New opportunities for children in the great depression in the United States

The Wall Street stock market crash in October 1929 was the symbolic beginning of the Great Depression in the United States. Part of an international financial crisis with distinct histories in industrialized nations throughout the world, the Great Depression in the United States continued through the 1930s and did not end until the massive wartime mobilization launched at full speed after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941. Of course the experiences of individual children and their families varied as the Great Depression dragged on in the 1930s for more than a decade. Race, class, ethnicity, and region were important factors. Some children were barely touched by the era’s hard times. Others suffered terribly with hunger and homelessness as the nation’s economic activity fell to its lowest levels in US history. For those already living in poverty before the Great Depression, the New Deal helped to ease their circumstances. Overall, most children and families found that the Great Depression meant making do with less, while facing a very uncertain future. Nevertheless, Robert McElvaine cautions that anyone who views the 1930s as only grim misses much of its flavor and significance. The era is also important for its political and social innovations as well as cultural changes more often attributed to the post-war period. Examining the history of childhood and the experiences of young Americans high-lights the dramatic changes in politics, society, and popular culture that shaped the complex history of the Great Depression in the United States. Most important for the nation’s youngest citizens, the decade solidified in public policy, law, and popular culture a modern American childhood defined as a protected and dependent period of life from birth through at least age seventeen. This prescription was not a new idea, nor was it a reality for the majority of young people growing up in the 1930s. However, during the Great Depression the public embraced this ideal and young Americans accepted it as a right for all children in normal times.