Stories about my Father 8
When Dad was six, Mr. Woodson, who owned the house in Rustburg that Eunice and Morris were renting, told them that he was going to sell it. He offered it to them first, but my grandparents couldn’t afford it. My grandfather must have decided that he’d learned enough practicing on his own and decided to go back to work with his father at their law practice in Lynchburg.
They moved to Lynchburg and into a rented house on Denver Avenue. It was the summer of 1929.
Nobody seems to agree about exactly why the Great Depression started after the stock market crashed on October 29, 1929. In hindsight, people argue that there are things that could have been done to stop it. Had the federal government stepped in and bailed out the larger banks, the smaller ones may not have folded. As it was, they did nothing, and bank after bank went under, taking people’s savings with them. To protect American businesses and farms, the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act was passed in 1930. It levied high taxes on all imported foreign goods. All this did was enrage our allies who, in turn, taxed American goods being imported into their countries at such a high level that all international trade essentially stopped. The Depression became global.
Consumer confidence is one of the main factors constantly cited as a major indicator of the health of our economy. We’ve heard that phrase used so many times that I think we’ve forgotten what it means. It means exactly what it says. How comfortable are people spending their money? Capitalism relies on the population feeling confident enough to be willing to part with some cash to buy or trade goods. The whole house of cards is dependent on feelings.
Gold is a naturally occurring element. You dig it up from the ground. It has some specific qualities that make it desirable. It doesn’t tarnish. It is extremely malleable - you can hammer it into sheets that are only a few molecules thick. Collectively, earthlings have decided that it has a value above and beyond what it can practically be used for. We are willing to kill for it. Only a fraction of what is mined gets used, the rest is hoarded in maximum security vaults. When we entered the Depression, our currency was still directly tied to this mutually agreed-upon value of gold.
It makes no more sense to base a monetary system on gold than it does to base it on beads made of shells. The people who lived in the Americas before the Europeans arrived used wampum. Made of tightly string lines of small shell beads, it was a universally recognized unit of value that made trade between differing tribes possible. Similarly, cowrie shells were used in many Polynesian counties as a method of payment. To this day, it is still occasionally used for payment in the Solomon Islands. You can find cowrie shells on the beach.
Diamonds are valued the world over, too. While they have industrial uses, they are primarily valued because they can be cut into shapes that twinkle and sparkle. Yes, they can be used on precision drill bits, but we covet them because they’re pretty.
They have value because we’ve agreed that they have value. We can look at three gold coins or three strips of cloth with cowrie shells woven into them, and depending on where we are, understand what they represent.
When we dropped off the gold standard, our paper money which used to represent an actual quantity of gold, started to just represent the idea of gold. When we get a handful of bills out of the ATM, and we feel like we have something of value, but really all we have is a stack of paper rectangles. We think we have something because we’ve collectively agreed that it IS something. The new cryptocurrencies are even less tangible than that. There’s no actual there, there. Our economies throughout the world run on nothing more than faith.
Unlike the basic home in Rustburg, the new house in Lynchburg had electricity, gas, indoor plumbing, and a telephone. There was a coal-burning range in the kitchen for cooking. It ran in all seasons except summer when they would use a gas or a kerosene stove instead. In addition to cooking, the range also heated up a tank of water attached behind it. It was piped into the bathroom for hot baths. During the summer, you had to heat a vertical coil above the kerosene stove for about twenty minutes before you needed it. If the top foot of water in the tank felt warm to the touch, then you likely had enough warm water for your bath. Like the house in Rustburg, there was an icebox on the back porch. During the warmer months, the ice man brought the ice that was needed, and it was placed in a compartment in the cabinet. You’d hang out a card with the amount you wanted - 100, 50, 25, or 12.5 pounds. The iceman would chip that size block off a larger block in his cart and, using a big set of metal tongs, wrestle it into the box.
Most of my dad’s childhood years fell during the ten-year official period of the Great Depression. During those years, he remembers seeing men downtown whose feet were wrapped in newspapers covered with burlap and tied together with string. That said, he doesn’t have any specific memories of deprivation. He was a kid. He had fun. He had some fancy toys such as a small pedal car he could sit in, but he also made toys out of anything at hand and got into trouble playing in the dirt. They had a little dog named Willie that they all loved. When my sister and I were kids, we heard stories about Willie constantly. My grandparents likely experienced many stressful times during it, but they seem to have tried to keep the worst of it from my dad and his sister.
As lawyers, my grandfather and his father were much better off than many others were. Whatever happened, there was always a need for lawyers. They were never rich, but they got by. My grandmother taught school. There was always a need for teachers, too. Eunice and Morris had an old 1926 Chevrolet that they managed to keep running almost until it fell apart. To get it going, it needed to be cranked in the front. If you didn’t do it correctly, the kick-back when it engaged could break your arm. My father remembers my grandmother in her Sunday best, shooing off the men who all tried to get it going with brute strength and, instead, finessing it started with a deft flick of her wrist.
