MEN, IMPACT OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION ON

In one of his more memorable lines, Franklin D. Roosevelt spoke in a 1932 campaign radio address of "the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid." In fact, large numbers of men during the Great Depression had good reason to feel forgotten—or worse.

FORGOTTEN MEN?

The Great Depression had, of course, extremely adverse effects on large fractions of the population of both sexes, but those effects were not entirely alike. The types of employment that had traditionally been classified as "men's work," particularly manufacturing jobs in heavy industry, were hit especially hard by the economic collapse and a resultant sharp drop in demand for most manufactured products. Many of the occupations previously defined as "women's work," on the other hand, such as teaching, clerical work, and domestic service, were not as hard hit. This differential left men facing problems beyond the direct economic ones that their loss of income produced.

It has often been argued that men's roles in society have to be artificially created and so are fragile and in constant danger. "It is impossible to strip [the woman's] life of meaning as completely as the life of a man can be stripped," anthropologist Margaret Mead wrote in 1932. For many men, the Great Depression went a long way toward stripping their lives of meaning. What had traditionally given meaning to men's lives were their roles as providers and protectors. Unemployment—or even the serious threat of soon becoming jobless, a potentiality that could be readily seen all around the men who did manage to hang onto their positions—quickly eroded one of these key components of male self-definition. If a man could not provide, was he really a man?

As John Steinbeck put it in The Grapes of Wrath (1939), men are more "breakable" than women. "Women and children knew deep in themselves that no misfortune was too great to bear if their men were whole," Steinbeck wrote. "The women watched the men, watched to see whether the break had come at last."

For many men in the 1930s, the break did come. Men who could not provide for their families during the economic Depression often fell into psychological depression. "Pa and Uncle John standing helplessly gazing at the sick man" at the end of Steinbeck's novel symbolizes the situation in which many men felt the Depression had left them. The women, Steinbeck indicated, could continue to do what they were supposed to do, which the author symbolized by having Rose of Sharon breast-feed an old man. The men, though, felt helpless. "I ain't no good any more," Pa Joad says earlier in the novel. "Funny! Woman takin' over the fambly. Woman sayin' we'll do this here, an' we'll go there. An' I don't even care."

MEN AT HOME AND ON THE ROAD

Filled with self-blame, their sense of being "real men" beaten down, many men spent more time at home, in the sphere that was traditionally the woman's place. Their presence there both increased the chances for friction between spouses and underscored the man's apparent inability to fulfill his expected role. He would not, after all, be hanging around at home during normal working hours if he were doing what a "real man" was expected to do.

"My father he staying home," a twelve-year-old Chicago boy wrote in a 1936 letter to the president and first lady that nicely captures the desperate and unaccustomed position into which many American men fell during the Depression. "All the time he's crying because he can't find work. I told him why are you crying daddy, and daddy said why shouldn't I cry when there is nothing in the house. I feel sorry for him." A man whose son feels sorry for him is not one who is likely to see himself as a "man" in the traditional sense.

Many married men took to the road, initially seeking work, but also escaping from the reminders that home and family constituted of their lack of success in their expected roles. Although most husbands who left home to try to find work presumably did so with the intention of returning, it was not unusual for them to disappear permanently. Desertion by men of their families increased markedly during the 1930s.

For those men who were not yet married, avoiding such responsibilities at a time when they had scant prospects of being able to meet them often seemed to be the most prudent course. And many young women did not seek to marry men who could not fulfill their traditional role. "I don't want to marry. I don't want any children. So they all say. No children. No marriage," writer Meridel LeSueur said of young women in a 1932 article. "The man is helpless now," she wrote. "He cannot provide. If he propagates, he cannot take care of his young."

A WORLD WITH NO PLACE FOR KNIGHTS

Men under such circumstances longed to return to what they believed to be the proper role for their sex. As "forgotten men," they wanted to be remembered—and restored to what they took to be their rightful position. That desire of men during the years of the Depression for a return to "the way things ought to be" in terms of the traditional roles of the sexes can be seen in a wide variety of the decade's popular culture. In the late-1930s Los Angeles depicted in Raymond Chandler's classic detective novel, The Big Sleep, Philip Marlowe finds himself in an environment that does not value traditional male virtues. He yearns for a world with a place for knights—a world in which men can play their roles as protectors, a world of damsels in distress, a world in which there are two kinds of women and a man can separate the virgins from the whores. He wants to be able to live up to his idealized male role, which he perfectly expresses as: "I work at it, lady. I don't play at it." To his deep dismay, he finds instead that "knights had no meaning in this game. It wasn't a game for knights." The game in which men found themselves by the 1930s was one in which the male-drawn line between virgins and whores had been blurred to the point where the only women in distress seemed to be whores. Chandler does not give us any of the more complex women who fit into neither category: From his binary perspective, if the weak, pure, helpless virgins are gone, all women must be whores. What Chandler wanted was what so many other men in the 1930s wanted: that people would "Remember My Forgotten Man." The song of that title, from the Warner Brothers movie Gold Diggers of 1933, well stated the male view of the way things ought to be: "Ever since the world began, a woman's got to have a man."

Men who felt threatened and insecure in their masculinity were prone to lash out, and a common target of their wrath was women. Women, Steinbeck wrote, "knew that a man so hurt and perplexed may turn in anger, even on people he loves." In his 1937 song, "Me and the Devil Blues," Mississippi bluesman Robert Johnson sang, "I'm gonna beat my woman, till I'm satisfied." The longstanding denial of the customary perquisites of manhood that led some African-American males to express such sentiments was spreading to a much larger segment of the male population as unemployment undercut the masculinity of millions of American men. Reflective of this change was the fact that men hitting women became a staple in Depression-era films, especially in the late 1930s. It seems that such vicarious assertions of masculinity struck a chord with men who were feeling insecure because of the Depression's undermining of their positions.

THE NEW DEAL AND THE VISION OF PROPER MASCULINITY

For its part, the New Deal, despite its progressivism in some areas (and notwithstanding the efforts of Eleanor Roosevelt to influence policy in ways that took the varying needs of women more into account), took a very traditional view of the proper roles of men and women. Although there were exceptions, New Deal programs were for the most part designed to provide work and income for men and to restore their position as "breadwinners." New Deal art often depicted such an ideal.

The psychological crisis that men faced during the Great Depression created a pent-up desire for a return to "normal" masculinity. World War II provided an outlet for this desire for a large number of men, but the postwar construction of a hypertraditional family in which "every woman needs a man" was a significant legacy of the unsettling effects the Great Depression had on men.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bird, Caroline. The Invisible Scar. 1966.

Chandler, Raymond. The Big Sleep. 1939.

McElvaine, Robert S. Down and Out in the Great Depression: Letters from the "Forgotten Man." 1983.

McElvaine, Robert S. Eve's Seed: Biology, the Sexes, and the Course of History. 2001.

Melosh, Barbara. Engendering Culture: Manhood and Womanhood in New Deal Public Art and Theater. 1991.

Mettler, Suzanne. Dividing Citizens: Gender and Federalism in New Deal Public Policy. 1998.

Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath. 1939.

ROBERT S. MCELVAINE

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