What It Was Like To Live Through The Great Depression (Colorized Photos)

March 3, 2021

A Woman Sells Her Children While Living In A Tent

For the majority of Americans, life during the Great Depression of the 1930s was hard. Many people, like the woman in this colorized photograph that was taken in 1936 by San Francisco photographer Dorothea Lange, left their homes in the Dust Bowl region to migrate to California in search of a better life. 

The "better life" that people went out in search for was rarely waiting for them. Even when migrant workers found jobs in the fields of California they were maligned for taking jobs from locals and the pay was nothing to write home about. In black and white these photos look like something from a history book, but in color they look like they could have been taken today.

The "Migrant Mother", an iconic Depression era photo taken by Dorothea Lange in 1936. (owwmedia.com)

Far from a grand adventure, the reality of life during the Great Depression is that many Americans were reduced to wearing rags and didn’t know where their next meal was coming from. 

The Great Depression

A colorized photo of a family trying their best in the 1930s. (grunge.com)

When the stock market crashed in October 1929, the economic downturn forced banks to close. Americans who didn’t lose all their money in the stock market crash certainly did when the banks went bankrupt. Cash money was hard to come by. Even scarcer were jobs. The situation was compounded by the Dust Bowl, the worst man-made natural disaster in U.S. history. Years of irresponsible farming practices turned millions of acres of farmland into dry, dusty wasteland. At that time, the United States did not have any sort of welfare or unemployment assistance. Some families have no other option than to accept handouts or rely on soup kitchens to feed their families.