The
fear of scarcity during the Great Depression gave rise to diverse social
changes that drove American progress in new directions. A child growing up in the middle of the
Depression may not have been aware of the hardships and difficulties their own
parents faced, which would have seemed much harsher given that the memories of
the Roaring 20s and the pre-Great War economic boom were still fresh in the
adult minds. Events that adults use to
mark the passage of their lives are not as easily accessible to children
because “general and historical conceptions play only a secondary role [in
memory]: they actually presuppose the prior and autonomous existence of the
personal memory”, and a child’s personal memories are limited in both scope and
meanings of events (Maurice Halbwachs, "Historical Memory and Collective Memory", pg. 58-59).
A Field for
Three
Standing in a Wisconsin field, 12
year-old Vera Whaley (later Zike) likely had no point of reference to compare
the general suffering in 1937, while she posed for a photo clutching what would
become her most prized possessions, two dolls named Maize and Patsy. Her beaming smile tells a story that almost
seems to conflict with the well-trodden path of the historic narrative; her
picture speaks of the happiness of a child.
“Parents and children each have their own interests,” and the world of
adults is to a child “an unknown land” (Halbwachs, pg. 62).
However, the adult world of the time
doubtlessly caught up with her parents, as economic hardships forced her
father, a horse trainer, to move the family from her birth-state of Iowa, and
later drift multiple times between Wisconsin and Michigan in the 1930s in the
search for work—a common Depression-era story.
Had she not had access to “ready-made reference points” from history and
collective memories external to her own perceptions, she would only have
recalled the entirety of the Depression in the child-like terms and “images of
lesser events”, (Halbwachs, pg. 58-59).
Personal memories that she relayed to her own children were the dissatisfaction
of moving to new towns with new schools, forced to leave old friends behind,
but one could hardly say that she remained unaware of the greater historic
significance because she had reference points to fix her personal memories to
collective and historical memories.
