This study of class during the Great Depression is the first to
examine a relatively neglected geographical area, the northern
plains states of North and South Dakota, from a social and cultural
perspective. Surveying the values and ideals of the old middle
class -- independent shopkeepers, artisans, professionals, and
farmers -- Catherine Stock presents a picture of Dakotans' cultural
life in the 1920s and 1930s and tells of their efforts to come to
terms with the enormous social change brought about by the New
Deal.
According to Stock, the depression not only destroyed Dakotans'
economic foundations but also bankrupted their community
organizations and undermined theirsocial relations. She shows that
Dakotans' social values, characterized by notions of
neighborliness, loyalty, hard wok, upright character, and
individual enterprise, were threatedened first by devastating
drought and subsequent economic collapse and then by massive relief
efforts and governmental intervention on an unprecedented scale. By
1940, one-third of all farmers who owned their land had lost it to
foreclosure, and the federal government had spent nearly half a
billion dollars to aid the region.
Stock argues that to Dakotans, the New Deal offered a trade-off
between autonomy, community, and local control, on the one hand,
and survival itself on the other. Dakotans, ambivalent toward
"progress," feared not only for their land, their businesses, their
families, and their communities; they feared for the survival of a
way of life. They responded, says Stock, by working to make sense
of the new world and find renewed meaning in the old.
Consulting varied sources such as diaries, autobiographies, oral
histories, and newspaper accounts, Stock includes women's voices as
well as men's. She integrates female perspectives on farm life and
old-middle-class community into the narrative as a whole and
devotes a separate chapter to women's experiences of the upheavals
produced by the Great Depression and the New Deal.
General
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