacle. He had filed too late to get his name on the ballot and those who wished to vote for him would have to write it in.

However, he had advantages which might not have been apparent at first. As an office seeker he was an amateur, but when it came to selling himself to the public he was a gifted professional. He had a large staff with wide experience in the fields of publicity and public relations.

His platform called for free school books, free auto tags, lower taxes, better times for the working people, lakes in every county, increased rainfall, an open door to the governor's office and a house cleaning in the statehouse. All of this didn't sound too bad in a depression year when people were out of jobs and farm prices were falling. And what a show he put on. When he wasn't traveling in his chauffeured 16-cylinder Cadillac, he was using his big blue plane, the Romancer. After being on the radio for several hours a day, the plane and the car enabled him, along with Mrs. Brinkley and Johnny Boy, to attend large meetings over the state in the afternoons and evenings.

Sunday was also a big day. The doctor piously made it clear that he would not discuss politics on that day. However, the Sunday programs, religious in nature, may have been the most effective of all. They gave him an opportunity to compare his problems and alleged persecutions with those of the Savior, which he never hesitated to do. 

Looking back it seems quite likely that if Brinkley's name had been on the ballot he might have been elected. Any way you look at it, however, Brinkley made a remarkable race. He carried 28 counties, including Sedgwick. TUnless national solutions are found, we will, sooner or later, be confronted with all these problems in Kansas. And they will be far greater than those which we faced in the 1930's. It is not a time to sit idly by.

THE GREAT DEPRESSION ITSELF

The Great Depression was an economic slump in North America, Europe, and other industrialized areas of the world that began in 1929 and lasted until about 1939. It was the longest and most severe depression ever experienced by the industrialized Western world.
Though the U.S. economy had gone into depression six months earlier, the Great Depression may be said to have begun with a catastrophic collapse of stock-market prices on the New York Stock Exchange in October 1929. During the next three years stock prices in the United States continued to fall, until by late 1932 they had dropped to only about 20 percent of their value in 1929. Besides ruining many thousands of individual investors, this precipitous decline in the value of assets greatly strained banks and other financial institutions, particularly those holding stocks in their portfolios. Many banks were consequently forced into insolvency; by 1933, 11,000 of the United States' 25,000 banks had failed. The failure of so many banks, combined with a general and nationwide loss of confidence in the economy, led to much-reduced levels of spending and demand and hence of production, thus aggravating the downward spiral. The result was drastically falling output and drastically rising unemployment; by 1932, U.S. manufacturing output had fallen to 54 percent of its 1929 level, and unemployment had risen to between 12 and 15 million workers, or 25-30 percent of the work force.

The Great Depression began in the United States but quickly turned into a worldwide economic slump owing to the special and intimate relationships that had been forged between the United States and European economies after World War I. The United States had emerged from the war as the major creditor and financier of postwar Europe, whose national economies had been greatly weakened by the war itself, by war debts, and, in the case of Germany and other defeated nations, by the need to pay war reparations. So once the American economy slumped and the flow of American investment credits to Europe dried up, prosperity tended to collapse there as well. The Depression hit hardest those nations that were most deeply indebted to the United States, i.e., Germany and Great Britain. In Germany, unemployment rose sharply beginning in late 1929, and by early 1932 it had reached 6 million workers, or 25 percent of the work force. Britain was less severely affected, but its industrial and export sectors remained seriously depressed until World War II. Many other countries had been affected by the slump by 1931.

Almost all nations sought to protect their domestic production by imposing tariffs, raising existing ones, and setting quotas on foreign imports. The effect of these restrictive measures was to greatly reduce the volume of international trade: by 1932 the total value of world trade had fallen by more than half as country after country took measures against the importation of foreign goods.

The Great Depression had important consequences in the political sphere. In the United States, economic distress led to the election of the Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt to the presidency in late 1932. Roosevelt introduced a number of major changes in the structure of the American economy, using increased government regulation and massive public-works projects to promote a recovery. But despite this active intervention, mass unemployment and economic stagnation continued, though on a somewhat reduced scale, with about 15 percent of the work force still unemployed in 1939 at the outbreak of World War II. After that, unemployment dropped rapidly as American factories were flooded with orders from overseas for armaments and munitions. The depression ended completely soon after the United States' entry into World War II in 1941. In Europe, the Great Depression strengthened extremist forces and lowered the prestige of liberal democracy. In Germany, economic distress directly contributed to Adolf Hitler's rise to power in 1933. The Nazis' public-works projects and their rapid expansion of munitions production ended the Depression there by 1936.

At least in part, the Great Depression was caused by underlying weaknesses and imbalances within the U.S. economy that had been obscured by the boom psychology and speculative euphoria of the 1920s. The Depression exposed those weaknesses, as it did the inability of the nation's political and financial institutions to cope with the vicious downward economic cycle that had set in by 1930. Prior to the Great Depression, governments traditionally took little or no action in times of business downturn, relying instead on impersonal market forces to achieve the necessary economic correction. But market forces alone proved unable to achieve the desired recovery in the early years of the Great Depression, and this painful discovery eventually inspired some fundamental changes in the United States' economic structure. After the Great Depression, government action, whether in the form of taxation, industrial regulation, public works, social insurance, social-welfare services, or deficit spending, came to assume a principal role in ensuring economic stability in most industrial nations with market economies.

You can learn more about the time of Great depression visiting these links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression_in_the_United_States
http://cla.calpoly.edu/~lcall/timeline.dep.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression
http://history1900s.about.com/od/1930s/p/greatdepression.htm
http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/depression/overview.htmhttp://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/depression/about.htm