In what ways did people seek to forget about the Depression?

The Great Depression was a roughshod era in America: brutal for the fifteen million people who couldn't notice work, roughshod for the farmers out westward whose crops failed in the Dust Basin, and for the up to one.8 million people of Mexican descent who were rounded up and illegally deported in "repatriation drives."

But fifty-fifty as many Americans struggled to survive, they yet found ways to have fun. Hither's what people did to distract themselves from the deprivations of their daily lives during the Corking Depression.

one. Watching Trip the light fantastic Marathons Where Contestants Danced Till They Dropped

Exhausted couples lay in each other's arms at the Walkaton marathon dance contest in Washington, 1934.

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Before reality tv set, Americans who wanted to see strangers do unusual or dangerous things for money and attention went to dance marathons. These marathons started in the 1920s as part of an endurance contest craze; merely when the Great Depression gear up in, trip the light fantastic marathons became more than just a course of recreation for the contestants. As long every bit dancers kept dancing, they had food, shelter and the take a chance to win a cash prize (though every bit with reality TV, show-runners often rigged the contests to favor sure couples).

These marathons could last for days or weeks. Usually, dancers received a whopping 12 meals a twenty-four hours that they had to eat at chest-high tables on the trip the light fantastic toe floor. They also typically got a break for 15 minutes per hour, during which they might lay down on a cot and accept a nurse attend to them or rub their feet. Because they had to stay moving for the other 45 minutes per 60 minutes, dancers learned to slumber while their partner held them upwardly and dragged them across the dance floor. If a sleeping person's knees touched the floor, the couple was butterfingers, so dancers sometimes tied their wrists together behind their partner's cervix for actress security before going to slumber.

The fact that trip the light fantastic toe marathons could be physically dangerous was function of the reason people paid to see them in the first identify, and it was also one of the reasons that they went out of fashion. By the late 1930s, trip the light fantastic marathons had faded in the wake of increased criticism and laws that banned them in many parts of the country.

2. Venturing into Haunted Houses

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Halloween traditions like flim-flam-or-treating, costume parties and haunted houses began during the Swell Low as a manner to keep young people out of trouble. October 31 had long been a night for mischief-making, but afterward one particularly bad Halloween in 1933—in which hundreds of teenage boys effectually the land flipped over cars, sawed off telephone poles and engaged in other acts of vandalism—many communities began to organize Halloween events for children and teens to dissuade them from causing this blazon of devastation.

Parents used their creativity to put together haunted houses without spending a lot of money. "Hang sometime fur, strips of raw liver on walls, where one feels his way to dark steps," advised a 1937 political party pamphlet on how to create a "trail of terror." "Weird moans and howls come from dark corners, clammy sponges and hair nets hung from the ceiling touch his face… Doorways are blockaded so that guests must crawl through a long dark tunnel."

READ More: The Bang-up Depression Origins of Halloween Haunted Houses

three. Lining Upwards to See People Sitting on Poles

Alvin "Shipwreck" Kelly enjoys Christmas perched on a pole 150 feet in the air, circa 1929.

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Another 1920s endurance challenge that connected into the Great Low was flagpole-sitting—i.e., sitting atop a pole for every bit long as possible. The man who started the trend was a Hollywood stuntman named Alvin "Shipwreck" Kelly. In the summertime of 1930, as many equally xx,000 people came out to see Kelly eat, sleep and shave atop a 225-foot flagpole in Atlantic Metropolis for 49 days.

That same summer, children across the state briefly took role in a tree-sitting challenge where they tried to stay in a tree for equally long as they could—one youth in southern California reportedly lasted 1,320 hours. Like Kelly, these kids came up with systems to bring nutrient and other supplies up to their perch. Pole-sitting largely petered out after that summer, but didn't completely disappear: in 1933, Richard "Dixie" Blandy set a record of 77 days atop a flagpole at the Chicago Globe's Off-white.

four. Gaping at Students Swallowing Goldfish

Harvard freshmanLothrop Withington, Jr. swallows a live 4-inch gold fish to win a 10 dollar bet, 1939.

