Comments on Those Depression Years – 1929 to 1939

Since I was born in January, 1939, my personal experience regarding the Great Depression is fragmentary, at best. However, the years surrounding home-front, domestic events during World War II, left me with an indelible appreciation for the resilient guts and determination shown by Lowell’s impoverished immigrants of every ethnic and cultural persuasion. Curiously, the daily travails, fears and uncertainties of this mostly unskilled, under-educated and poorly trained layer of industrial society had hardly changed since the ear-shattering Wall Street crash of 1929. There was little reason to expect that the halcyon days of Lowell’s pre-World War One economy might return even if the clanging of a new war could be heard across the Atlantic and also in the Pacific.

Conversations that I overheard all around me either while napping in my crib or while relaxing over a bowl of pablum in my high chair in the kitchen were often focused on maddening events happening elsewhere like in Oklahoma, Maine, Washington, Chicago, Boston, etc. but also in Tokyo and Berlin. To me, it sounded like a nonstop mishmash of problems lasting decades. Many people in the U.S. and in Europe were apparently upset about not finding work, the high cost of butter and settling for margarine, the dust bowl, Prohibition, the mobs, market volatility on Wall Street plus Hitler’s actions in Austria and Czechoslovakia in 1938 followed by Poland in 1939. Finally, to top it off, Pearl Harbor really shuck us up in December, 1941.

Looking on the positive side, though, a few more local people were employed making combat boots, knapsacks, gas masks, tents, parachutes and bullets for the Army and Navy in preparation for the war to come and, later, for the war that was. It seems to be tragically true that disasters seem also to open up new avenues for a creative population to make the best of an ugly surprise. In this sense, the typical human being on our planet is a walking, talking panorama of potential solutions.

As a young person with strong family ties to a Quebec-based, 17th Century, French Catholicism under the guidance of the Pope in Rome and my pastor (mon curé de paroisse) at the Église Saint-Louis de France in Lowell, Massachusetts, my allegiances were already divided among several, historical viewpoints. Franco-American, textile mill laborers carrying these insignia, generally, considered themselves as hard-working Republicans, whereas similar, Irish, immigrant families often tended to side with the local Democratic attitudes and issues. In contrast, workers from a Greek, Polish, Portuguese, Lithuanian, etc. backgrounds may have divided their political allegiances equally across Republican and Democratic ballots. I simply did not know.

Summary of Grievances: No butter, again, so we used margarine; Roosevelt is a terrible President; farmers out west were slaughtering many, many pigs and letting the meat rot in the fields while some people, even in Lowell, were going without meat because there was no work in the factories. Everywhere, you turned, the whole system was broken, kaput, and Democrats everywhere were responsible! Of course, we were hard-working, poorly paid Republicans so it just was not fair!

Below, I have included statistical data showing the number of times per decade our local newspaper, the Lowell Sun, mentioned key job categories such as: operative, laborer, bricklayer, etc. In this way, the reader can obtain a quick overview of employment conditions from 1920 through 2000. People with certain skills managed to survive the Depression years better than others.

The economic situation that enveloped the unskilled portion of workers called the operatives, who were hacking out a marginal and very modest existence by selling their labor to the mill owners, took a two-point set of external hits in the 1930s. Immediately, after the big crash, the textile production in Lowell faced a new and growing competition from mill owners in the Carolinas where lower labor costs could be found. But, later in that decade, industries sprung up locally to help put the country on a near-war setting in preparation for WWII.

Laborers did not do well in the 1950s and 1960s, but a person could still have a job as a laborer even at the peak of the Depression (~ 1934). Curiously, there was plenty of work for such a worker between 1980 through 2000.

Men and women, who were ready to handle manual labor routines where muscle, energy, endurance and a non-aversion to dangerous work situations, found themselves in increasing demand in the transition period from the 1920s to the 1930s. The data shown above indicates a nearly 50% increase in demand for laborers in that time period. Some of this increase may have resulted from the work requirements put into effect through Roosevelt’s WPA program. SEE: WPA – Laborer = travailleur, un laboureur

That ancient craft of the bricklayer (see below) showed a remarkable resilience over the years from 1920 through the 1980s. It is curious that the years of the 1990s through 2000s seemed so lean.

Bricklayer: a very specialized work category with a societal importance going back to the Greeks – Where would cities, ancient and modern, be without the contributions of this group of tradesmen? Note: In the 1920s and 1930s, several mill owners decided to make some repairs to the aging, monstrous, football-field-size factories within the city. This decision would be good news for all bricklayers in the region since nearly all existing textile factories used a brick exterior facade. See: The Course of Industrial Decline: The Boott Cotton Mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, 1835-1955 (Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Technology)

Note: In the 1920s and 1930s, several mill owners decided to make some repairs to the aging, monstrous, football-field-size factories within the city. This decision would be good news for all bricklayers in the region since nearly all existing textile factories used a brick exterior facade.

