1930's Experts: True? -"enough food + money then"

[oscar111]

i have heard there was no shortage of food or money in the '3O's.

I heard grain was piled high in graineries.

I heard that huey long planned for everyone to have a home of his own, but some say "wasnt enough money for that plan".

Any big experts in here, have some documentation on this astounding claim of "more than enough"? It shocked me totally. Contrary to years of my school books.

{my cpr cant do PDF files, so please post any data here at DU}.

[Kagemusha]

1. I'll address one thing in particular.

If a group of farmers can't get a price high enough to justify shipping the grain from the granary to where it would be sold, the grain will pile very high in the granary indeed.

[Alex146]

2. Uhhh... sounds wrong to me

Maybe not. What do I know.

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

3. the Dust Bowl

and farm depression actually started in the 20s. There was a lot of land that, because of poor farming practices, literally dried up and blew away. Many people didn't have money, but since most people still lived on farms, I guess those folks were able to eat. My maternal grandfather was a doctor in a small town, and there was never any lacking of food (He also made sure the local minister and others had food if they were caught short). My paternal grandfather was a printer, from a neighboring town, and I didn't hear of him starving, either-he was able to send his son to college-the first in his family to attend.

I have seen newsreels of soup kitchens and many many people out of work, as well as the Dust Bowl victims. I think urban areas and the Dust Bowl areas were probably the worst hit during the Depression, and no, it wouldn't surprise me if food was available but that people couldn't afford to spend money to get it.

[left is right]

4. My dad says they lived one whole winter

on buckwheat pancakes and sorghum molasses. They grew the buckwheat themselves and traded some labor for the molasses. What's more he said they were glad to get them because otherwise they would have gone to bed hungry.

[Warpy]

8. My mother ate oatmeal three times a day

for nearly two years. She would never allow it in the house when I was growing up. She redeveloped a fondness for it, though, in the years before she died.

[converted_democrat]

29. Exactly the same as my grandfather and great aunts..........

Only it was beans. We could'nt put out baked beans at family functions until just recently.

[CTyankee]

5. My mother

who just died at 94 told me that she ate apples sold on the street during the depression. She was young and able and got jobs and was able to support herself. She was strong enough to survive, even if she didn't have money. She wanted to go to college but only her brother could go. He went to West Point because my grandmother convinced her Congressmen that he was qualified (which he was as a math prodigy).

I think that if you were young and strong you could probably survive the Depression. I'm glad my family members were so strong, for my own sake, but I don't know about others.

[oscar111]

13. Bell Curve describes strength in a population

widespread curve describes many things in Nature.

your family obviously, lucky to be on the high end.

Not slamming you, dear poster, but on a related topic -----
On another subject, the RW oft tricks folks with
" X climbed out of poverty, any who do not are just lazy bums"

well, the bell curve shows a few are strong, and can climb out while the rest of the curve are not strong enough, even with equal effort. Strength being athleticism and genius. We are simply not all born with athletic genius in our body/brains.

Poverty, a result of job shortage... is to blame, not laziness.

[benevolent dictator]

18. "Your family obviously, lucky to be on the high end."

Wouldn't it be true that all of our families were at least high enough on the curve to survive? I mean... if your mother or grandmother had died during the depression... you probably wouldn't be here.

:evilgrin:

[oscar111]

21. Benevolent, you are right LOL

i gracefully concede your point.

However, tho many on the lower end did survive, the poster i spoke to was indeed hi on the curve... one was young, one a prodigy and also young.

both referred to as "strong" relative to the curve in toto.

the word survive can also hide existences that are not much. another DU'er pointed out that eating from dumpsters and sleeping in an alley qualifies as survival for three million citizens in america today.

Americans --- eating from garbage.

And that is not the headline on the Evening Edition of the paper?

[area51]

35. "Poverty, a result of job shortage... is to blame, not laziness."

hear, hear.

-------------
"Prosperity is just around the corner." — Herbert Hoover
"The economy has turned a corner." — GW Bush

Herbert Hoover = GW Bush

Neither man cared about the Depression their economic policies created.

[punpirate]

6. It's pretty tough to find analyses today...

... that aren't highly revisionist--for this reason: we're living in the Roaring Twenties now, and there are a lot of people who don't want to admit that bubbles, in one way or another, are fueled by uncontrolled debt.

