The Stock Market crash on October 29, 1929 heralded the onset of the Great Depression. While the crash is often thought to have brought on the Depression, it was merely one symptom of a sick economy. Businesses overexpanded; consumer debt increased with purchases on credit; unregulated banks and corporations engaging in speculation and outright fraud

The Depression generally connotes a time of great hardship--Hoovervilles, soup kitchens, and general bad news. But this decade was actually about more than deprivation; it was also about hope, hard work, and a search for the silver lining behind the cloud.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected President in 1932. FDR won on the promise of a "New Deal," and on the strength of his charm, dash, and energy. Most of all he had Eleanor Roosevelt, the first high-profile First Lady, with her press conferences, newspaper columns, radio addresses, and travel. She served not only as FDR’s advisor but also as an advocate of women and minorities, and Americans loved her.

The New Deal brought the government as never before into the everyday lives of Americans, who soon knew the many agencies by their initials: CCC, NRA, WPA, PWA, TVA, FDIC, and AAA. Just how much these programs actually helped the economy is still under debate, but at the least, FDR gave people hope.

High unemployment and low wages dictated tight circumstances for the majority of Americans in the Depression. The almost frenzied search for pleasure that had characterized much of the 1920s was over. Still, Americans sought to forget their troubles, and the 1930s became the Golden Age of radio and film. In 1930, 46% of American households had radios, a number, which had grown to 90% by the end of the decade.

Hollywood kept theater attendance high with a record number of movies, which not only featured sound, but also, after the mid-1930s, color. Audiences loved Jean Harlow, W.C. Fields, Mae West, Errol Flynn, the Marx Brothers, Shirley Temple, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, and movies such as Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, and Showboat. After 1934, the Motion Picture Production Code prohibited homosexuality, abortion, drug use, or sex (including the word itself) on screen. Audiences didn’t care; in 1930, weekly movie attendance in the U.S. was 90,000,000 (as compared to a mere 22,000,000 in 1990).

Americans looked for inexpensive entertainment. They read For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway or chronicles of the Depression such as The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. They sang along with folk singer and political activist Woody Guthrie as he turned Depression hardship into music. They enjoyed cards, miniature golf, jigsaw puzzles, and sports (whether as players or spectators). With the repeal of Prohibition in 1933, Americans could even drink again. Those who could afford to travel attended the World’s Fairs in Chicago in 1933 and in New York in 1939. Texans celebrated the Texas Centennial in Dallas in 1936.

Personalities of the decade included Amelia Earhart, John L. Lewis, Dorothy Parker, Will Rogers, and Fiorella LaGuardia. Even the "bad guys": John Dillinger, "Pretty Boy" Floyd, Bonnie and Clyde, and Ma Barker were all good press until their eventual rendezvous with justice.

Fashion in the 1930s allowed women to enjoy their natural curves. Hemlines and hair were worn longer than in the previous decade, hats bore up-tilted brims. Makeup, which had achieved respectability in the 1920s, became as important as fashion, as did hygienic factors that had once been considered too personal to discuss publicly: a sweet-smelling body, fresh breath, and white teeth.

In Beaumont, the petrochemical industry, boosted by a second Spindletop boom in 1925, gave the local economy a momentum that lasted until about 1931. After that, the local economy slowed; the easy business opportunities of the 1920s were gone, and cash was scarce. Like other Americans, Beaumonters saw their investments and life’s savings disappear; men struggled to provide their families with bare necessities of food and shelter. Electricity, natural gas, and telephone service became unaffordable luxuries. Backyard gardens and the barter system enjoyed new popularity. NRA posters in store windows, the CCC’s construction of Tyrrell Park facilities, and PWA stamps on downtown sidewalks gave evidence of New Deal activity. In 1937, the WPA pulled up the streetcar tracks in Beaumont, and people began riding the bus.

Hardworking Beaumonters appreciated leisure time, listening to radios and Victrolas and attending movies at one of the seven theaters in town. They picnicked and danced and went to the South East Texas State Fair. They supported the Exporters, Beaumont’s Texas League baseball team that won the Texas League championship in 1938. And Beaumonter Babe Didrikson won gold medals in the 1932 Olympic javelin throw and the 80-meter hurdles then switched sports and won a major golf tournament in 1935.

The Depression affected the McFaddins’ finances, though they never suffered serious deprivation. They could still afford a comfortable lifestyle, and their farm provided them with milk, eggs, chickens, sausage, vegetables, fruit, and cane syrup. Early in the decade, Ida and her sons even built a family "compound" of beach homes on Bolivar Peninsula.

