Great Depression and the Middle Class

Experts, Collegiate Youth and Business Ideology, 1929-1941

Mary C. McComb

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415648134
• eBook ISBN: 9781135526870
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Great Depression and the Middle Class: Experts, Collegiate Youth and Business Ideology, 1929-1941 explores how middle-class college students navigated the rocky terrain of Depression-era culture, job market, dating marketplace, prospective marriage prospects, and college campuses by using expert-penned advice and business ideology to make sense of their situation.

Chapter One

Great Depression and the Middle Class: Experts, Collegiate Youth and Business Ideology, 1929–1941

It has been rightly said that no man is broke who has kept a sense of values…. A sense of value usually is the one thing that you have to cling to when everything else is gone. A sense of values creates a new horizon for which you can set your new course when the financial winds have deserted you.¹

“A Sense of Values” The University of Michigan Daily, July 3, 1932.

Young people and experts alike raised questions about what to value during the harsh years of the Great Depression. The crash of the stock market in 1929 and the ensuing years of financial hardship represented an emotional and economic earthquake that shook the foundations of established social, cultural, political and economic institutions to the core. The impact of the crash displaced people, both literally and figuratively, with many Americans losing their homes, jobs and savings. Others endured less dire material setbacks, yet experienced an extreme sense of psychic dislocation, feeling that they had lost their footing and established place in the world.

Writings from the Depression era portray an initial sense of mass befuddlement at the beginning of the crisis, followed by a collective sorting through the psychic rubble left in the crash’s wake. The Depression proved particularly harrowing for middle-class Americans who were raised to embrace the ideal of competitive individualism and the notion that hard work and individual striving would lead to material and emotional security. The pecuniary and psychic crises assaulted people’s sense of identity, often creating the notion that if one’s personal worth could be measured in dollars earned, so too could one’s personal worthlessness.² Middle-class college students and expert authors participated in the sifting process by writing articles and books that raised questions about what to value, what to discard, how to define success and how to rebuild some concrete foundation on which young people could construct their futures.

Members of the middle class expressed a range of fears about the impact that the Depression might have on them. They worried that the destabilizing reverberations from the stock market crash had the frightening potential of acting as a leveler of social class distinctions or, worse yet, being the harbinger of a class-based revolution. The effects of the stock market crash in 1929 had affected the poorest people first, but by 1932 members of the professional middle class began to feel the repercussions of the financial fallout.³ People who were fortunate enough to have jobs still experienced financial setbacks, with the amount of money paid out in salaries decreasing by 40% and wages dropping by 60%.⁴ These rapid economic and social changes prompted questions about where things had gone wrong in the past, how to fix them in the present and how to prepare for the future. Middle-class youths who had grown up during the prosperous 1920s learned from their parents and teachers that if they worked hard, saved their money and planned wisely they would be guaranteed access to the American Dream, which usually included a salaried job, marriage, children, a house, a car, mass-produced consumer items and household appliances.⁵ The Depression robbed young members of the middle class of this sense of security, challenged their belief systems and raised the question of why they should value hard work and ambition when so many dedicated workers were fired and people who wanted jobs could not find them.⁶

In the early years of the Great Depression politicians repeated the promise that prosperity was “just around the corner,” yet with strikes, marches and rallies occurring around the country on a regular basis the potential for a mass class-based uprising hung heavy in the air. As the Depression wore on with little relief in sight, radical notions began to circulate in the national discourse. Many Americans feared that a proletarian uprising could occur at any time; journalists and politicians alike began predicting that revolution, not prosperity, might be lurking just around the corner.⁷ American citizens from all age groups and socioeconomic backgrounds responded discursively to the pecuniary and psychic repercussions from the stock market crash. Some people wrote letters to the editors of their local papers suggesting ways to deal with the Depression. Students, parents, unemployed people, social workers and scientists generated theories about how the government and individuals could best cope with the crisis. Most of these suggestions for solutions did not make it into the upper echelons of national governmental policy making, yet the politicized writings of Americans created a national discourse that played out on the pages of daily newspapers, magazine columns and student campus newspapers during the early years of the Depression.

