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Down and Out in the Great Depression is a moving, revealing collection of letters by the forgotten men, women, and children who suffered through one of the greatest periods of hardship in American history. Sifting through some 15,000 letters from government and private sources, Robert McElvaine has culled nearly 200 communications that best show the problems, thoughts, and emotions of ordinary people during this time. Unlike views of Depression life "from the bottom up" that rely on recollections recorded several decades later, this book captures the daily anguish of people during the thirties. It puts the reader in direct contact with Depression victims, evoking a feeling of what it was like to live through this disaster. Following Franklin D. Roosevelt's inauguration, both the number of letters received by the White House and the percentage of them coming from the poor were unprecedented. The average number of daily communications jumped to between 5,000 and 8,000, a trend that continued throughout the Roosevelt administration. The White House staff for answering such letters -- most of which were directed to FDR, Eleanor Roosevelt, or Harry Hopkins -- quickly grew from one perso

Author

Robert S. McElvaine

Publisher

The University of North Carolina Press

Published

1983

Language

EN

ISBN

9780807815342

Subjects

History, Humanities

Updated

2026-03-24