Impacts of the Great Depression

 In 1929, the Great Depression started. There is dispute as to what triggered the depression, but the stock market was over-leveraged with margin loans. When stock prices began to fall, these loans were called due. However, they could not be repaid even after liquidating other assets. These liquidations caused banks to fail as people pulled their money from institutions amid rapidly falling prices. They wanted to hold their money in hand and not risk their bank failing and losing the money. Of course, this was a self-fulfilling prophecy causing many banks to fail.

The Federal Reserve did not attempt to intercede, instead watching as the market "corrected" itself. Because of this inaction, the depression had global effects. Recovery didn't take hold until the mid-1930s with some areas not recovering until the late-1930s. Let's look at changes in the lives of of my grandparents during the Great Depression.

Elroy Shephard 

Let's visit first, Elroy and Madeline Shephard. In 1900, they had married and moved to Spring Valley, Minnesota where Elroy was a cashier in a bank. It was here that they began raising five sons, including my father. The family experienced great changes during the Great Depression.

In 1930, we find Elroy and his family moved to Lancaster, Ohio where he had taken employment as an insurance salesman. In 1935, he took a job with the Crosset Manufacturing Company in Tomah, Wisconsin. By 1953, he had returned to his roots in finance by becoming the City Treasurer for Tomah, a position that he held for over 8 years. He died in 1963, before I had a chance to meet him (at least to my memory).

My father was ten when the Great Depression started, possibly not old enough to fully understand the causes, but old enough to be see and be affected by the changes. He grew to adulthood during the recovery and I'm sure that this event drove much of his financial decision making throughout his life.

My mother's father, Kurt, was a civil engineer in Wisconsin, working for the Federal Bridge Company prior to the Great Depression. In order to stave off failure, the remaining banks became very conservative in making loans and much construction was halted. By 1930, he had changed industries, now using his engineering skills as a machinist in a motor works plant. He was able to keep his family in Waukesha and was not forced to move unlike what appears to have happened to Elroy and Madeline.

My mother was eight at the onset of the Great Depression. She later became an accountant, a skill she may have learned helping her mother with the family budget during these perilous times.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Musings on the Spencers in Colonial Hartford

My meanders begin in Colonial America; Hartford, Connecticut to be exact. Thomas Spencer, my 9th great-grandfather is one of the town's founders. (See foundersofhartford.org ). I have noted the history of the settlement during the lifetime of my ancestor.  Reverend Thomas Hooker was a Puritan and was forced from England by the Archbishop of Canterbury. In 1633, he sailed from Holland to the colonies to escape further persecution, settling in Cambridge. He formed a church with an assistant, Samuel Stone, who had been born in Hartford, a hamlet north of London. In 1635, he decided that the Boston area was too crowded and left for Connecticut with about 100 people from his congregation and some cattle. They started a settlement to the north of the Dutch outpost, House of Hope, from New Amsterdam. Connecticut derives from the Algonquin word, quinnetukut , which means "long, tidal river". Hartford means "deer crossing", so it is thought that Samuel Stone suggested th...
Read more

Possible causes for the Peikerts to immigrate from Germany

 Julius Peikert and his wife, Emma nee Hauser, immigrated from Loiusenfelde, Prussia (now Brandenburg) to New York in July 1885. They were aged 32 and 27 respectively. Germany was doing better than most of Europe at that time, what drove the immigrations from Germany to the US during that time? In the mid-1800s, many Germans and Irish migrated to the United States. The Irish came because of the potato famine, the Germans came to escape political persecution. The Germans in the middle of the century came with money and so were able to spread out across the US with major centers in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. When emperor Bismarck came to power in Germany, he began consolidating the various states and building alliances with Austria/Hungary and Italy against France. The German empire had great influence over the Nordic countries as well as the Netherlands. This was the Germany that Julius and Emma grew up in. It was becoming a world power and cautiously eyeing Russia's desire to grow...
Read more

Grandparents meet in South Dakota - farmer Shephard's son and the miller's daughter

Image
 From the last post, we found how my great-grandfather's family wound up in Howard, South Dakota where my grandfather was born. But how does the son of a corn farmer in the 1880s meet and fall in love with a young woman who lived about 40 miles away. What chance encounter could they have had? My grandmother's father, James Cox also came to South Dakota as it opened up in the early 1880s, He took up residence in Alexandria, in neighboring Hanson County. I'm sure he knew many of the farmers in the area because his occupation listed on the 1880 census in Illinois was Miller. I'm sure he saw the frontier as a way to start a new life being one of the first millers in a land opening up for farming. In 1900, the Coxes moved to Howard. Elroy and Madeline were married in Howard in 1908. So did they meet earlier? Probably not, they probably met after the move for the first time and had a normal courtship. Though I cannot find a tie through their occupations, it was agriculture th...
Read more