Carpenters are always on call when new home building is the rage. Also, a massive national effort during WWII in the 1940s heightened the job opportunities for this class of labor.

Carpenter (un charpentier): Joseph, the father of Jesus, according to the New Testament, practiced this honorable trade when those Roman legions roamed the sandy and dusty streets – donkey paths – of Palestine. He probably never became wealthy from his business endeavors, yet, he might have been influential in underscoring to his son the valuable contributions made for society by lowly craftsmen and craftswomen.

JJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJ

Mentions for a “welder” in the Lowell Sun varied greatly over the years. It is not surprising that the societal needs for welders became intense as the country entered the new age of military spending for ships, submarines and aircraft during World War Two, WWII. Plus, the remarkable increase for more welders at the start of and during the Cold War shows again the importance of advanced metal- working technologies to the sense of national safety in the eyes of an industrialized population.

LLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLlll

Plumber (un plombier): The local call for plumbers stayed relatively constant in the 1920s to the 1940s with a not too surprising dip in those numbers during the days of the Depression. Cold War spending may have accounted for the 50% increase in “plumber” references from the 1940s to the 1950s in the Lowell Sun. In contrast, the huge increase (about 100%) in these numbers from the 1970s to the 1980s might be indicating that the Lowell economic situation was going through a period of growth.

YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY

Fireman (un pompier): Working for the city of Lowell as a firemen was considered, as I recall, a primo job to attain especially in a fiercely politics laden selection process in use at the time. Cries of political corruption played out as a background murmur to be denied by many. Naturally, my source of information regarding the job selection criteria was not entirely free of its own strong political bias, either. Also note: The steady decline of “firemen” mentions in our paper could be interpreted as proof positive that there was very little turnover in the ranks of Lowell’s firefighters from the 1940s to the 2000s. What other interpretation does the reader propose for this graphical behavior?

RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR

A leather shoe worker with some practical experience in the world of Robbie Shoe on Jackson Street, for example, might not necessarily fall into the category of a cobbler (un cordonnier) but related job titles might have been listed in the want ads next to cobbler. As a matter of passing interest, my maternal grandfather, Paul T. Charbonneau, had started his working life in the US of A as an assistant in a leather shop.

Although my mother had a high school degree from the College Saint-Louis in Centralville, she never used her education in a local, downtown clerical position. After her years of delivering milk to homes and businesses in the area and trying her hand in nursing (no details available) and opening a hairdresser’s shop in Lowell, her role as a homemaker dominated her hours as a mother, wife and caretaker for our paternal Memere.

This job category hit home for me and my immediate family. My mother had opened a hairdresser shop in Lowell, on Central Street, I believe, in the latter part of the 1930s. Her father, Paul T. Charbonneau, had most likely funded this endeavor. There is some expensive machinery needed by the owner of such a shop including a stand-up hairdryer, a stand-up hair curling machine, which looked like a torture instrumrnt from the Early Middle Ages, plus combs, scissors and buckets of formaldehyde as a disinfectant fluid. Of course, a shop owner also needed to rent commercial space on a street with easy access to bus service and near other retail shops for the convenience of customers. All of this equipment finally ended up in our home after this business venture did not pan out.

I bring this out here since her skills as a hairdresser became a source of additional revenuue to maintain our family finances above the critical water line, which maked my daily existence and that of my parents plus my brother and two sisters over the long years of near-poverty. The mention of hairdresser for the 1950s shows a nearly 50% decrease from the number of 1074 of the previous decade. Since my father died in January, 1953, our depending of a suffiient stream of income from my mom’s home business at tht time would hame been the height of folly. True, my brother and I could each clear $3.50 per week from our newsboy businesses, but in 1953 our cupbords were running short on vitals. Dreams of long-term well-being seemed fancyful, at best. Maybe, even foolish. Although I did not know this French proverb at the time, “La vie ne fait pas de cadeaux.” Loosely translated, one might say that “Life makes no gifts” or “Life means tough sledding.”

SSSSSSSSSSSSSS

Few job categories, which were open to the general population of working-class persons in Lowell, showed a comparable growth rate from the 1920s to the 1980s. Of course, WW Two, the Sputnik scare plus the ICBM concerns that appeared in newpapers, magazines and movie news reels on a regular basis had managed to wake up enough fellow citizens that there was a life-and-death struggle with Soviet expansionism across the world. Both my brother and I realized in the mid-1950s, that come-hell-or-high-water, we were not going to find ourselves as had our parents “a day late and a dollar short” when it came to eating regularly as adults. Nitty gritty life in Lowell’s ghettos had already taught us both a valuable lesson not painfully taught in our parochial schools and our Quebec Catholic upbringing.

UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU