Local History

However hard times may be pressing down on the hearts and purses of the citizens of Rhinebeck,” observed the December 26, 1931, Rhinebeck Gazette, “there is no evidence of it in the spread of holiday cheer about town.”

Like a fair number of us, we had family that were born and grew up in the teeth of the Great Depression, roughly defined as extending from the October, 1929 Wall Street crash to 1939. “You never know when you might need it,” was a rallying cry of the age and for decades after for those who lived it. Throw something away? Well, the garage of my next-door grandfather 30-plus years after his demise still contains items that “might be useful someday.” Truth is, I’m guessing we all hope that day never arrives.

An adventure into the past

What’s the goal here today? To answer one big question: What did holiday times look like around these parts during the Great Depression? 

Trying to find out was an eye-opening, albeit highly informal, adventure for yours truly. It’s almost shameful to say, but for all my lifelong nose-poking into things history, my knowledge of the Great Depression is not exactly overflowing, and, in fact, it barely flows at all. After a spell, it dawned on me that what I’d done was file it all away as everybody universally everywhere was barely hanging on by their fingernails for that calamitous decade of 1929–1939. As it turns out, that’s not the whole story. A monolithic disaster? Not exactly, was my quickly growing sense of it all, as I blazed my way along the Great Depression path.

Left unsaid: Prior to the 1929 Wall Street disaster, despite the general overview that during the 1920s everyone was swimming in vast opulence, many were already sailing in that same rocking boat. “Pretty much everybody was in the same boat, and after a while no one really knew it,” I do recall my mom, who grew up in the 1930s, saying. Was the generation that experienced the Great Depression better equipped to handle the prevailing economic catastrophe in the first place? Did they sense that opportunity was right around the corner? Were they loaded with ingenuity and knew it? What indeed is up here? Hard to know. Clearly at least part of the issue here, it seems to me, is that for those of us not-so-well versed in the Great Depression, we’ve pretty much absorbed the Dust Bowl and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath version and considered our knowledge of the era full and complete. Little did I know that Dust Bowl life and Hudson Valley life during the 1930s were not exactly one and the same. 

1932 life at a glance

Let’s take a look at this situation from 30,000 feet, as the TV pundits are wont to say. What was life like during the Great Depression? Here’s a thumbnail sketch. In 1932, the unemployment rate in the United States was 23.6%, rising to a high of 24.9% the following year. A typical family dinner – for a family whose breadwinner was without work – might consist of a couple sliced hot dogs combined with some sort of pasta and a canned vegetable. A 1932 dollar would be worth $23.01 today. 

Meanwhile, here in the Hudson Valley, after poring through countless newspaper pages of the time and other assorted bits of information, it’s difficult to arrive at any other conclusion than this: The Great Depression be damned, the overall mood seemed to be, We are not going to die on this hill. “Woe is me/us” was not part of this lexicon, it seems. Does this speak to some indomitable spirit that lives in the Hudson Valley? A close-my-eyes-and-you-can’t-find-me attitude? Maintaining a stiff upper lip? Again, hard to know. But with that in mind, let’s take a gander at a few samples, non-scientific though they may be, of what was appearing in local newspapers around holiday time.

In the news:

It’s clear that accommodations designed to reduce the obvious glare of the exigencies of the day were underway. As noted by the Rhinebeck Gazette in mid-December, 1930, “The big, rosy apple that little Jennie used to put on the teacher’s desk the day the Christmas holidays began won’t be there this year. … For Willis J. Pells, principal of the local school, has sent a letter to the parents of all school children advising them that the teachers will not expect presents and further that the giving and receiving of them will not be permitted.” Mr. Pells would explain. “’We feel, however, that some children bring gifts that are too expensive; others, seeing these, are perhaps hurt; parents in some cases find it inconvenient to provide a gift for teacher; with several children in a family it may be a real burden.’”

A year later, with Christmas a week away, opined the Rhinebeck Gazette in an editorial page entry entitled, “The Christmas Spirit:” “How the spirit of Christmas is everywhere in evidence these modern days! Decorations are not confined to a corner in some room in the house. Mantles are not the only receptacles for candles on Christmas Eve and the night before is not the only time the Christmas lights appear. Front door, yard, porches, sun rooms, and windows the lights appear as Christmas approaches. Christmas trees, lighted and adorned, spring up from lawns and vacant spots adjacent to buildings, home or shop or store. … Everywhere there is Christmas cheer.”

Front page fodder and an inkling of distress

In 1933, widely considered the apogee of the Great Depression, in the absence of some foreknowledge it might be tough to discern that an economic crisis of any sort was underway when scanning the front page of the Rhinebeck Gazette three days from the Christmas holiday. 

Most conspicuous was a headline announcing, “Fifteen Working on Sewer Project; Plan Two Shifts.” Innocuous enough, even with the citation that the work was being done under the aegis of the Civil Works Administration, a government jobs program designed to quickly restore unemployed workers to the job force. Otherwise, the notice that the National Re-Employment Service would be in Poughkeepsie two days after Christmas to register unemployed individuals for the opportunity “to obtain work on any of the Federal relief projects” provided an inkling of distress. Otherwise, a fire company ball, the Rhinebeck Grange, junior gardeners, local church’s holiday activities, and similar provided pedestrian-level front page fodder. 

The New Deal

Wending our way to 1934, a year following the implementation of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, designed to lift the United States into recovery, the first dip in the U.S. unemployment rate – 21.7% from the previous year’s peak of 24.9% – since 1929 appeared, according to Investopedia. It was deemed the year the effects of the Great Depression began to ease.

Midway between the 1934 Christmas holiday and New Year’s 1935, the Rhinebeck Gazette looked back on the year and opined, “Why look back? We cannot change our record, nor recall for one minute the time which has passed. Forward is the word; ahead of it is the record we must make. We can mar it by despair and disagreement and inefficiency; or, we can enhance it by optimism, helpfulness, and effort. We can make of it a better record than the one which is closing. This is what we aim to do; and we point toward a better service for a bigger community; a better record for a better Rhinebeck.”

Eyes wide open

Jumping ahead to the 1936 holiday season, genuine optimism – as opposed, perhaps, to cheerleading – began to appear, just as I’d begun to contemplate the notion that the newspapers of the day were engaged in a Chamber of Commerce-type operation designed to keep everyone’s spirits, such as they were, up to the best of their abilities.

I’m not sure what exactly I expected but it wasn’t this – I confess to being completely befuddled by what revealed itself in all this poking around in my effort to gauge the tenor of the times. With that in mind, I backed up a bit and started including any time of the year in my research, thinking perhaps, in the effort to assuage the angst of the time, an informal moratorium was placed on what my shallow vision of the Great Depression had created in my head, that of caterwauling and gnashing of teeth and whatnot when holiday times rolled around. 

Nope. 

The remainder of the years were not treated differently. What had I expected? Tales of deprivation and misery? How little Johnny wouldn’t be getting a brand new, shiny bike this holiday season? No new doll for Janey? Well, yes. That is precisely what I’d expected.

None of this, of course, is intended to paint a picture that every day the sky was eggshell blue and the roses were perpetually in bloom throughout the 1930s, as evidence abounds to the contrary. There’s no question that things were not good for many. Yet, those of us, as in me, who arrived at the mouth of this particular cave with a specific vision of things, now take our leave with eyes more widely open. •