That's pretty much what caused the Great Depression... there wasn't enough money. Here's roughly how it worked. Banks loaned money for stocks, on very low margins. As long as the stock market bubble continued, the prices rose quickly enough that one could sell the stock, pay off the loan, and still show a profit.

When the bubble burst, the banks, more or less unregulated at the time, didn't have the reserves necessary to cover their losses--they were over-extended on loans, and weren't getting returns on those loans because the stocks fronting those loans were worthless.

Complicating the issue was that a significant amount (about 40%) of the real wealth in the country was tied up in the hands of the top 1%.

Further complicating the money situation was consumer credit for household goods--a very new thing in the `20s--particularly in urban areas. That also artificially pumped up production, which pumped up stock prices, and pushed the bubble more.

Eventually, as stock prices crashed, there were runs on banks--people withdrawing their money to avoid losing it when the banks failed. That accelerated the problem. More banks failed.

Therefore, money very rapidly stopped circulating, creating severe deflation. By 1931 or 1932, you could buy a loaf of bread for two cents--because many people didn't have the two cents. There was no real employment insurance, and as people were laid off (because no one had money to buy goods), the deflationary spiral just got worse.

The lack of money circulating in the system was the primary problem. This was exacerbated by Hoover, for two reasons. First, as all this began to happen, federal tax revenues dropped and there was danger of a deficit occurring. Hoover couldn't stand the thought of even a temporary deficit, so, second, he decided to raise taxes. He thought the wealthy were the engines of the economy, so he raised taxes on the middle class and left the taxes of the wealthy pretty much unchanged. That took even more money out of circulation, and actually accelerated the depression.

The economy didn't begin to recover until Roosevelt was in, and used deficit spending to get the economy going again--work programs such as the CCC and WPA gave people money to spend, and the greatly increased taxes on the wealthy instituted during the New Deal kept the government afloat while it subsidized the economy. Bank insurance programs such as the FDIC were implemented so people would trust putting their money in banks again, so banks could once again loan money for economic development.

Complicating matters is the fact that the 1929 agricultural harvest was not good (made worse by the Dust Bowl problems), so there was a spike in food prices which reduced disposable income, and that, along with the increased taxes, probably were the main reasons sending the economy into a tailspin.

Farms had food, and little or no money. People in cities lost their factory jobs because there wasn't enough demand for products, and could no longer spend to buy food or pay rent. (In the worst days of the depression, around 1931-2, there were 150 families a week thrown out on the street in Detroit--when Hoover wanted to campaign there, the mayor told him not to, and said that the Detroit police could not guarantee his safety.)

The favorite theme today of economists is, I think, that the depression occurred not because of a lack of regulation, but because people feared that the economy would turn down, and therefore, it did.

What puts the lie to that is that Roosevelt's constraints on previously unrestrained business worked. By 1938, life was beginning to get back to normal. Regulation was necessary, because business simply wouldn't regulate itself--particularly the banking industry.

Cheers.

[oscar111]

9. punpirate, another great post! PS would you know

how much money was in circulation at any time during the 3O's?

Today, we can just go to "the L 5 table" of fed reserve. But i see their historical data only begins in forty five.

perhaps someone else has that data, since surely Treasury existed then, and surely their records still exist. even fed reserve began about the 'teens, right?

[punpirate]

12. There may be some old records...

... in the Departments of Commerce or Treasury archives, but it would be trial to find them.

Y'know, just occurs to me--there might be some inkling of that in Kevin Phillips' Wealth and Democracy. He's got a lot of old figures in some of his tables on accumulated wealth, period by period, and the sources for that might a place to start looking.

Another thought might be to look in The Statistical Abstract of the United States, provided it goes back to the `30s (of that, I'm not sure at all).

Cheers.

[oscar111]

14. Promising leads, Pun. Anyone else have sources?

good post pun.

[fasttense]

17. Great post punpirate.

I've been studying the Great Depression lately and it amazes me how so many economic pundits fail to mention the middle class in their analysis of that economy. They go on and on how the wealthy were hording money, how most companies were overstocked. But they rarely mention that you had a large middle class that went from making it day to day to starving and on the streets in a matter of weeks. Your analysis is right on. The few analysis that quote actual figures and don't just give you fuzzy logic, agree with your post.

