THE HARD TIMES ALMAMAC

Miami Herald, The (FL)
April 17, 1994
Author: MICHAEL BROWNING Herald Staff Writer


I fell into a deep Depression the other day.

At an old bookshop named Bartle's, there was a 1932 almanac, priced at $7.50. (It only cost 60 cents when The New York World Telegram published it.) Printed on cheap newsprint, its 944 pages were brown and brittle. A whole year lay within it, a year of utter despair.

The stock market had crashed five years earlier. America was at rock-bottom, bludgeoned by economic forces no one could begin to understand or remedy. In neat tables of figures, some so small they have to be picked out with a magnifying glass, could be read tales of ruin, coolly laid out without much comment. The country was going to hell, and nobody could stop it.

A vast distance seems to separate those times from ours. The events described in the old almanac seem to take place in a faint rushlight, in muted, twilit hues that were hardly more than black and white. Some things seemed familiar -- in the year in review, 1931, there was trouble in Yugoslavia; there were political prisoners in Cuba; Florida was recovering from a terrible hurricane. Some names still resonate -- in 1931 Al Capone went to jail; Mohandas Gandhi got out of jail, and Knute Rockne was killed in a plane crash.

But overall, there is a strangeness about those starveling days that sets them sharply apart from ours. Today, beset with all the problems and uncertainties of the final decade of our millennium, it is some small comfort to look back to really hard times. Nostalgia, as someone said, isn't what it used to be.

The almanac said some 6.05 million were out of work in 1931, three times as many as in 1930. By 1932, this figure would nearly double, to 12 million. The able-bodied labor force was reckoned at about 50 million. Soon one in three working Americans would be jobless.

In 1930, some 26,355 businesses failed, involving assets of $442 million. A total of 640 banks failed, losing assets of $308 million.

But this isn't the full story. A separate set of figures shows 1,345 banks had "suspended" business, and only 147 had re- opened. The assets involved here were $864 million. Modern research now puts the total stock losses for 1929 at $50 billion.

Land of Opportunity

Trying to sound upbeat in his 1931 State of the Union address, President Herbert Hoover praised the "notable absence of public disorders and industrial conflict," and lauded the "remarkable development of the sense of cooperation in the community."

For a nickel you could buy a Blue Book pamphlet titled: "Herbert Hoover, the Fatuous Failure in the White House."

Desperation screeches politely from the ads at the front and back of the almanac. Become a railway postal clerk and earn $2,700 annually -- send away for this manual and learn how! Enroll in radio repair school! Learn accounting! Become a private detective! Learn how to fix cars! "Men! Big Opportunity is Here in Electric Refrigeration!"

I read the almanac in a hotel room near Interstate 10, with a color TV and air conditioning, a few miles from the vast Eglin Air Force Base, whose weaponry today is probably powerful enough to have conquered the whole world in 1932. In 1932, the United States had three aircraft carriers and 16 battleships. Starting pay in the Navy was $21 a month. There were 118,750 soldiers in the regular U.S. Army. Britain had the world's largest navy, with 1.15 million tons. The United States had tonnage of 1.12 million.

In 1931, American troops were involved in peacekeeping missions in Haiti and Nicaragua. President Hoover pledged they would all be home soon. There was a small flotilla of U.S. Navy vessels patrolling the Yangtze River, in the heart of China.

The "public debt" of the United States was $17.31 billion, and each citizen's share of this debt was $134.40. Today, of course, it is $4.5 trillion and we each owe over $17,000. The entire projected federal budget for 1933 was $4.6 billion. Today it is $1.3 trillion.

Government was smaller. How small? The White House staff numbered 43, of which all but four were men. As of June 1931, there were 71,000 "civil servants" in Washington, 545,144 outside Washington. The entire federal bureaucracy in Washington would have fit inside Miami's Orange Bowl.

The total U.S. population, as of April 1930, was 122,775,046. (The 1990 census counted over twice as many Americans: 248,709,873.) The average life expectancy of Americans in 1930 was 55.33 for men, 57.52 for women. (Today it is 67.8 and 75.6, respectively. It would seem that women have gained more than men over the past six decades.)

In 1931, there were 513 millionaires in America. Letters cost two cents to send first class. Post cards were a penny. An airmail letter was five cents for the first ounce. Playing the stock market, or what was left of it, was a rich man's game. Individual shares of blue chip stocks were remarkably expensive. AT&T was a mind-boggling 178 5/8. IBM was 150. Coca-Cola stood at 50 3/8.

Income tax rates started at 1.5 percent on the first $4,000 of earned income, and ran up to 25 percent for incomes of $100,000 or over. An American earning $10,000 would pay $101.25 in income tax.

The Untouchables

Prohibition was still in force, but people were getting fed up with it. It cost $11.3 million to enforce the "National Prohibition Act" in 1931. A total of 63,177 people were arrested. Some 8,499 automobiles were seized. Seized also were: 21,541 stills, 5.3 million gallons of beer, 291,582 gallons of wine, 1.934 million gallons of spirits and 32 million gallons of mash. Some 1,016 cases were filed in Florida, of which 1,010 ended in guilty pleas. Cirrhosis of the liver ("hobnail liver") deaths were 9.1 per 100,000 in Florida, one of the highest in the nation.