Much has been written about working-class people organizing around a shared socioeconomic-political identity as a means to empower themselves during the Depression era, but little has been written about the middle-class retrenchment process. Historians examine the political, economic, social and cultural currents of the Great Depression, but their work often ignores the lives of middle-class youths and the particular gender and racial dynamics of the middle class.⁸ Some images of the Depression include working-class employees engaging in sit-down strikes, masses of forgotten men standing up to a faceless bureaucratic government, Dorothea Lange’s haunting images of the Dust Bowl and married women workers quietly trudging off to their jobs under the harshly-critical eyes of the larger society. Historians have done an excellent job of portraying the dynamics of these large-scale struggles. Many studies of Depression-era American culture have explored the plight of these forgotten men and the backlash against married women workers, but few have focused on the struggles that young, college-aged, unmarried middle-class women and men faced.⁹

Michael Denning argues in The Cultural Front that during the economic disruptions of the Depression, people in the United States took a communal turn to the left, which resulted in the “laboring of American culture.” This process, like earlier social struggles for the abolition of slavery and suffrage for women, reshaped American culture and promoted a profound and lasting transformation of American mass culture.¹⁰ Denning’s excellent text reads working-class cultural productions including songs, manifestos and dramatic performances as a means to explore working class organizations, movements and cultural productions generated during the Depression era and beyond. While Denning’s work provides provocative insight into the laboring of American culture, it fails to elucidate how middle-class youths of the 1930s coped with the Depression and how gender and race issues figured into the process. Denning’s contention that during the 1930s many Americans, including people from both working class and middle class, embraced the rhetoric and ideals of the labor movement, including collective bargaining, joining unions and supporting solidarity among their ranks, overlooks a tenacious defense of middle-class exclusivity. Middle-class people who grew up in the competitive, individualistic, capitalist system of the United States often favored preserving their individual freedoms and pursuits, more than they valued collective organizing.¹¹

My intervention is to look at the class-based discursive formation that occurred on college campuses during the 1930s, by examining the discourse produced by middle-class collegiate youths at Amherst College, Mount Holyoke College, George Washington University, Howard University and the University of Michigan and middle-class experts including sociologists, psychologists, professors, etiquette writers and mass-market manual authors who produced written texts between January 1930 and January 1942.¹² This book explores how expert authors and college students articulated their middle class status during the crisis of capitalism in the 1930s. It examines how students struggled to define themselves in an uncertain world where a college degree no longer guaranteed immediate employment after graduation and how students learned to use the language of the marketplace to cope with the crisis of capitalism. During the stressful years of the 1930s, experts and students formed symbiotic relationships in an attempt to articulate and define a middle-class position appropriate to the national crisis. The successful reproduction of the taken-for-granted American standard of living was disrupted by the economic, social and political dislocations generated by the Depression, so collegiate youths and experts banded together to create a discursive rationale for the downturn in their economic and social status.

Even in the face of an extreme crisis of capitalism, Americans wanted to maintain the level of well-being they had before the crash of the stock market as well as a certain level of respectability within their community.¹³ At the simplest level, during the first few decades of the twentieth century, many members of the middle-class had attained an “American Standard of Living,” meaning that middle-class Americans enjoyed a sense of material comfort, security and abundance on a daily basis.¹⁴ In this paradigm, consumerism became a primary mode for pursuing individual happiness and prestige.¹⁵ Middle-class consumer-citizens who had felt solidly self-aware of their positions on the social, political and economic fields of the 1920s were thrown off balance by the market upheaval and began to question their place in the larger hierarchies.¹⁶

Middle-class experts and collegiate youths of the 1930s coped with the emotional and economic dislocations of the Great Depression by creating discourses that relied on the language of the marketplace as a means to shape their individual senses of identity while creating a collective set of middle-class standards and norms to which they could abide. They collaboratively created a vision of a stable future that drew largely from the past and used the language of business and commerce as a retrograde solution to a current problem.¹⁷ Experts and students effectively pieced together bits of the scientific-management and business rhetoric of the 1920s and combined them with the gender norms of the pre-feminist era with the hope that the mixture of ideologies would provide them with a sense of stability that the Depression had greatly disrupted. Middle-class youths and experts appeared to embrace the notion that if they aligned themselves with the corporate order they would be protected from the worst effects of the Depression. The language of the marketplace and business ideology bled over into the realms of fraternity and sorority life, rating and dating and marriage and family life because the economic crisis was so ongoing, far-reaching and seemingly endless that it made an impact on all areas of culture. Depression-era students and experts attempted to make sense of their situation by using the tools they had on hand, including the language of business efficiency, scientific expertise, normative values and adjustment that were popularized by prominent sociologists, psychologists and business people of the 1920s.