[punpirate]

19. Many economists today...

... want to see the Great Depression in terms of monetary policy only. That did have an effect--Hoover's Treasury tightened the money supply some in 1928 and 1929 to cool the market fever--so, the monetarists still think that's the reason and if they'd not done that, everything would be fine, or at worst, it would have been a recession. Not so. The market bubble, despite that constriction of money continued to expand in accelerated fashion--because it and the general economy were operating on huge debt--any hiccup was bound to have considerable influence.

Money supply does have an effect. By 1936, some of the New Deal programs had gotten some money moving again, and unemployment was going down, but late in that year, the Federal Reserve required new, higher reserve levels for banks, which constricted the money supply and unemployment rose again in 1937, because there was still excess production capacity.

There's just a strong tendency today among economists to manufacture excuses for not needing controls on business, and in particular, banks and the markets. They rarely mention, in that context, a very recent phenomenon of the negative effects of lack of regulation--the savings and loan failures of the `80s. If the pre-1933 environment had existed in 1989, the effects on the economy would have been dramatic. Millions of middle-class people would have lost their homes and savings in a year or two--precisely for the same reasons as in 1931 and 1932--bank failures from bad loans and excess debt.

The reason that didn't happen was that the risk to the middle class was partially absorbed by government and the losses were spread among all of society. FDIC and government intervention helped prevent a complete collapse of that segment of the economy.

That's part of the reason why I relate then to now--if the middle class is burdened by large debt and stagnating wages, the government is burdened by large debt and has reduced controls on business and the markets and the corporate structure is burdened by debt (the case today), what prevents a serious hiccup (say, a sudden drop in the dollar, or a sudden increase in oil prices, or the additional costs of further wars) to cause that house of cards to come tumbling down?

It's worth considering.

Cheers.

[teryang]

30. Great posts

my only comment would be that the savings and loan crisis was averted by shifting the risk to the middle class. Somebody had to pay for it and we did. The tax burden on the middle class was increased and economic opportunities were contracted as a result. But I suppose having an inequitable risk sharing device is better than none.

In connection with the systematic banking and government financial fraud was the emergence of gross inequities in the distribution of wealth which was noted by investigative journalists of the Philidephia Enquirer who described in detail it in the late eighties. Political chronicler David Phillips noted it as well and predicted the election of Bill Clinton as a result.

Unfortunately, the inequities continue and the risks are piling up.

[sendero]

27. Great sketch....

.... of the times.

I've taken comfort over the years in the idea that we've learned a lot about economics since the 30s, and that any reprise of a Great Depression would be managed much better.

Then I see the crop of fools running things and I realize, no matter what we all 'know' about economics, it only takes having a few idiots in power to throw it all out the window.

We shall see.

[kurtyboy]

36. One reason America had to wait until 1938...

...was that FDR did not believe in deficit spending, just like Hoover. The cuts he made to social programs in 1937 lurched the US economy back into recession from recovery, all for the sake of "balancing the budget".

If WWII had not come around in 1939, I doubt that FDR would have ever steered us out (completely) from the Great Depression.

JM Keynes predicted it, and FDR never listened....

[theoldgeezer]

38. I have to point out

that everything I've ever read concludes that even in 1938, unemployment had fallen only a small amount. Estimates are that at the worst of the depression, unemployment was in the low 20's percentagewise, and at the time Pearl Harbor was bombed in the 40's, unemployment had only fallen to 15 or 16 percent, as contrasted to less than 2 to 5 percent for most of the 20's.

That wasn't getting back to "normal". Maybe it could be more accurately described as people having become "accustomed" to high unemployment and difficult financial times.

[fasttense]

39. Very good summary punpirate. n/t

[Warpy]

7. There was food available

but most people had run through all the money they had trying to hang onto the stocks they'd bought on margin. With no money to spend, they stopped demanding any goods or services they could possibly do without, and the goods and services that were available simply piled up as people with no money went hungry and put cardboard or newspaper into their shoes to make them last a little longer. With no demand for goods and services, factories and stores simply locked their doors and put everyone out of work. People who had only a month or two left on a mortgage found themselves foreclosed by banks that were in bad shape, themselves. Other banks simply closed their doors after runs. The financial system of this country was in total meltdown. What was available was often destroyed in an attempt to keep prices up.

The country was in great shape, so Hoover said, with the pipeline chock full of everything people needed. What Hoover failed to note was that the people who needed it lacked jobs, paychecks, and the money to purchase what was available. To his credit (but too late) he tried to persuade companies to open their doors and hire workers they didn't need, but we all know how that goes. No rich man ever gave you a job he didn't have a customer for.

