Maine History Online

Survival and Self-Help

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.

Lorena Hickok, who traveled the nation reporting on conditions in each region, noted that in the depths of the Depression thousands of eligible Maine people refused federal relief due to pride and community pressure: a "Maine-ite," she reported, would "almost starve rather than ask for help."

On the other hand, Maine tradition obliged neighbors to donate money or food, contribute labor, or cut wood for families in an emergency, and this system of responses was Maine's first line of defense during the Depression.

A long history of rural self-sufficiency provided another stopgap, and here the onus of family survival fell mostly on the women who raised garden crops and poultry, made cheese, canned fruits and preserves, and contributed other key sources of sustenance.

Extended families were another source of support; married children often returned to their ancestral home, and with two or three generations working odd jobs and gleaning subsistence from fields, woods, barnyard, and garden, families weathered the hard times. Maine people also benefited from a long history of seasonal job migration; skipping from job to job as a way of life prepared them for Depression layoffs.

Others, particularly unmarried young men, moved in and out of Maine looking for jobs. Here, too, a tradition of occupational opportunism prepared them for life on the road.

Job prospects were as bleak outside Maine as within, but a man on the move, possibly with the help of a Traveler's Aid Society bus ticket, could survive by changing places and making the rounds of soup-kitchens and mission houses between jobs.

Despite these adaptive strategies, families in desperation strained existing relief systems. Initially town governments shouldered the burden of relief with help from private charities and churches, but these services were quickly overwhelmed.

By 1932, state and local governments had reached the limits of their solvency. In Portland, 1933 relief expenditures were 500 percent above pre-Depression costs, despite the city council's resolve to observe the "most rigid economy."

The city passed bond issues for improvements in parks, streets, and cemeteries and put unemployed citizens to work building a municipal golf course and copying "ancient records" for the city clerk.

When Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in 1932, the federal government assumed the burden of providing relief, partly through direct payments and partly through payments to state and local governments. Federal funds were welcome – indeed necessary – but Maine's response to the federal government was conditioned by a long history of localism and self-reliance. Adjusting to the new federal influence was painful.

The New Deal Responds in Maine

The president moved quickly to restore confidence in the economy by sending Congress a flood of work-relief and economic stimulus measures. The Federal Emergency Relief Administration made grants to the states, which in turn distributed these funds to cities and towns for local work-relief projects. The Works Progress Administration provided similar funding after 1935.

These agencies ushered in a variety of new services including school lunches and after-school classes in dancing, photography, music, drama, crafts, ice hockey, figure skating, and volleyball.

The WPA hired women to sew garments for relief organizations or for sale and employed others to teach sewing and nursing, transcribe historical records, or staff programs in naturalization and literacy. Men and women learned skills in clerical work, typing, shorthand, business-machine operation, boatbuilding, carpentry, and auto mechanics.

New Deal agencies sponsored hundreds of construction projects, most of them prosaic – sometimes simply repairs – but necessary improvements in public infrastructure. Maine gained 122 new schools along with improvements in sewers, bridges, airport runways, roads, sidewalks, municipal buildings, wading pools, playgrounds, and parks.

Late in the decade when the nation moved toward military preparedness, WPA workers enlarged the Bangor Airport to accommodate heavy bombers, and by 1939 commercial airlines were making regular stops at the new facility.

Women, constituting 25 percent of Maine's unemployed, took jobs like canning foods for school lunches, sewing, nursing, tutoring, teaching English, running nursery-schools, and conducting in-home health inspections.

The Federal Writer's Project produced literary and informational material like the popular Maine: A Guide "Downeast" (1937). Part of the American Guide Series, it was designed to highlight Maine's history, culture, scenery, folklore, social and economic trends, and points of interest.

Perhaps the most controversial WPA program was the Federal Art Project, guided by the idea that artists working with ordinary people would create a "democratic art" for America. In Maine, Dorothy Hay, an art major from Smith College, supervised the program. As elsewhere, it produced paintings and murals for public buildings, and posters, prints, charts, and illustrations for other federal activities.

The WPA also built theater stages and sets, designed costumes, sponsored community art classes, and collected American folk-art by searching through antique shops, sail-lofts, boat yards, barns, and junkyards. The program yielded a trove of wall stencils, crewel embroidery, china, woodcarvings, figureheads, weather vanes, cigar-store Indians, and ship signs. A similar Federal Music Project based in Portland, Lewiston and briefly in Bangor, sent traveling entertainment troupes, bands, and orchestras around the state.

The most popular of the New Deal relief agencies was the Civilian Conservation Corps, which recruited unemployed young men and later young women and put them to work on various conservation-related projects in return for food, lodging, and $30 a month (usually sent home to the parents).

In Maine, CCC units employed about 16,000 youths, most of whom built roads and cleared fire trails for the Maine Forest Service. They completed the Appalachian Trail to the top of Mount Katahdin, worked to control Gypsy moth and brown-tail moth infestations, built campgrounds and trails in Acadia National Park and Camden Hills State Park, and cleared forest debris after the hurricane of 1938.