Cities in the Great Depression

Throughout the industrial world, cities were hard hit by the Great Depression that began in 1929.

Europe

Britain

In Britain the industrial areas were hard hit, as well as Wales. London and the southeast were relatively less hurt. In 1933, 30% of Glaswegians were unemployed due to severe decline in the heavy industry. There was widespread and long-term male unemployment, and in protest against this, 'hunger marches' were arranged by the National Unemployed Workers' Movement (NUWM). These included a march of 2000 people in 1932, two further national marches in 1934 and 1936, and a march of 200 blind people to London, also in 1936. It was in this climate that Jarrow Borough Council, on 20th July 1936 decided to present a petition to Parliament, delivered by men who had marched the 300 miles to London. They called this their 'crusade', partly to emphasise the seriousness of their plight and partly to distinguish their march from those of the NUWM - whose connection with the Communist party raised the spectre of revolution.

Germany: Berlin

In Germany, the depression reached its worst in 1932, with 6 million unemployed, spread throughout every city. From 1928 to 1932 unemployment in Berlin soared from 133,000 to 600,000. In Hamburg, a port city, the numbers went from 32,000 to 135,000. In Dortmund, in the Ruhr industrial region, it went from 12,000 to 65,000. Berlin verged on political chaos as Communist and Nazi paramilitary forces fought for control of the streets. Overall the Nazis were weakest in the largest cities, which were controlled by Socialist and Communist parties (and in Catholic areas, the Center party).

United States

America's larger cities in the 1920s enjoyed strong growth. With the end of large-scale immigration, populations stabilized and the plentiful jobs in the cities pulled families upwards in terms of social mobility. Investment in office buildings, stores, factories, utilities, streets, and, especially, apartments and single-family homes, added substantially to the infrastructure, supported a very strong construction industry, and bolstered confidence that even better times were ahead. After 1929, the optimism ebbed away, overwhelmed by a deepening pessimism that made long-term private investment seem inadvisable.

The Depression's damage to large cities, suburbs, towns and rural areas varied according to the economic base. Most serious in larger cities was the collapse of the construction industry with new starts falling to less than 10 percent of the norm of the late 1920s. Although much needed work was deferred, maintenance and repair of exisiting structures comprised over a third of the private sector construction budget in the 1930s. Devastating was the disappearance of 2 million high paying jobs in the construction trades, plus the loss of profits and rents that humbled many thousands of landlords and real estate investors.

Second came the general downturn in industry, especially heavy manufacturing. Steel in Pittsburgh and Gary and automobiles in Detroit took the heaviest hits, along with railroads and coal mining. In these sectors, the largest cities suffered somewhat less than smaller mill towns, mining camps and railroad centers. Unemployment was a problem everywhere, but it was less severe among women than men, among workers in nondurable industries (such as food and clothing), in services and sales, and in government jobs. A sharp educational gradient meant that the less skilled inner city men had much higher unemployment rates than the high-school and college educated men who lived in outer zones and suburbs. Although suburbia stopped growing, it did not suffer nearly as much as the central cities. While some unemployed came to the cities looking for relief (especially African Americans), it appears that even larger numbers of unemployed returned to family farms. For the first time ever, the movement of native population was away from cities and toward rural America.

The fiscal soundness of city and county governments was challenged by the rise in relief expenditures and the sharp fall in tax collections. The Hoover administration had encouraged state and local government to expand public works projects, which they did in 1930 and 1931. While this expansion may have slowed the rise in unemployment, the spending was a luxury that could not be borne in the face of falling tax revenues and the unwillingness of investors to put more money into municipal bonds. After 1933 new sales taxes and infusions of federal money helped relieve the fiscal distress.