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Dance marathons and flagpole-sitting may take started in the 1920s, but the Bang-up Low has one very weird contest all to its own: goldfish-swallowing. The contest started at Harvard University in 1939 when some students bet a freshman $10 that he couldn't swallow a live fish. On March 3, the freshman fulfilled his end of the bet past chewing and swallowing a live goldfish in the dining hall in front of a group of students and a reporter.

LIFE magazine picked upward the story, and shortly students at other colleges began to test how many live goldfish they could swallow. In less than a month, the record jumped to 42 goldfish (swallowed by a member of the class of 1942); and past the end of April, the tape was 101. The fad as well inspired students to endeavour swallowing other things: college students swallowed v baby white mice in Illinois, 139 alive angle worms in Oregon, an entire result of the New Yorker in Pennsylvania and pieces of phonograph records at Harvard and the Academy of Chicago. These other swallowing challenges never caught on, and the goldfish-swallowing fad faded soon after it began.

v. Seeing High-Tech Hollywood Movies

The Wizard of Oz came out in 1939.

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The Cracking Depression was a largely successful decade for Hollywood. Tickets on average cost under a quarter for the whole of the 1930s, downward from 35 cents in 1929, so spending fourth dimension in the movie theater was an affordable class of escapism for many.

The era's films were revolutionary, too: Those were the years in which the flick industry fully transitioned from "silent films" to "talkies." Hollywood began investing in new soundstages and flick concepts that could make the most of new sound technology, and this ushered in big-budget musicals with original songs like 42nd Street (1933) and The Sorcerer of Oz (1939). Information technology was besides the decade when Walt Disney released the commencement-e'er total-length blithe feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937).

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People also bought tickets to comedies with the Marx brothers, screwball rom-coms starring heartthrobs like Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant or melodramas similar A Star Is Born (1937). And before Hollywood started enforcing the Hays Code in the summer of 1934 to proceed movies "make clean," picture-goers could see Marlene Dietrich kiss a woman in Morocco (1930) and Barbara Stanwyck sleep her manner to the top in Baby Face (1933). Film attendance did dip with the onset of the Cracking Depression, simply with movies similar these, the percentage of people who went to the movies on an average weekly ground never dropped below 40 percent.

six. Building Soap Box Cars and Racing Them

Lather Box Derbys started in the 1930s as a competition for kids that didn't crave a lot of money. In 1933, a announcer named Myron Scott noticed some kids in Dayton, Ohio, were racing in soap box cars they'd made themselves. He took some pictures of them and started helping them organize bigger races. By the terminate of the summertime that yr, these races were drawing up to 40,000 spectators.

The next yr, Scott got Chevrolet to sponsor the offset All-American Soap Box Derby for boys (girls couldn't compete until 1971). After belongings local races in the Midwest, the 34 winners of those races came to Dayton to compete for the title. The next yr, the championship race moved to Akron, where it's been ever since.

7. Binging on the Lifestyles of the Rich and the Famous

As a crowd of curious looked on, Gloria Vanderbilt, the 10-year-former heiress over whose custody there had been much litigation, visits her mother for the first time since the courts ruled that she be nether the care of her paternal aunt, circa 1934.

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Ane of the time-honored traditions in American history is reading about the torrid lives of celebrities. For Depression-era Americans, this meant reading almost "Buffet Club." Subsequently Prohibition concluded in 1933, former speakeasies in cities like New York turned themselves into chic restaurants and nightclubs filled with moving-picture show stars, musicians, rich people who hadn't lost all their money yet, hangers-on who were trying to stay relevant and plenty of gossip columnists to record what all these people did there.

The ultra-wealthy Vanderbilts were an excellent source of Cafe Society drama. Photographers followed bachelor Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, Jr. to night-clubs to snap photos of him romancing a series of glamorous women. Meanwhile, gossip columnists wrung their hands over the supposedly decadent lifestyle of his younger half-sister, Gloria "Mimi" Bakery, who was already visiting nightclubs and gambling casinos when she was fifteen. Family unit dramas outside of the club scene also made the news: in 1934, newspaper readers gawked at the sensational custody trial over ten-year-old Gloria Vanderbilt.

