Remembering the Great Depression in the Rural South by Kenneth Bindas is an impressive book and the most intriguing thing about it is the diversity of the individuals that Bindas interviewed. The major theme in the book is the tender balance of austere poverty and bounteous selflessness. By using thematic presentation in his book, Bindas has interwoven a hail of voices and has run interpretive analysis. He has done this in order to skillfully demonstrate not only the crisis and destitution that was involved in the Depression but also the clear “collective consciousness” that left a lasting mark on the ones who transitioned to maturity during the difficult years of the 1930s (Bindas 145).
Bindas and his students conducted more than five hundred oral histories over a period of four years from 1989 to 1993 for this detailed written study. Despite the diversity of the interviewees, they all had the same thing to say, that “everyone had a hard time” (Bindas 67) during the Great Depression. The lasting spirit of community, family, and hard work is reflected by the interviews that are contained in this book. The book begins with a thesis crafted by Bindas in which a complete collection of personal remembrance is framed. He puts forth the argument that a division was marked in national culture by the Depression since Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal ethos of collective support and cooperation displaced the “pioneer ideal” of individualism (Bindas 2).
In the first three chapters of Remembering the Great Depression in the Rural South, the regional context this new ideal was fabricated in is thematically depicted. In Chapters 4 and 5, the interviewees are allowed to speak more in detail and the critical importance of community and family networks are evoked (Bindas 114). Those who were interviewed recall and recollect selective memories from their past to tell stores ranging from redefinition of traditions to starvation. Additionally, they also tell a few stories about people who were not affected by the Depression as much as others because they bartered for essentials and grew their own food. Stories about children who died from illness and starvation are the most heart wrenching and powerful ones in this book. One such story is about a young boy who starved to death in his classroom.
No doubt, Bindas’s Remembering the Great Depression in the Rural South has its merits, but whether or not the pathos of poverty in the rural South is adequately expressed in the book is uncertain. Bindas is seriously vague when it comes to explaining the concept of what “rural South” actually is. He includes both small cities like Georgia and major cities like Atlanta in the treatment. Apart from these places, poverty in the Depression decade was also experienced in places cities New York City, and Wisconsin. The densely populated countryside was the true “rural” South and experienced a much more longstanding poverty, even more heartrending in the 1930s. As early as the 1870s, the southern countryside was already under blanket of poverty. In the next sixty years, there was a notable increase in the rates of tenancy. Eventually, a silent revolution was inaugurated by the Agricultural Adjustment Act which eliminated the necessity of rural labors as the region was transformed by federal capital.
Thus, the argument that Bindas presents that a majority of the rural southerners became fearful because of the financial crisis of 1929 and 1930. Moreover, his argument that both the black and white had adequate reason to be fearful of such acquainted things as persisting indebtedness and inconstant unpredictability of the demand for cotton around the world long before the national Depression (Bindas 118) also does not seem convincing. Bindas also paint vivid images of never ending bread lines, “bankers and professors and everybody [with] holes in the bottom of their shoes” (Bindas 116) from the era. These instances were indeed real at that time and left a profound mark, but for millions of rural southerners, the poverty that was experienced by both the larger nation and the urban South was just not astonishingly new. They had probably already developed cultural resources long before the 1930s in order to confront poverty.
A critical resource that is brought out by Bindas’s Remembering the Great Depression in the Rural South is the public ethos of neighborliness. The interviewees continue to recall, time and time again, how communities and families looked out for each other. Thus, the burdens that fell on the people were shared by them and the strength of unity was present even in the face of strict hardship. However was this consciousness something new? Was this a “new ideology of social cooperation” that Roosevelt and the New Deal embodied, as claimed by Bindas (Bindas 3)? Perhaps cooperating with each other was already a part of the culture of the rural people, and it was nothing new for them. Lawrence Goodwyn describes Populism in his Democratic Promise as a “cooperative crusade.” There have been many folk gospel songs that circulated across the rural South in which self-sacrificing neighborliness has been highly praised.
It is more likely that the public solidarity that is recalled by the elderly interviewees was nothing new in the 1930s. Also, it was more of a dominant older theme that was demonstrated by the Farmers Alliance, and local rural churches rather than being instilled by the New Deal’s liberal ideology. However, the strange thing about reading Bindas’s book about the rural South is that he rarely mentions religion. Probably, the questions that Bindas and his students asked the interviews did not prompt them to significantly discuss religion. Although Bindas’s interpretation represents religion was central to the sense of indentify of the rural people and to the ways they faced poverty, but he mostly remains on the outskirts of this suggestion.
All the elderly interviewees that Bindas and his students interviewed all seem to drive a careful, tender line between celebration of liberation from hardship and nostalgia. Although it is apparent that none of the interviewees want to return to the harsh poverty that was experienced by them, but a sense that they lost something with widespread prosperity is express by many of them. The most eye-catching and strongest part of their seemingly absurd recollections can be found in Chapter 5. One person recalls that he “didn't see no sad people walking around” (Bindas 136), and another person expresses grief that “the people have gotten meaner and don't care” (Bindas 138) because of their wealth. This mindset seems quite strange, and it upsets a prevailing modern assumption that prosperity must be a vague benefit. It is because of such a strange sensibility that many these days, not just historians, are able to learn by listening to its bearers while they are still around, and Bindas’s Remembering the Great Depression in the Rural South brings their voices to us.
Works Cited
Bindas, Kenneth J. Remembering the Great Depression in the Rural South. Florida: University Press of Florida, 2009. Print.
