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Thursday, 23 October 2008

The Great Depression

By Linda Hillin of Texas to Oregon

As I write this post, I have beside me a document from the November 1935 term of the court, a document giving a bank the power to foreclose on my father-in-law, taking everything he owned. One month following this date a baby girl, the tenth child of this family, was born.

Here was a man, thirty-eight years old, with a wife and ten children, ranging in age from the unborn to 16 years of age. This action would take away the farm equipment he used to make a living for his family. He was not a land owner, so he would have to move his family off the land and out of the house he was renting.

Can you imagine the thoughts that crossed his mind that day? How did he feel looking out over the sandy fields with fence rows piled high with sand blown there by the wind; the fields where he planted corn and cotton.

What were his thoughts when his family came to the table that night for supper. When he looked down at his plate and looked around the table at the mouths of hungry children, did he know where food would come from for the future? When he looked at his pregnant wife and saw the worry on her face, what were his thoughts? What about the child with diabetes?

It was hard for banks to sell the farm equipment they were repossessing. It often sat in a field decaying. Would it not have been wiser to let the farmers keep their equipment? The following items were listed in the foreclosure order.

• One bay mare mule 10 years of age, 16 hands high, of the value of $100
• One bay horse mule 10 years of age, 16 hands high, of the value of $100
• One black mare mule 10 years of age, 16 hands high, of the value of $100
• One mouse-colored mare mule 10 years old, 16 hands high, of the value of $100

(Family members who knew these mules have told me their names were Tom and Ada; Black Gal and Liz.)

• One second-hand riding cultivator of the value of $25
• Two second-hand riding planters of the value of $50
• One sulky plow of the value of $25
• One farm wagon and farm bed of the value of $25
• Three tons cotton seed of the value of $100
• Six hundred bushels corn of the value of $240
• Two bales seed cotton of the value of $100
• Ten tons hay of the value of $80
• Crops from the land consisting of 50 acres of cotton and 50 acres of corn and other grain and hay

There was more sorrow to come with the death of his wife, only 37, in 1937. She was so full of life, so petite she could stand under his outstretched arm the day they ran away to marry in 1917. The death of the diabetic daughter, at age 14, followed in 1938.

"No Congress of the United States ever assembled, on surveying the state of the Union, has met with a more pleasing prospect than that which appears at the present time. In the domestic field there is tranquility and contentment...and the highest record of years of prosperity. In the foreign field there is peace, the goodwill which comes from mutual understanding."

- Calvin Coolidge, December 4, 1928

"Prosperity is no idle expression. It is a job for every worker; it is the safety and safeguard of every business and every home. A continuation of the policies of the Republican party is fundamentally necessary to the future advancement of this progress and to the further building up of this prosperity."

- Herbert Hoover, Campaign Address, Madison Square Garden, October 22, 1928

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Posted by Ronni Bennett at 02:30 AM | Permalink | Email this post