While local relief focused on providing small sums of cash or baskets of food and coal for the neediest, the federal programs launched by Hoover and greatly expanded by the New Deal tried to use massive construction projects to jumpstart the economy and solve the unemployment crisis. ERA, FERA, WPA and PWA built and repaired the public infrastructure in dramatic fashion, but did little to foster the recovery of the private sector. In sharp contrast to Britain, where private housing construction pulled the country out of depression, American cities saw little private construction or investment, and so they languished in the economic doldrums even as their parks, sewers, airports and municipal buildings were enhanced. The problem in retrospect was that the New Deal's investment in the public infrastructure had only a small "multiplier" effect, in contrast to the high multiplier for jobs that private investment might have created.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt had a magnetic appeal to the city dwellers,(let us not forget that FDR was the one who followed in Britain's footsteps and moved away from the gold standard) especially the poorer ethnics who got recognition, unions, relief jobs and beer thanks to the President. Taxpayers, small business and the middle class voted for Roosevelt in 1936, but turned sharply against him after the recession of 1937-38 seemed to belie his promises of recovery. Roosevelt discovered an entirely new use for city machines in his three reelection campaigns. Traditionally, local bosses minimized turnout so as to guarantee reliable control of their wards and legislative districts. To carry the electoral college, however, Roosevelt needed massive majorities in the largest cities to overcome the hostility of suburbs and towns. With Harry Hopkins his majordomo, Roosevelt used the WPA (1935-1942) as a national political machine. Men on relief could get WPA jobs regardless of their politics, but hundreds of thousands of well-paid supervisory jobs were given to the local Democratic machines. The 3.5 million voters on relief payrolls during the 1936 election cast 82% percent of their ballots for Roosevelt. The vibrant labor unions, heavily based in the cities, likewise did their utmost for their benefactor, voting 80% for him, as did Irish, Italian and Jewish voters. In all, the nation's 106 cities over 100,000 population voted 70% for FDR in 1936, compared to his 59% elsewhere. Roosevelt won reelection in 1940 thanks to the cities. In the North the cities over 100,000 gave Roosevelt 60% of their votes, while the rest of the North favored Willkie 52%- 48%. It was just enough to provide the critical electoral college margin. With the start of full-scale war mobilization in the summer of 1940, the cities revived. The new war economy pumped massive investments into new factories and funded round-the-clock munitions production, guaranteeing a job to anyone who showed up at the factory gate.

Canada

Main Article: Great Depression in Canada

Canada's economy at the time was just starting to shift from agriculture-based to industry-based, and was the worst-hit (after the United States) becuase of its economic position. It was further affected as its main trading partner (until 1942) was England, followed by (and eventually becoming) the United States, both of which were badly affected by the Great Depression.

The hardest-hit cities were in Southern Ontario, as they were where much of the production in Canada was located, but the Prairie Provinces were hit the worst. Hamilton, Ontario was (and still is) Canada's largest steel-manufacturing city, analogous to Pittsburgh. Windsor, Ontario also took a devastating blow, being a general manufacturing center, and home to auto manufacturers, much like its larger neighbour, Detroit, Michigan. In Ontario, unemployment skyrocketed to roughly 45% (levels not approached again until the late 1980s and early 1990s during the tenure of David Peterson and Bob Rae). Much like in the United States, the Government of Ontario decided to start numerous Public Works projects (such as freeways, dams, bridges, tunnels, and so on) in order to employ people and lessen unemployment levels, much like the New Deal. By 1937, the province's unemployment levels began to recede towards their pre-crash levels. It was during this time that the Queen Elizabeth Way, Highway 2A (which would later become Highawy 401, and the roots of today's 400-Series Highways were sewn.

The Prairie Provinces and Western Canada were the hardest-hit, and did not even begin to recover until 1939, the eruption of World War II. Out west, many farming families felt they could not sustain a living with crops such as corn and wheat when their demand plummetted and prices offered went down to a third or even a quarter of what they formerly sold for, so they would move towards nearby centers such as Calgary, Alberta, Regina, Saskatchewan, and Brandon, Manitoba.

As if to pour salt on a bleeding wound, many state governments in the United States immediately pressured their federal government to put tariffs on Canadian wheat, as it may have fought for shelf-space and for the few dollars that people had to spend. The result was the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, passed on June 17, 1930.

The Federal Government initially refused to offer large-scale aid or relief to the provinces, much to the anger of provincial premiers, but started a Canadian "New Deal" type of relief by 1935. By 1937, the worst of the Depression had past, but it left its mark on the country's economic landscape. Atlantic Canada was reduced to fishing and shipbuilding, as many of the industries headed to Ontario and Quebec in hopes of staying solvent.

The public at large lost faith in both the Liberal Party of Canada and the Progressive Party of Canada. This caused the rise of a third party, composed of the Labour Party of Canada (which would become the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, a socialist party that achieved some success before joining the Canadian Labour Congress in 1961, becoming the New Deomcratic Party.

Further reading

World

• The World in Depression, 1929-1939 by Charles P Kindleberber (1986.)
• The Nazi Economic Recovery 1932-1938 by Richard J Overy (1996).
• The Nazi Voter: The Social Foundations of Fascism in Germany, 1919-1933 by Thomas Childers (1983).
• Timothy Hatton and Roy Bailey, "Unemployment Incidence in Interwar London" (2000) online at [1]

• George Orwell. Down and out in Paris and London (1930) Online at [2]; commentary at [3]
• Llewellyn Smith, The new survey of London life and labour (London, 1930-1935). Data available at [4]

United States

• JoAnn E. Argersinger, Toward a New Deal in Baltimore: People and Government in the Great Depression (1988)
• Roger Biles, Big City Boss in Depression and War: Mayor Edward J. Kelly of Chicago (1984).
• Douglas L. Smith, The New Deal in the Urban South (1988)
• Charles H. Trout, Boston, The Great Depression, and the New Deal (1977).

External links

• The Kings Highway
• The Windsor Star