Both before and after the market crash, Ida McFaddin was purchasing blue chip stocks such as AT&T. W.P.H., with his extensive land holdings, was, like many other businessmen, caught short of cash, and actually lost some of his property. Since 1929, when his failing physical and mental capacities had dictated a necessity for it, his holdings had been in a Trust, and through hard work his sons Perry Jr. and Caldwell kept losses to a minimum. By the 1930s, Caldwell had left his private law practice and joined the McFaddin interests, managing the office end of the business, while Perry continued to take care of the ranching interests.

Advancing age and infirmities didn’t keep W.P.H. from expressing his opinion in 1931, when he wrote essays to the Beaumont newspapers, one entitled "How to Make Times Good and Get Out of the Depression" and the other, "What is the Matter with This Country? A Solution Given for Hard Times." His solution was to issue more money and enact protective tariffs. In mid-October of 1935 he suffered what was probably a stroke and died November 5, his daughter Mamie’s birthday. She never felt the same about her birthday after that.

Ida put her considerable administrative and organizational skills in business to use as an officer of the McFaddin Trust; after her last brother, Dabney, died in 1936, she became president of her family’s business, the J.L. Caldwell Company in Huntington, West Virginia.

This decade was also Ida’s most active with the D.A.R. As State Regent of the organization from 1931-1934, she organized a number of new DAR chapters in Texas, traveling about in her chauffeur-driven lavender Pierce-Arrow. From 1934-1937 she served as Vice President General, National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution.

Ida also traveled, to see her family in Huntington and to the beach in the summer. She and Mamie made a 1935 chauffeur-driven tour of Canada and New England. She went to Europe twice in the decade, in 1933 with a friend, in 1938 with Mamie.

At home, Mamie supervised household operations. From her diary we learn of the family’s activities in the 1930s; for example, she frequently went to movies and wrote her opinion of them: "’Things to Come’ awful;" "’Robin Hood’...colored picture--good;" "’Confessions of a Nazi Spy’...every American should see it."

In 1937 Mamie and a group of interested Beaumont women founded the Magnolia Garden Club, which held flower shows and sponsored local beautification projects, such as planting crape myrtle trees along the routes into town.

By the 1930s Carroll Ward was president of the family business, the Texas Ice Co. In 1939 he combined business and his personal love of sports and opened an ice skating rink, and later the same year added a professional hockey team, the Texas Rangers. They won their league championship that year. Carroll bought Mamie a pair of ice skates, though she wrote in her diary, "never will skate alone."

The 1930s were a time when segregation still ruled in the South and, in reality, in many other parts of the country. African Americans continued to hammer away at inequities in the "separate but equal" doctrine. During this decade, Joe Louis became heavyweight boxing champion, and Marion Anderson sang at the Lincoln Memorial, after having been denied use of Constitution Hall by the DAR.

The McFaddins employed a full domestic staff during the 1930s, many of them longtime employees: Louis Lemon cooked on a half wood, half gas stove. Brunie Payne washed for the family. Andrew Molo and Tom Parker began the decade chauffeuring Ida and W.P.H., respectively, until Andrew sought other employment about mid-decade. After W.P.H.’s death, Tom continued working for the McFaddins, driving Ida and Mamie to California in 1936. The McFaddins hired a new yardman, Percy Andrews, in the 1930s, who would remain with them until the late 1940s. Upstairs maid Carrie Chatman, an employee since about 1921, quit in June 1939 to stay home and keep her own house. An unhappy Mamie replaced her, but missed her skills, and Carrie continued to work occasionally for seasonal cleaning or when Ida and Mamie were packing for and unpacking from trips.

Decade’s end saw the national economy greatly improved since the early 1930s, stimulated in part by the war that was raging in Europe. The preliminaries to that war had cut short Mamie and Ida’s trip to Europe in 1938. From Paris, Mamie had written in her journal on Sept. 14, "Worried about war conditions...Phoned American consulate...No one knows what will happen." They returned home immediately, and as the war intensified, the McFaddins followed events on the radio, Mamie recording important events in her diary.

The 1930s ended with the nation headed toward war. It had been a decade of great hardship, but rich in events and one that gave Americans a common experience. As many have said of the years 1930-1939, "we were poor, but we didn’t know we were poor." It was a complex time of hope and effort, with bright moments--a decade of dreams, deals, and dazzle.