Federal Writers' Project – Life Histories/2020/Spring/Section25/Johnson Bearman

Otis Griffin

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Otis Griffin
Nationality	American
Occupation	Cabinet Maker

Otis Griffin (1880 - Unknown) was a cabinet maker who was the owner of “the Bearman shop”. It was a “one-story frame structure painted a sickly yellow” on the South Front Street in New Bern, North Carolina. Otis Griffin changed his name to Johnson Bearman when he was interviewed by James S. Beaman. on May 17th, 1939.

Biography

Early Life

Otis Griffin was born in Kinston, North Carolina in 1880. His parents had three children, Johnnie, Griffin, and Marie, from oldest to youngest. Griffin’s father was a merchant, who supported his family to have a comfortable living condition from his dry goods business. Griffin first came to New Bern, North Carolina when he was seventeen and he worked in a grocery store for five years. Then he decided to go South, but found nothing interesting there. So he went back home, and made his living by producing and selling cabinets from 1921.

Later Life

Griffin had never been married in his life because the girl that he engaged to died. He had not joined any church until he heard an evangelist preaching, being fond of the stories he told. However, Griffin did not like the “unreal” preaching that he usually heard after he became a trader. He wanted to hear some old-fashioned preaching that “teaches the love of God and the redemption of sinners through Christ’s love”.

In a week of May, 1939, Griffin only sold two kitchen safes. He had no work to be done because no dealers had demands for his cabinets. He even did not “sell a dime’s worth” in some weeks during the Great Depression.

Griffin cared less about politics as he thought “politicians are liars”. Although he always voted the Democratic ticket, Griffin thought politicians were corrupted and spent “people’s money with liquor and women”. Therefore, when some people counted on the national election, hoping it to bring economic development, Griffin did not do so because he thought politicians only made “fool laws”. He cared about his own business more than politics.

Social Context

Relationship bewteen Marriage Rate and GDP per capita

Declining Marriage during the Great Depression

During the Great Depression, the U.S. marriage rate fell by a whopping 22 percent from 1929 to 1933. “The marriage propensities and gross domestic product were positively correlated” during the period of the Great Depression. And places where got hurt heavily by the Depression tended to have the largest decrease of marriage rates. One chief factor of the dropping marriage rate was high male unemployment. Because “the cultural norms of the 1930s held that women should leave the labor force upon marriage”, women tended to find men with stable jobs in order to form their own household. Therefore with “an increase in local male unemployment of ten percentage points”, “women’s probability of marriage lowered by one fourth”.

However, “marriages formed in poor economic times were more likely to survive than marriages made in more affluent periods”. The divorce rate “fell from 1.66 per thousand of population to a low of 1.28 in 1932”. That was because individuals got married during tough economic times paid more attention on quality other than economic viability. They also encountered difficulties together, forming stronger bonds between each other. Therefore, although the marriage rate fell dramatically, couples married during the Great Depression time were likely to have more stable and long-lasting marriages.