Each year when it came time to get new license plates for the car, my grandfather left it in the garage for three months because he couldn’t afford the full year’s fee. After three months, he could get plates for the rest of the year at a discounted rate. During the gap, they all got to where they needed to go by streetcar. The plates were always in place by the time summer rolled around and everyone went swimming out in the river at Holcomb Rock.
Hester & Hester had to put many people into bankruptcy during that period. Families would get into trouble and be forced to liquidate their belongings. They could keep a minimum number of beds, tables, chairs, and a few small personal things in exchange for having their debts erased. So many of their other clients either routinely delayed their payments or never paid them at all, but the $15 fee they got for bankruptcies was given top priority in the distribution of assets. Those payments kept the family afloat.
The Salvation Army which had been going since the Civil War, set themselves up on the corner of Main and 9th, right near the family law office, to solicit donations to help the ever-growing number of people in need. They had a loudspeaker that broadcast “Who’s afraid of the Big Bad Wolf” from the 1933 Disney movie The Three Little Pigs. It repeated endlessly throughout the day and drove the Hester men crazy.
Herbert Hoover was in office during the crash and its aftermath. While he was in office, the worldwide gross domestic product fell by an unimaginable 15%. To put that in some sort of perspective, during the crisis in 2008, the GDP only lost about 1%.
In England, when things start going south politically, a no-confidence vote can be called to try to replace the Prime Minister. It is exactly what it sounds like. People lose the feeling that the person or party they’ve chosen to lead them is up to the task and decide to choose someone else. If the person in question can change people’s minds before the vote, then they keep their job. It’s not a scientific process, it’s an emotional one.
In the United States in 1932, there was a feeling of hopelessness. There did not seem to be a way out of the economic hardship. Nobody thought that Hoover was doing enough but nobody could agree on what he should be doing. While he was running for office, Franklin Delano Roosevelt promised everyone economic recovery with what he called a “New Deal.”
People believed him. He received more of the popular vote than any Democratic nominee had before that. FDR was elected by a landslide.
In Rustburg, news came via the newspaper. The train tracks into town ran down at the back of their house. My grandfather had an agreement with the guy who ran the mail car that as the train slowed down on its way into the station, he’d throw the newspaper into their backyard.
Television hadn’t been invented yet and radios were still a rarity in people’s homes. My great-grandfather had a small Philco radio, but my grandfather didn’t feel that they could afford one for himself. When they moved back to Lynchburg, they would go down the street to my great-grandfather’s house every Sunday night to listen to Eddie Cantor.
Just before the end of Hoover’s term, though, once FDR had won the election, Morris bought one like it for himself. The first thing that my father remembers hearing on it was Roosevelt’s inaugural address on March 4, 1933. “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.” My grandfather believed that Roosevelt would make a difference. He believed in him enough that he splurged on a new radio just to hear what he was going to do. That is a perfect example of consumer confidence.
Historians, who don’t agree on much when it comes to the Depression, seem to agree that the beginning of the recovery started with Roosevelt’s election. In March of 1933, thirteen million people were unemployed and almost every bank was closed. A massive drought had turned the middle of the country into a dust bowl. People wanted to believe Roosevelt when he said that things would get better and, slowly, they did. Consumer confidence rose. The Federal Art Project, one of the five main programs under the Works Projects Administration put thousands of artists to work. Today, our country’s museums are filled to bursting with the incredible pieces that were created. He took us off the gold standard and created the whole Social Security program we have today.
During the worst of the coronavirus pandemic, when we were all unemployed, the government paid us weekly stipends. Those payments kept the wheels of our economy moving forward. We could buy things from factories that were employing people to make and distribute them, and those people could, in turn, buy things for themselves. A government that always complains about not having enough money for social programs suddenly found billions of dollars to give back to all of us.
We believe that the system will work, and that belief is pretty much what makes it work. When our faith in it wavers, someone needs to assure us that it’s all fine so that it can continue. It’s sobering to think that there is nothing more substantial than that holding us up, but there isn’t.
During the Great Depression, the life they were living was what my dad knew. He may not have consciously worried about anything during that time, but as an adult, he carried his parents’ worries about money to his grave. Clearly, they didn’t keep as much away from him as they thought they did. Children will listen.
My mother is younger than my father by twelve years and she didn’t grow up in this country, so she never lived through a period like that terrible decade. As kids, my sister and I would roll our eyes every time my father would complain about how expensive something was. Did we need the thing we were begging him for? No, we just wanted it. My father was ten years older than most of my friends’ dads. Those guys didn’t live through that either. My father often did without. The rest of us… not so much.
Things get better when we start to believe that they will get better. Fear can throw us off the path of our faith very easily. We are living through a time, now, that is the perfect example of that. Half the country is terrified that “others” will take what they have - their jobs, their land, their guns. They have lost faith in the agreements that we all live by and put their belief behind a con man who promised to save and protect them by excluding all of those “others”. ‘The rule of law’ is a phrase that has been repeated often enough that, like ‘consumer confidence’ it has lost its meaning.
When people talk about how fragile our democracy is, they aren’t kidding. It is just a soap bubble of collective belief. It needs all of us to keep it aloft.
What do we want our lives to be? They can be whatever we want them to be, we just have to believe in them.