What was needed was an infusion of money at the bottom, and a popular song was "You Gotta Prime the Pump." Eventually Roosevelt figured this out, and did just enough to avoid revolution.

So yes, there was food available, at least in the first years. There just wasn't any way for hungry people to buy any of it.

[oscar111]

10. I put cardboard in my hole-y shoes during college. Not the '3O's either

i had holes in both shoes and needed that cardboard.

Then, i also lived on dry beans. exclusively. I knew a Paki student who lived on one meal a day, at my college here.

[oscar111]

11. Warpy, great post. Would you have any source

on food supplies for any year of the thirties?

It is mind-blowing that food was there, tho 225 outrigtht starved to death in Nyc, hospital record evidence. In 32, 33, those years you say prob had food.

[oscar111]

15. Pun - "families thrown out onto the street " in 3O's

funny you never read that phrase now, tho it still is going on full speed.

SF paper estimates two million more will become hmless in the coming year due to new cuts.

that is forty thousand a week, thrown out.

Or, about eight thousand a week in each state. Given five big cities per state, 1,800 in each big city nationwide, thrown out each week.
Given three/family... lumping individuals and normal families...

SIX HUNDRED FAMILIES THROWN INTO THE STREET EACH WEEK, IN A TYPICAL US CITY, IN THE COMING YEAR.

Punpirate, did you say 15O families/city {detroit} during the depression? Bush will dwarf that rate with 6OO/city, for every typical city.

FOUR TIMES AS BAD AS THE GREAT DEPRESSION -- bush's coming plan for evictions.

ps the homeless die at three times the normal rate. 1OO OOO/yr. excess deaths, currently.

[oscar111]

16. 100,000 homeless/yr, excess deaths due to hmlessness

it was at a line break in the post i made above, so the number was not perfectly clear. This is to make it fully clear.

deaths due to heat, cold, rat bites, hunger {12 million hungry, slated to go up another million with bush's coming cuts.}

If they even get medicine that needs refrigration, how are they supposed to keep it at 4O degrees when they are living in an alley?

You sleep well knowing you are behind a locked door. Imagine having no door - how well would you sleep?

Wages are lower than when reaganomics began... adjusted for inflation. Reaganomics {the basis of housing voucher cuts} is a flop. Toss reaganomics. House the homeless again.

[Warpy]

25. Unfortunately, it's not that easy

What you'll find are websites like this one, which details a picture of a roadside stand selling raspberries. The story it really tells is that the farmer had no market for such a luxury item, and was trying to sell it to passers by in order to get some income, any income.

http://www.beamccowan.com/foodand.htm

A cursory discussion of how farm income had fallen and why is at http://www.e-connections.org/lesson10/Tlesson10.html , detaling a decrease in demand while supply remained steady.

You're lucky to have found cases of starvation. Most people who starved to death in the 30s died of "pneumonia" or "heart failure." Very few coroners wanted to risk the wrath of the ruling class by telling the truth about their fellow citizens.

It's not unusual for food to be withheld from starving people. It's been done by hoarders all through human history. One of the most egregious examples of this was during the Potato Famine, when Ireland was producing enough non potato foodstuffs to feed the population, but most of it was exported while the peasants ate dogs, cats, grass, seaweed, and then pebbles, trying to keep their bellies feeling full.

[happyslug]

26. Minor Correction for Potato Famine

No one had Potatoes in Ireland during the Famine, the problem was the export crop (and what the landowners ate) was WHEAT not potatoes. The Wheat was shipped to London for sale (or made into bread for the landowners).

The poor Irish had become dependent on Potatoes for it was the richest form of food per acre they could plant. What really caused the hatred was the fact that the men worked in the wheat fields and could obtain food by eating the wheat (And that way NOT get caught "stealing") but if they tried to take any wheat home they were called thieves and arrested and the wheat confiscated. Thus you had a situation where the men saw their wives and children starved to death while they lived on. This just breads hatred and while the Irish claim their hatred of the English date back to the Middle Ages, prior activities of the English had been "Normal" massacres between peoples (i.e. what happens when you have two people in conflict, not always nice but also not something to "Hate" a people for. You hate the person who did the crime i.e Oliver Cromwell but not his fellow countrymen). The Irish Famine was something else. The English through their stupidity and greed caused the deaths and the men of Ireland could do nothing about it. This was NOT the product of War and the excesses of one or two men (Going back to Cromwell again as an example) but the product of a System that just did not care if people died. A system that was the product of the English people (as far as the Irish were concerned).