Expert authors and middle-class collegians alike espoused the tenets of liberal individualism and methods of self-commodification as key tools with which to navigate their way through the economic and emotional quagmire created by the Great Depression. Liberal individualism places primacy on the individual person; individuals are encouraged to “think only about themselves, about their shares and about whether their rights have been respected or violated and whether they have received or failed to receive their fair share.”¹⁸ People who embrace the ideology of liberal individualism often believe that people can be the most effective agents when they are allowed to carve out for themselves “the most extensive set of rights and the largest bundle of commodities” that they can obtain.¹⁹

Students of the 1930s who were struggling to obtain the symbolic capital of a college degree definitely had interests in obtaining as many privileges, rights and commodities as they could in a time when economic capital was in short supply. Symbolic capital encompasses diverse elements including prestige, recognition and power in one’s social circle.²⁰ In this system, economic and symbolic interests are deemed equally viable since the accruing of symbolic capital often is intrinsically intertwined with reaping real social and material benefits.²¹ Agents seeking prestige draw on their educational, cultural and material resources as they attempt to seize the dominant culture in an acceptable manner. If agents’ legitimate attempts to appropriate culture fail, they will question the grounds on which legitimacy was bequeathed. These competitions and conflicts regarding the legitimate culture create hierarchies of what is seen as possessing social worth and prestige.²²

By contrast with labor union emphasis on the collective and on the need to unite to get better wages and treatment in the workplace, the middle class embraced individualism and a seemingly selfish set of values. The experts and the students both upheld individual agency as the key for coping with the systemic crisis. Both groups agreed that nonmaterial qualities including personality, charm, frame of mind and values should be the criteria used to calibrate the social standing of young people.²³ During the Depression era these evanescent symbolic goods became, for many people, more valuable than material assets. At the same time, the language of competitive striving and the constant evaluation of self and others mimicked the calculations of profit-oriented businesses. The parlance of emotions and economics intermingled in a discursive domain where investing financially and emotionally, taking stock, calculating one’s worth, reading the price tags of life and performing personality inventories all were depicted as viable means to reap profits in the social world. In addition, the concept of confidence, or lack thereof, appeared in countless advice books about monetary and mental malaise. During the 1930s, many economists posited that a lack of consumer confidence caused the Depression to continue unabated. Meanwhile, psychologists repeatedly informed young people that their lack of personal confidence, in the form of the dreaded Inferiority Complex, created the conditions for an ongoing bout of emotional depression.

The young people who grew up in the 1920s and attended college in the 1930s were privy to an ongoing cultural discourse rife with commercial messages and business terminology that had emerged full-force during the first decades of the twentieth century. Middle-class Americans of the 1920s and 1930s regularly utilized the concepts of markets, customers, suppliers, laws, trends, schedules, timetables, statistics, grades and profit margins to make sense of their daily lives.²⁴ College students and expert authors of the 1930s relied heavily on the language of the marketplace to express themselves, and planned on using self-commodification to find a job, score a date, or seek out a marriageable mate.

Self-commodification processes functioned differently depending on a person’s gender. Young white women were encouraged to commodify and sell themselves on the dating and marriage marketplaces. Experts and peers often advised females to fashion themselves into marriageable mates who were attractive, appealing and willing to submit to the leadership of their husbands. Women in the dating and marriage marketplace competed against one another for male attention. Men were expected to compete in the commercial marketplace to attain jobs. These gender-based forms of competition and self-commodification became a bit skewed in the 1930s because women, often out of financial necessity, began competing against men in the commercial marketplace for jobs. Self-commodification required self-promotion, marketing oneself just like any other product. In 1931, writer Henry Adams explained that men needed to recognize themselves as commodities that were up for sale on an open market and they needed to use business methods to compel their elders to buy them as investments.²⁵ Conceptualizing humans as investments both reduced people to commodities while simultaneously valuing them as commodities, so the concept could be read in differing ways depending on an observer’s vantage point.²⁶ Some youths embraced the principles of self-commodification to present themselves in the best light to marriageable mates or potential employers. Other college students resisted the standards of self-c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter One Great Depression and the Middle Class: Experts, Collegiate Youth and Business Ideology, 1929–1941
• Chapter Two Why Are We Here? How Do We Sell It?: Life on Campus, 1930–1934
• Chapter Three Selling Out or Buying In: Ritual, Tradition and Standardization, 1931–1935
• Chapter Four The Marketplace of Romance: Rating and Dating, 1935–1940
• Chapter Five The Price of Wedded Bliss: Companionate Marriage and Its Discontents, 1935–1940
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index