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1920-1945 Countryside at Midcentury

(Page 1 of 5) Print Version 

How did Maine people cope with Depression-era unemployment? Proud and fiercely independent, they generally considered "going on the town" disgraceful except in cases of extreme emergency.

An experiment in federal counter-cyclical spending, the New Deal deliberately used the deficit to pump money into the economy and boost consumer power. This Maine people considered a political sacrilege.

Between 1940 and 1941 defense spending in Maine leaped from $130 million to $500 million, reducing unemployment dramatically.

Potato harvest, Woodland, ca. 1922
Potato harvest, Woodland, ca. 1922
Nylander Museum

Like all Americans, Maine people fought in World War I, suffered the economic disaster of 1929-1939, and adapted to the federal government's new role in the national economy. But in Maine a unique constellation of forces determined a different path through these momentous events.

Sixty percent of Maine's 800,000 people still lived in the countryside in 1930, and as in earlier times, each community wove family, work, and religion into a unique set of relations and identities. More than three out of four Maine people in 1930 were native born of native parentage – the highest proportion in New England – and this homogeneity reinforced a strong sense of tradition.

Out-migration continued into the 20th century, but population declines merely reinforced the conservative bent among those who remained – generally town elites with a strong stake in traditional local society.

New Sweden Grange, 1930
New Sweden Grange, 1930
New Sweden Historical Society

Rural Maine had not changed significantly in the 19th century. Towns and villages still provided the essentials of life: barbershop, blacksmith's forge, general store, Grange, and a scattering of professional offices, churches, mills, and artisan shops. These local services provided goods and equipment for the farm family and processed their corn, grain, livestock, dairy products, wool, timber, and hides.

Rural Maine was a gritty world of unheated bedrooms, kitchen pumps, and outdoor privies, but few had reason to believe this would change. As always, activities followed the patterns of nature: horizons expanded during summer and contracted in mud season; the pace of work quickened as the days grew warmer, culminating in the fall harvest. This continuity lent credence to the sense of permanence; in a hundred subtle ways everything in Maine moved with the seasons.

Building of Arts, Bar Harbor, ca. 1930
Building of Arts, Bar Harbor, ca. 1930
Jesup Memorial Library

Isolation and Outside Forces

Isolation bred independence and a strong sense of individual responsibility. Families worked together, ate together and hunted, fished, and gathered berries together. Children settled near their parents, and generations came and went around the "home place," guided by a culture of hard work, adaptability, and competence.

Men worked in the woods and fields, and women tended the home, the garden, the barnyard, and the henhouse. They bathed kids and washed clothes in tubs in the kitchen and sent them off to school clean and well groomed.

There were subtle changes, however. Roads, radios, telephones, and theaters provided new vectors for urban culture. Two-thirds of Maine's farm families owned automobiles by 1930, and Rural Free Delivery broadened their consumer reach.

Farmers working the lime-rich soils of Aroostook County harvested about one-eighth of the total U.S. potato crop by 1930 and enjoyed substantially higher incomes than those in the rest of the state. But they were increasingly subject to distant influences like railroad agents, express companies, bank managers, food processors, farm-equipment dealers, commission merchants, and seed and fertilizer suppliers.

Blueberry Harvesting Film
Blueberry Harvesting Film
Northeast Historic Film

Central Maine farms were prosperous as well, each producing a mix of crops ranging from hay, potatoes, apples, sweet corn, and blueberries to poultry, eggs, milk, and butter.

Here, too, farmers were subject to outside forces difficult to understand or anticipate, and like farmers all across the country they had expanded during World War I and suffered declining markets in the 1920s.

In more remote districts, farmers mixed commercial cropping with subsistence, meaning growing larger vegetable gardens and keeping livestock for family consumption, selling pulpwood, maple syrup, Christmas trees, or firewood to keep the farm together, and moving endlessly from farm chores to off-farm work in what autobiographer Mark Walker called "treadmill lives." Better roads and rural electrification eased these burdens, but improvements were uneven.

Coastal counties, where nearly half the farms were engaged in mixed activity, experienced dramatic population losses after the turn of the century, evident in deteriorating buildings, neglected orchards, vacant schoolhouses and churches, and shuttered mills and shops. During the 1920s more than 40,000 Maine people left the countryside. While this was consistent with trends in rural America generally, fewer in-migrants replaced those who left Maine.

Islesboro Town Meeting, 1933
Islesboro Town Meeting, 1933
Islesboro Historical Society

These changes generated a variety of political and social tensions. Maine people searched for villains among the poor, the newcomers, the corporations, and the federal government, and this unsettled mood conditioned their response to the New Deal. They would emerge from World War II a different people, but for the time, they clung to their immediate points of reference: the country store, Grange hall, church, and the annual town meeting.

Rural life, as historian Richard Condon notes, stood on the brink of modernity.


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Exhibits

Unfulfilled Dream: Tidal Power

Unfulfilled Dream: Tidal Power

Dexter Cooper, a young engineer, devoted much of his energy and personal finances to a plan to harness the tides in Cobscook and Passamaquoddy bays to generate electricity.

Capturing Arts & Artists in the 1930s

Capturing Arts & Artists in the 1930s

Emmie Bailey Whitney of the Lewiston Journal Saturday Magazine and her husband, amateur photographer G. Herbert Whitney, captured in words and photographs the richness of Maine's arts scene during the Great Depression.

The Nativist Klan

The Nativist Klan

In Maine, like many other states, a message of patriotism and cautions about immigrants and non-Protestants drew many thousands of members into the newly re-formed Ku Klux Klan in the early 1920s.

Film: Swimming in Portland

Film: Swimming in Portland

On the eve of America's entry into World War II, Portlanders found entertainment close at hand at East End Beach, shown in this film shot for the City of Portland in about 1940.

Putting Men to Work, Saving Trees

Putting Men to Work, Saving Trees

While many Mainers were averse to accepting federal relief money during the Great Depression of the 1930s, young men eagerly joined the Civilian Conservation Corps, one of President Franklin Roosevelt's most popular programs.

South Portland's Wartime Shipbuilding

South Portland's Wartime Shipbuilding

Two shipyards in South Portland, built quickly in 1941 to construct cargo ships for the British and Americans, produced nearly 270 ships in two and a half years. Many of those vessels bore the names of notable Mainers.

A View of Maine Streets

A View of Maine Streets

Photographers from the Eastern Illustrating and Publishing Co. of Belfast traveled throughout the state, especially in small communities, taking images for postcards, many of which capture Main Streets on the brink of modernity.

Bibliography/Further Reading





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