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.