Newspapers dubbed Gloria "the poor little rich girl," a moniker they also used to draw young Cafe Order members Brenda Frazier and Barbara Hutton. In 1938, the 17-year-old Frazier was known as the "No. 1 Glamor Girl" and appeared on the cover of LIFE ahead of her debutante ball. Readers likewise followed the troubled love life of Hutton, heiress to $45 million dollars of the Woolworth fortune, who married and divorced 2 European royals betwixt 1933 and 1937. Her response to a 1939 protest by Woolworth clerks suggests she never quite realized the depth of her privilege as a Depression-era millionaire: "Why practise they hate me?" she reportedly asked. "There are other girls equally rich, richer, almost as rich."

eight. Creating Real Estate Empires in Monopoly

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The fact that a board game called Monopoly became popular during the Groovy Depression is ironic in itself, but it'south fifty-fifty more ironic given the game's backstory. The game'south inventor, Elizabeth J. Magie, first patented it in 1904 every bit the Landlord'south Game to teach players about the evils of capitalism. And for a few decades, it did.

Only then in the 1930s, another human began selling a lath game based on her idea. In 1935, he sold it to the struggling Parker Brothers company, which then began selling it as Monopoly. The game was a huge success among Great Low families because it was a relatively cheap class of entertainment that they could use over and over (in addition, it may have served as a class of wish fulfillment for those who knew they'd never bring together Cafe Club). But information technology too erased Magie's function as the game's originator. So even though Parker Brothers earned enough from Monopoly to save itself from bankruptcy, Magie only ever made $500 off of the Landlord's Game.

READ MORE: How the Great Depression Became the Aureate Historic period for Monopoly

ix. Reading the Comics and Complaining About How Political They Were

Cartoonist Harold Grey, creator of Orphan Annie comic strip, at work in his home, 1964.

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Every Sunday, kids around the state grabbed the funny pages to read virtually the adventures of Dick Tracy the detective, Flash Gordon the Yale polo player and Petty Orphan Annie, the plucky young girl with surprisingly pro-concern, anti-labor views. In ane 1933 comic, Annie cheerfully exclaimed: "Leapin' Lizards! Who says business is bad?" If ever Annie needed help on an hazard, she was saved past "Daddy" Warbucks, a chivalrous millionaire whose proper name literally indicated he was a state of war profiteer.

Annie'southward politics reflected those of her creator, cartoonist Harold Gray. The popular comic had made Greyness incredibly rich since he started it in 1924, so that by 1934 he was earning a cozy $100,000 a year (near $ii one thousand thousand in 2019 dollars). Enraged by the ballot of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in '32, Gray used his strip to runway confronting unions and the New Deal. The comic was popular among children considering of picayune Annie's large adventures, but non all adults were fans of her politics. In 1935, The New Republic denounced Annie equally "fascism in the funnies."

ten. Tuning in to Hit Radio Shows About Masked Avengers

 Histrion Earl Grasser playing the Lone Ranger on WXYZ, the radio station'southward about popular graphic symbol, circa 1937.

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Radio was an important source of news and entertainment during the Cracking Depression. Over the decade, the number of American households with radios grew from roughly 40 to 83 pct.

Every calendar week, Americans tuned in to follow the masked vigilantes in The Solitary Ranger and The Light-green Hornet or laugh along with comedians like Gracie Allen and George Burns. One of the about popular sitcoms was the objectively racist Amos 'n' Andy, which introduced greasepaint minstrelsy tropes to radio. Kids in particular listened to Dick Tracy and Little Orphan Annie—two shows inspired past the popular comics—and mailed in Quaker Oats box tops or Ovaltine seals to join each show's hugger-mugger order.

Americans likewise tuned in to hear about current events, the latest baseball scores or juicy Hollywood gossip. In 1933, FDR revolutionized the way presidents communicated with Americans by talking straight to them through the radio. During his "fireside chats," as they became known, he talked about issues like the banking crisis, the New Deal and the Dust Bowl.

READ MORE: Life for the Average Family During the Great Low

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Source: https://www.history.com/news/great-depression-entertainment-monopoly-movies-radio

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