Thus the real hatred of the Irish to the English starts in the 1830s and related to the Irish Potato famine and the shipment of wheat from Ireland to London.

One more fact from the Irish Famine, the first two years of the Famine was elevated by the Prime Minister of England who purchased American Maize to the sold in Ireland (NOT at a profit, just resold to break even). His actions were found out by his Party and he lost the Prime Minster-ship. Thus people wanted to do something but the greed of the people who owned the Wheat prevented it.

http://www.victorianweb.org/history/famine.html
http://www.nde.state.ne.us/SS/irish/irish_pf.html
http://mars.acnet.wnec.edu/~grempel/courses/wc2/lectures/potato.html
http://www.humboldt1.com/~history/lexiso/

A more pro-British view of the Famine:
http://www.historyplace.com/worldhistory/famine/begins.htm

[Warpy]

32. Correction? I said FOOD.

There was enough FOOD to feed everyone in the country, but the landlords Exported it.

Yes, nearly all the potatoes that had sustained the poor were bad. That's what happens when the rich take the best of everything and leave the poor with a monoculture that barely sustains them.

Please save corrections for posts that truly need them.


Original paragraph: It's not unusual for food to be withheld from starving people. It's been done by hoarders all through human history. One of the most egregious examples of this was during the Potato Famine, when Ireland was producing enough non potato foodstuffs to feed the population, but most of it was exported while the peasants ate dogs, cats, grass, seaweed, and then pebbles, trying to keep their bellies feeling full.

You may think this is a quibble. I don't, since it's a lousy way to wake up and my pain meds haven't kicked in and I hate being "corrected" when I was already right....

[struggle4progress]

20. Hunger is almost always a matter of political powerlessness. eom

[oscar111]

22. "STruggle", agreed. Irish Potato famine: no shortage then: plenty potatoes

some PBS show in last year, said casually, the rich had stockpiles of potatoes, enough to feed all.

but they did not share the food.

HG Wells, in his fine LW "Outline of History" {which i recommend except for the RW part added after his death, covering WW2 and thereafter } ... commenting on the Europe-wide pesant unrest following the Black Plague, spoke of a similar lack of compassion in a different situation. Landowners saw decimated villages after the Plague, but insisted on the same farm rent paymemts as before.

[happyslug]

23. HG Wells Outline of History, a good start

Now the versions I read ended in the 1930s so I missed the additions after his death. The version I read had been printed between the war. It was in my house along with some other books from the time period (and may have been my Grandfather's books). These books were all in bad shape (Well read and abused). One of the books was Hendrick Von Loon's Geography. I read it and enjoyed the book. One of my favorite parts was reading about Serbia and Yugoslavia. Von Loon starts his description of Serbia by pointing out that the Great War had been caused by pigs. Serbia is seems only had one export product of any value, pigs. On the Adriatic Coast the best port is Trieste. Thus Serbia went to war with Austria to obtain Trieste. The problem was in the Versailles treaty Serbia obtained all of the Adriatic Coast EXCEPT FOR TRIESTE, which was given to the Italians. Von Loon wrote that Serbia obtained nothing but a future war with Italy (and in some ways he was right). Even after WWII Trieste stayed in Italian hands and was a point of friction throughout the Cold War between Italy and Yugoslavia.

Here is Von Loons "Story of Mankind"
http://www.worldwideschool.org/library/books/youth/history/TheStoryofMankind/Chap0.html

[fasttense]

33. It was my understanding that it wasn't so much potatoes

All potatoes in Ireland were hit by the blight. But these rich people were selling tons of lamb, beef and food to England while the majority of people in Ireland were starving to death, then dying from secondary infections such as dysentery. No one did anything because they believed in the "free market". Better that half the population of Ireland get wiped out than to mess with the magical "free market".

[Warpy]

34. Well, they had plenty of wheat, barley, mutton, lamb

beef, and fish and that's what they didn't share.

The poor had only potatoes, and only one variety of them, at that, and that's why they were so vulnerable when the potato blight hit.

The rich, then as now, thought that feeding starving people only made them weak.

[Robert Oak]

24. farmers

were dumping milk and grain because it wouldn't pay to harvest the
crops or bring it to market.

