Most of us living these days don't remember the Great Depression of the late 1920s and 1930s. To remember those times we would have to be at least 90 years old. However, many of us have experienced hints of those times, mini-versions of economic depression, such as in the decade following 2008, as well as our experience of pandemic-driven economic recession throughout the year 2020 and continuing to today.
These lesser versions of depression have given us some taste of the insecurities brought on by instability or crashes in the stock market, high unemployment rates, shortage of available jobs, low interest on savings accounts and certificates of deposit, and so on. In 2008, we even went through a period when the banks were facing bankruptcy, when people's life savings were vanishing into thin air, and the government felt it necessary to take steps to stabilize the institutions in which people's money was invested. If we were to think of those conditions in a magnified form, we would get a pretty good sense of what people faced during the years of the Great Depression. Interestingly, during the 1930s, at the height of the Great Depression, nearly all the banks in our Benton County failed, with two exceptions -- those being our own Bank of Pea Ridge and the Bank of Gravette in the western part of the county.
People like myself, who were born around 1940, remember Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was president of the USA for four terms, from 1932 to 1945. He passed away as the World War II years were coming to an end. He is known for some of the measures he initiated as part of surviving the Great Depression and conducting our country's participation in the war effort from 1941 to 1945. I noticed today, Sunday, Sept. 19, that the Perspective Section of today's Arkansas Democrat-Gazette has an article about two notable programs initiated after 1932 to address the great Depression -- the WPA and the CCC (the Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps). I take it that the writer of that article would like to see similar programs utilized in dealing with today's economic challenges. The issue is still a hot one, even as it was hot in the 1930s, with great disagreements over how much the government should try to do to address economic recessions, and just how it should go about it. The WPA and the CCC were work programs, in which the government paid the people who were part of the programs to work on a variety of government-funded projects intended to benefit individuals, families and communities.
One of our nearby CCC programs was the construction of the fish hatchery and campgrounds at Roaring River State Park in Missouri. My understanding is that a Pea Ridge WPA project was the establishment of the Pea Ridge Community Library. Initially the library was housed in the public school building and served both the school and the community. I can remember when Winnie Martin was the librarian in the mid- to late 1940s. In later years, after my Grandmother Ellen Nichols passed away in 1954, my grandfather Scott Nichols and Winnie were married. Granddad lived to be 94 years old, and I still have the idea that Winnie kept him active, fishing and doing crafts for the War Eagle Fair, and probably extended his lifetime by several years.
The WPA program was in many ways an infrastructure program having some similarities to the proposed infrastructure rebuilding program for today's United States. The WPA built school buildings, court houses, parks and facilities for parks, community buildings, lakes, community water systems, and so on, many of which still exist and function today. The CCC, as the name suggests, was involved in various conservation projects, as well as building projects similar to those of the WPA. The CCC young men lived in camps, in a military-like setting, and worked for about $30 per month. They received about $5 per month for their personal spending, and $25 was sent home to their families. One can still visit the site at Roaring River where the CCC Camp was situated, downstream a short distance south of the fish hatchery.
Back in the 1930s, speaking generally, people tended to take great pride in being able to work and to make a living for their families. Taking charity without working for the pay was not a popular idea. Entitlement thinking was not widespread. Maybe in our day, too, we should give more practical consideration to the kind of economic program and infrastructure development represented by those old 1930s programs such as the WPA and the CCC.
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Editor's note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge and an award-winning columnist, is vice president of Pea Ridge Historical Society. He can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected], or call 621-1621.