For example, historian Amity Shlaes reports that in 1931, for a sustained period of time, the residents of Salt Lake City abandoned cash transactions. Money had become not only scarce but unreliable, because its purchasing power was not predictable. So the people of the city turned to bartering system.
Other Americans looked to subsistence farming. The nation living through the Great Depression was only a generation or two removed from a lifestyle earlier in the nation’s history, when many families provided for nearly all their own wants and needs. Many people experiencing the Great Depression had heard stories of self-sufficient living from their parents and grandparents. Some were old enough to have experienced it themselves.
As it became clear that the government’s attempts at help would reach only a few individuals adequately, thoughts of subsistence farming turned into action, and handfuls of people in various parts of the country radically changed their lifestyle, as Amity Shlaes writes:
The improvisation was not confined to Utah. Communities across the country were beginning to find new ways to get through the trouble. Out in California, city people were beginning to think about moving to abandoned farms, taking up plows, and trying to make a life independent of money. Back east, Ralph Borsodi, an author and social thinker, was readying a book titled Flight from the City, about his own family effort to live on the land an hour and three quarters outside New York. Borsodi concluded that self-sufficiency of the family was the new ideal, that with his poultry yard of fat roasting capons, his self-built swimming pool, and his apiary, he had found the solution to downturns like that of 1921 or 1929. The family ought to be the next factory.
For the majority of the nation’s people, subsistence farming was neither desirable or possible. But the movement manifested both people’s creativity and their desperation.
Other experiments included turning to the black market to defy various regulations. If the government was unable to help most people, why would those people want to obey the rules imposed on them, especially when those rules were imposed with the promise ending their misery? The regulations, in fact, often increased the suffering.
It’s worth remembering that the Great Depression was a worldwide phenomenon. Not only the United States, but nations around the globe were profoundly impacted. As people realized that governments were inadequate to face the situation, they turned to their own creativity, inventiveness, and ingenuity.
