Not every worker lost a job during the Depression. Not every family needed aid. Most Americans, however, had to make do with less: less income, less food, and less security. Some families survived the Depression by pulling together. Parents and children shared homes with grandparents or other relatives to save money. Although the birthrate had decreased, school enrollment increased; because fewer young people could find work, they remained in school.

The strain shattered other families, however. Nearly two million men, and a much smaller number of women, abandoned their homes. They took to the road, drifting to warm places such as Florida and California.

Many people thought that women should not hold jobs if men were unemployed. Despite such prejudices, desperation drove many women into the workforce. Many families survived on a woman’s income, even though American women earned less than men. Women also worked harder at home to make ends meet. Instead of buying clothes or groceries, they sewed their own clothing, baked their own bread, and canned their own vegetables. Some women started home businesses such as laundries or boardinghouses.

The New Deal era opened doors for women in public life. President Roosevelt appointed the first woman ever to serve in the cabinet, Frances Perkins. He also named more than 100 other women to federal posts. One, Ellen Sullivan Woodward, started a program to give jobs to women. In 1932, Hattie Caraway of Arkansas became the first woman to be elected to the United States Senate. The best-known woman in American public life was Eleanor Roosevelt, who often acted as her husband’s “eyes and ears.” She made many fact-finding trips for the president because polio had limited his mobility. Mrs. Roosevelt campaigned vigorously for women and minorities and other humanitarian concerns. She wrote a daily newspaper column and used her boundless energy to meet people all over the country.

To make matters worse, the southern Great Plains suffered an environmental disaster during the 1930s. Hardest hit were western Kansas and Oklahoma, northern Texas, and eastern Colorado and New Mexico. The region was dubbed the Dust Bowl. Using new technology such as tractors and disc plows, farmers had cleared millions of acres of sod for wheat farming. They did not realize that the roots of the grass had held the soil in place. When a severe drought struck in 1931, crops died, and the soil dried out. Strong prairie winds simply blew the soil away. Each storm stripped away more soil. One storm in 1934 carried about 300 million tons of soil, depositing some of it on ships 300 miles out in the Atlantic Ocean. The drought, and the storm, continued for years. People called the storms “black blizzards.”

Thousands of Dust Bowl farmers went bankrupt and had to give up their farms. About 400,000 farmers migrated to California and became migrant workers, moving from place to place to harvest fruits and vegetables. So many came from Oklahoma that people called them “Okies.”

The Depression fell especially hard on the minority groups who were already on the lower rungs of the American economic ladder. These groups included African Americans, Native Americans, and Hispanic Americans. In the South, more than half of the African American population had no jobs. African Americans who lived and worked in Southern cities found their jobs taken by white people who had lost theirs. The collapse of farm prices crushed African American farmers. Seeking more opportunity, about 400,000 African American men, women, and children migrated to Northern cities during the decade of the 1930s. These migrants did not fare much better there, however. The jobless rate for African Americans remained high.

African Americans did make some political gains during the Depression. Roosevelt appointed several African Americans to federal posts. He had a group of advisers, known as the Black Cabinet, that included Robert Weaver, a college professor, and Ralph Bunche, who worked for the State Department. Mary McLeod Bethune, who established Bethune-Cookman College in Florida, also served as an adviser. African Americans continued to fight against prejudice. In 1939, opera singer Marian Anderson was denied permission to sing in Constitution Hall because she was black. Mrs. Roosevelt helped arrange for Anderson to give a historic concert at the Lincoln Memorial.

The 1930s did bring some benefits to Native Americans. The new head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, John Collier, introduced a set of reforms known as the Indian New Deal. Collier halted the sale of reservation land, got jobs for 77,000 Native Americans in the Civilian Conservation Corps, and obtained Public Works Administration funds to build new reservation schools. Most important, he pushed Congress to pass the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934. This law restored traditional tribal government and provided money for land purchases to enlarge some reservations.

At the beginning of the 1930s, about two million people of Hispanic descent lived in the United States, mostly in California and the Southwest. Many had emigrated from Mexico. They worked as farmers, migrant workers, and laborers. As the Great Depression deepened, resentment against Mexican Americans grew. Many lost their jobs. Politicians and labor unions demanded that Mexican Americans be forced to leave the United States. The government encouraged Mexican immigrants to return to Mexico. Authorities gave them one-way train tickets to Mexico or simply rounded them up and shipped them south across the border. More than 500,000 Mexican Americans left the United States during the early years of the Depression, often involuntarily.

Hard times helped radical political groups gain ground in the United States during the 1930s. Radical groups advocate extreme and immediate change. Socialists and Communists viewed the Depression not as a temporary economic problem but as the death of a failed system. They proposed sweeping changes. Communism attracted workers, minority rights activists, and intellectuals with promises to end economic and racial injustice. Although both socialism and communism had significant influence, neither became a major political force in the United States.

Another political development that caught the attention of many Americans was the rise of fascists in Germany and Italy. Fascism is a political philosophy that holds the individual second to the nation and advocates government by dictatorship. In 1936, the Spanish Civil War began. Germany and Italy supported fascists who were trying to take over the Spanish government. Although the United States remained neutral, more than 3,000 Americans went to Spain to fight the fascists.

The Depression produced two separate trends in entertainment and the arts. One was escapism, light or romantic entertainment that helped people forget about their problems. The other was social criticism, portraits of the injustice and suffering of Depression America. Radio became enormously popular during the 1930s. Daytime dramas sponsored by laundry detergents earned the nickname “soap operas.” Adventure programs such as Dick Tracy, The Lone Ranger, and Superman had millions of listeners, as did variety shows featuring comedians George Burns, Gracie Allen, and Jack Benny.

Every week, about 85 million people went to movie theaters, usually to escape their cares and worries. Some movies did explore serious topics. For example, The Grapes of Wrath (1940) was a screen version of John Steinbeck’s powerful novel about farm families fleeing the Dust Bowl. The 1939 film of Margaret Mitchell’s novel, Gone With the Wind, set in the Civil War era, also portrayed people coping with hard times.

Many writers and painters portrayed the grim realities of Depression life. Richard Wright’s novel Native Son told the story of an African American man growing up in Chicago. Writer James Agee and photographer Walker Evans depicted poor Southern farm families in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Photographer Margaret Bourke-White also recorded the plight of American farmers, and Dorothea Lange took gripping photographs of migrant workers. Painters such as Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton showed ordinary people confronting the hardships of Depression life.