Vera

About the Book

The Year was 1931. Kentuckians, like everyone else in the country, were deeply affected by the Great Depression. Workers lost their jobs and farmers lost their farms when they couldn’t pay back their loans. It was a time of financial turmoil. Farmers who owned their land outright, and even their tenants farmers, fared better because they had food to keep from going hungry. They had meat in their smoke houses from the butchering of their hogs. They had cows for their milk and butter, and sheep and goats that they sold to the market. There were orchids of fruit on most people’s farms and they canned the vegetables from their gardens each year. Most farmers had a cellar under their house to keep their potatoes, their canned fruits and vegetables, and things like raw apples, pears, nuts, and anything else they could scrounge from the land. There was hay and corn stored in the barn to feed the stock. Actually the poorest farmer was drastically better off than the poor city man who had lost his job and didn’t have any money to feed his family. There was no effective system of unemployment Insurance to cushion the jobless. The Depression had started in 1929 during the presidency of Herbert Hoover. The Federal Reserve’s attempt in 1928 and 1929 to raise interest rates to discourage stock speculation brought on an initial recession. The recession had been expected to be self limiting, instead falls in prices set in motion further contractions in productions, which triggered additional falls in prices. Workers were idle because firms would not hire them to work their machines; firms would not hire workers to 1 work machines because they saw no market for goods; and there was no market for goods because workers had no income to spend.

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