Drugs, by contrast, were scarcely any threat at all. "The Government is inclined to the opinion that there are not more than 100,000 narcotic drug addicts in the continental United States at present, these figures representing a liberal estimate," the almanac says on page 307. In 1931, the United States imported 134,092 3/4 pounds of opium; 340,328 1/2 pounds of coca leaves ("of which 221,997 1/2 pounds were for medicinal purposes"). Where the rest of the coca leaves ended up isn't specified.

Accurate figures on drug abuse today are hard to come by, but it is estimated that 75 million Americans have at least experimented with one illegal drug or another, in their lifetimes.

In 1928, the latest year for which information was available, the prison population of the United States was 116,626. In 1992, it was 883,592. Some 83 men and one woman were executed in 1928. Last year only 38 people, all male, were executed.

The social fabric was less frayed. Only 17 percent of marriages ended in divorce in 1930. Marriages were legally hard to dissolve. Divorce was permitted in Florida for "cruelty, violent temper, habitual drunkenness, physical incapacity, desertion of one year, former marriage existing or relationship within prohibited degrees." (Hawaii, still a territory, allowed divorce for leprosy.)

Blacks scarcely exist in this almanac. When mentioned, they are called "Negroes." There were 11,891,143 "Negroes" in America in 1930. Today, according to the 1990 census, there are 29,986,060 blacks.

Some 2.29 million blacks were enrolled in "Negro Public Schools." The total population of school-aged blacks was estimated at 3.2 million, so only about two out of three blacks were being educated. Four million people were illiterate in the United States that year, 83,242 of them in Florida -- 7 percent of the population. This still put Florida well above Alabama (12 percent illiterate) or Mississippi (13 percent).

On a single day, Feb. 27, 1931, six blacks were sent to the electric chair in North Carolina, for the murder of two white men. "They went to their deaths calmly and with prayers on their lips," the almanac reports.

There were 21 lynchings in 1930, One particularly horrific incident happened in Maryville, Mo., on Jan. 12, 1931, involving a black man named Raymond Gunn, accused of killing a schoolteacher. "The schoolroom furniture was piled about the building. Gunn was forced to mount a ladder to the roof and creep to the ridgepole. Shingles were removed to permit him to be fastened by chains to the rafters. Roof, floors and furniture were drenched with gasoline and a moment later a burst of flames reached the Negro. The victim waved at the mob once before the flames reached him. He was dead within about ten minutes. The crowd on foot and in automobiles around the scene of the lynching extended a mile along the roads in four directions."

The almanac mentions that there had been 4,308 lynchings in the United States since 1885. The biggest single year was 1892, which saw 255 lynchings, of which 155 involved blacks. Lynching figures were supplied to the almanac by the Tuskegee Institute, which kept a record for its "Negro Year Book."

The Old Florida

Florida was an agricultural backwater with a population of 1,263,548 when the almanac was published. That included 854,585 whites and 401,733 Negroes. Miami's population was 110,637. Illiteracy among whites was 7.1 percent and among Negroes 18.8 percent. Blacks numbered 431,828 or 29.8 percent of the state. Jacksonville was the biggest city in the state, with 129,549 people. There were 164,000 telephones in Florida, and 58,446 radio receivers.

For some reason the almanac is careful to give breakdowns on Jewish population. It says there were 13,402 Jews in Florida in 1927, not even 1 percent of the population. There were 25,116 blacks in Miami, 43,967 in Jacksonville. Florida State University had 1,719 students, all of them women. The University of Florida had 2,388 and John Tigert was president.

"Florida is of coral formation, with no high elevations, and in the southern part are vast swamps, the Everglades, which are being drained and provided with roads to make available large potential agricultural wealth. In the interior is a coniferous, tree-clad, sandy region where citrus fruits have been developed," the almanac says. Florida produced 14.5 million boxes of oranges and 12 million of grapefruit, 8,000 boxes of limes and 6,000 boxes of pineapples, all valued at about $50 million. The state also produced 3.2 million tons of phosphate.

Florida was still recovering from the great hurricane of 1928, the almanac says. Property loss was reckoned at $25 million. The storm left 17,884 homeless and killed 2,000, according to the Red Cross. To make matters worse, there was a medfly infestation in 1929, the year after the hurricane, which caused crop losses of $10 million. Apart from the Red Cross, there was no help to speak of from Washington, no tents or trailers from the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA). People just took it on the chin.

There were 9,064 auto fatalities in the entire country over the 52-week period ending Oct. 3, 1931. Of these, 59 were in Miami, a little over one per week.

Baseball ruled American sports in 1931. The St. Louis Cardinals won the World Series and each player received $4,484. The Philadelphia Athletics lost, and each player received $2,989. Max Schmeling was heavyweight boxing champion. Twenty Grand won the Kentucky Derby. There was no pro basketball, only six small regional conferences in which colleges played each other. Football, too, was limited to colleges, and the University of Florida had an awful year, beating Auburn and North Carolina State, tying South Carolina, and losing all the rest of its games, four of them without scoring even once. Even in those days, it took faith and patience to be a Gator fan.

Section: TROPIC
Page: 14
Copyright (c) 1994 The Miami Herald