FDR, Henry Wallace (sec. of agriculture) started working on
government buying programs, subsidies to raise food prices so it was stable.

The dust bowl is a different story, different area of the country.

They had no government pgms from 1929-1934 to buy food distribute food
and so forth and there were riots.

A quick, good history lesson of the great depression, which you
can probably get at the library is this:

Great Depression, The: Series
--Former New York Governor Mario Cuomo hosts the A&E network's four-part examination of the social, economic, and political changes wrought by "Black Thursday" and the subsequent depression. Includes "Part I: The Great Shake-Up," "Part 2: Getting Away From It All," "Part 3: Striking Back," and "Part 4: Desperate Measures."

But, I don't know what books you're reading, this is fairly well known.

What's more interesting is how the factors leading up the great depression look really similar to now.

[ArmHayseed]

28. Money and food supply

Banking statistics for 1892 – 1941 are available at:
http://fraser.stlouisfed.org/publications/bms

“Total deposits adjusted and currency outside banks”

(Figures as of end of December in millions.)
1929 – 54,713
1930 – 53,553
1931 – 48,325
1932 – 45,362
1933 – 42,548
1934 – 47,985
1935 – 52,182
1936 – 57,351
1937 – 56,639
1938 – 58,955

From “America’s Great Depression” by Murray N. Rothbard

Page 228 - 229

As the depression struck, the FFB (Federal Farm Board) went into action. Its first big operation was in wheat, prices of which had been falling sharply for over a year. When first established, in August, the FFB advised farmers not to send wheat forward to market too rapidly, but rather to hold wheat in order to wait for higher prices. In September, it made additional loans to cooperatives to withhold stocks and raise prices. Yet the wheat price continued to fall sharply. On October 26, shortly after the stock market crash, the FFB announced that it would lend $150 million to wheat coops, at up to 100 percent of the market price, to try to hold up prices by keeping wheat off the market. Soon after the stock market cr4ash, the FFB established a Farmers’ National Grain Corporation, with a capital of $10 million, to centralize cooperative marketing in wheat and other grains……

At first, the FFB and Farmers’ National loaned money to farm cooperatives to hold wheat off the market, then, after prices continued to fall, the Farmers’ National itself began to buy wheat at the loan prices.

Page 231:

On June 30, 1930, the GSC (Grain Stabilization Corporation) had accumulated over 65 million bushels of wheat held off the market. Discouraged, it did little until late 1930, and then, on November 15, the GSC was authorized to purchase as much wheat as necessary to stop any further decline in wheat prices. Bravely, the GSC bought 200 million more bushels by mid – 1931, but all to no avail. The forces of world supply and demand could not be flouted so easily. Wheat prices continued to fall, and wheat production continued to rise. Finally, the FFB decided to dump wheat stocks abroad, and the result was a drastic fall in market prices. By the end of the Hoover administration, combined cotton and wheat losses by the FFB totaled over $300 million, in addition to 85 million bushels of wheat given gratis to the Red Cross.

It seems Hoover was the original promoter of ‘Trickle Down’. At the time of the depression $300 million was a huge amount of money. Had that money been pumped into the economy at the worker level instead of supporting the commodity prices for the benefit of a few of the favored co-ops and brokers the depression might not have lasted as long.

[Robert Oak]

31. Great Depression, very important study

Seriously. There are so many parallels to "Bush" and the
dismantling of social safety nets, easy credit, fraud in
securities, "bubbles", and erosion of unions, workers rights
in today's world and what lead up to the great depression.

FDR and all social safety nets, Keynesian economics are under
direct attack by the Bush administration and I personally
do not want a return to < 1934.

There is a 7 part series by PBS, called, "The Great Depression"
that a lot of libraries have, it's entertaining along with
being educational.

The problem is the people who remember what it was like before FDR
are dead, plus the Democratic party became the "corporate party"
instead of fighting for the working American people.

[theoldgeezer]

37. My parents lived through it

and it was one of the most formative parts of thier lives.

As far as there being "lots of money", there might have been somewhere, but not where they were. They lived in desperate poverty - both of them (well before they married) - and they didn't know anyone who DID have money.

As far as people starving... You know, a lot of people grew thier own food, and they shared with each other, and neighbors looked after neighbors. If there was a production surplus, I'm unaware of it, and certainly, it wasn't any significant factor in people's lives at that time.