The Memory of Fear: Scarcity and the Consumer Culture

            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. 

One such reference point was the iconic images from the Farm Security Administration that preserved the 1936 scene Dorothea Lange directed her camera-lens toward, and became a nation-wide emblem, Migrant Mother, giving it a force and power to stir the emotions of people then and now, (Goldberg, pg. 136-139).  It also captured a meaning of the Depression that might have been outside the experience of any given individual collective apart from the subjects of the photo, except that national newspapers and magazines published and later republished it, exhibitions toured the world showing it, and artists re-imagined and repurposed the photo until at least 1973 (Goldberg, pg. 137-138).

            To her grandchildren decades later, Vera did not pass clippings from old newspapers, or copies of famous images, but she did commit to the future attitudes that children learn from their parents in succession generation to generation, and her prized dolls, Maize and Patsy, which she gave to her oldest granddaughter, Rose Zike.  Grandparents and grandchildren form a unique generational bond where children replace their own parents because both elderly and young are, “for different reasons, uninterested in the contemporary events that engross the parent” (Halbwachs, pg. 63).  What information about the past that survives from grandparents to grandchildren is first filtered down through the enduring hopes of the future collected over a life time; fears from the past find their ways directly from parent to child as the children observe yesterday’s contemporary events becoming tomorrow’s memory.

            The children of the Great Depression, becoming the young adults of World War 2, came into an understanding of the world that was much different from any previous generation in American History.  Between peace and war, domestic scarcity had at least touched every one of their lives, and had lasted for as long as they could remember.  However, the rise of abundance and consumption marked the following decades, which saw changes in food production, transportation, and a robust globalized economy (Imagining the Twentieth Century, pg. 98-99).  For all the Great Generation might have lacked in life, they made ways of providing for their own children, the Baby Boomers.

            One of the ways to enable that was the complete overhaul of the “depression-era wreckage of industrial America,” where “[c]ities were overly large and too disconnected from transportation routes and raw materials” (Imagining, pg. 108).  What started as FDR-sponsored work programs, ended up revolutionizing American infrastructure, and most notably, ordering of the transportation network.  Nighttime aerial views of the countryside began to look less like the haphazard dispersion of twinkling of stars, but by the 1970s and 80s it took on an appearance like a well-crafted circuit board found in the computers that were slowly becoming integral parts of modern life (Imagining, pg. 109).

            The Baby Boomers growing up in a time of plenty may have had a difficult time understanding their own parents’ stories of starvation.  Nonetheless, the habits of the Depression, both discovered by the Lost Generation and remembered by the Great Generation, were present throughout their post-war childhoods.  “Our grandparents leave their stamp on our parents. … Our parents marched in front of us and guided us into the future.  The moment comes when they stop and we pass them by” (Halbwachs, pg. 67).  The fear of scarcity survived a time of plenty in the living collective memories of the previous generations and became tangible by iconic images never completely forgotten.

On the Road to Yesterday’s Future

            Taking advantage of the opportunities presented by the new orderly transportation networks of the later-20^th Century, in May 1973 Duane Zike set out from Colorado bound for Ardmore, Oklahoma, to attend a 3-week truck driving school.  The results of that were a Commercial Driver’s License and enough practical experience to launch a life-long career in the transportation industry.  Only four months later, Duane became one of the last new additions before the governmental and global economic machinery ground to a halt for want of oil.  International relations between the US and the oil-producing Middle East nations had broken down resulting in an embargo against the United States.

            The U.S. Department of State’s Office of the Historian’s website states that the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) embargo was in response to America’s involvement in the Arab-Israeli War.  It triggered a series of product shortages across the entire nation the likes of which were unknown since the Depression and WWII.  The old fears enlivened in a new generation.

            This crisis, being the work of international politics, differed from the factors that caused the Depression, and the governmental regulations of the previous crisis were still in effect.  It only took one year before OPEC lifted the embargo, but not before the government took steps to free the American economy of the stranglehold of foreign states.  New oil fields opened in Alaska as construction resumed on the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS) in 1973, providing new opportunities for another of Vera’s children.

The Shiny New

            Standing in front of their owner-operator tractor, Phil Zike and his wife, Jackie, were setting off from Berkley, California, on a new direction, hauling parts for TAPS (with a short interlude of working for North American Van Lines in 1978).  The photo shows three new trends in the way Americans lived their lives.  First, husband and wife traveling freely across the entire nation while “on the job”; the notion of a separate work and home life from the 1950s was fading as a highly mobile population found their own new ways of living and making a living.  Second, it represents the rise of the private, independent contractor in traditionally “in-house” industries.  The workforce trends of the 70s and 80s that revolutionized Wall Street found a home on Main Street as well.  Third, despite the nation’s at-times-crippling need for oil, the new, job-centered nomadic American culture provided lucrative opportunities for those with the means. 

Conclusion

            As the photographs lapse from the time before our births into the age of our current remembrance, we may be tempted to view family albums as only personal records of private events frozen in paper, or perhaps collective memories best shared with those that were there.  They can be much more than that because the lives and deeds of our parents and grandparents shape the world we live in now.  History frames their personal and collective memories, and the moments they felt worthy of a photograph allow us to glimpse into a past beyond ourselves, although directly related to us. 

            The intersection of family archives and historical records reveals details that help us frame our own recollections in a deeper, more meaningful and personal way.  The three photos here examined, disconnected by decades and geography, on the surface only hint at a story of a mother and two of her five sons, but when we place them in their times, we find we can trace the changes in American society, and see history’s effects on a family.  Smiling faces in hard times can be difficult to reconcile with the history books and journalists’ photographs, but we take photos to remember the “Kodak story of the children” (Winter, pg. 7).