What was life like for whites in 1930?
The markets crashed in 1929, the world as everyone knew it, was over. My father and his four brothers hoped freight cars to the Northern areas of Minnesota to work for the CCC camps set up for the poor for work, they made $18.00 a month, he sent this home, that’s why he jumped freights to save the money. There were “hobo camps” all along the Mississippi River in Minneapolis, until the late forties, men of all ages lived in these camps. They wandered the neighborhoods looking for hand-outs. My grandmother always had an extra sandwich for the ones that stopped in. When my friend and I fish the river we listened to the hundreds of personal stories of these people. Very few were women, usually the wife of a hobo or, a sister. My Grandmother made her own lye soap in the backyard, selling it to neighbors. I can’t go into the still she was using to make booze. She did sell to the ‘Bo’s that stopped in for 25 cents a fruit jar. We would go to the local dump and find zink jar lids and break the
My great grandparents and grandparents lived on farms, so life wasn’t as hard for them as it was on other folks. The 1930s were rough on everyone, not just whites. The Great Depression had hit in 1929, and the country was in the deepest financial trouble it had seen for quite some time. It was even worse than after the Revolutionary War, in that it affected all of the states, not just some of them.
