Do people who lived through the "great depression" forget what it was like and did they forget to

[kiva]

22. A couple of things:

First, most of them are dead - my parents were born in 1914 and 1919, so would be 100 and 95 if they were still alive.

Second, it's a Walton (as in the TV show The Waltons) fantasy that everyone stuck together, it was the same as today, some people did and others didn't. I've heard (can't remember the source) that in a poll the majority of white Americans at that time thought that it was wrong for a black person to have a job if a white person didn't.

Hundreds of thousands of Mexicans (and some Mexican Americans) were deported. Whites from the southeast ("Oakies" and "Arkies&quot were migrant workers in California and the appalling way they were treated was documented by John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath.

Generations moved in together not because they necessarily wanted to but because they had to in order to survive. Men, ashamed of their inability to support their families, abandoned them. The divorce rate fell, not because people were more committed to each other during a bad time but because couples couldn't afford to get divorced.

Don't buy into the fantasy and tart up history, it's far more interesting when you look at what actually happened.