Federal Writers' Project – Life Histories/2023/Fall/Section33/William Smith

Biography

Personal life: William Smith was a man who worked in a soil pipe factory in Alabama, 1939. He worked long hours for many years in order to support his wife and six kids. Both of Smith’s parents left him when he was little and after that he made his own way. Since he was abandoned around the age of seven, he did not have the means to get an education for himself. Smith went through life without the benefits of education and while that was the case for most people his age, he saw the way it left him worse off. After finding work in the soil pipe factory, Smith’s boss kept him employed for over 36 years, through the depression and years after in order to help him keep his family in a house and fed.

Social Context

Education

Before the turn of the century, just about half of all white children were in schools. Merely 50 percent of children from the age of 5 to the age of 19 were getting an education, the rest fell through the cracks and had to survive without much literacy or any fundamental knowledge of math, sciences, or english. There was also notice of many pre-school age children needing family services, which kept them from getting an education at all. Many children of a poor family life background were kept out of school as the family didn’t have the means, motivation, or opportunity to give them that head start to life. Without that basis, though, it was harder for these children to find jobs and ways of supporting themselves later in life. Education rates rose after the start of the 20th century, but not much. In the early 1900s, schools were underfunded and understaffed. Many didn’t have the money to open their doors, much less support the curriculum expected or pay their teachers. Illiteracy rates were high in children, both white and black, and many didn’t receive much, if any, proper education. “At the time [1918], the illiteracy rate for children 10 and older reached 12.1 percent; the rate was 6.4 percent among whites, and 31.3 percent among African Americans” (Harvey 2010). With so many people growing up not being able to read, that skill was a lot more valued and those without it were at a disadvantage when searching for jobs after leaving school age.

Employment

During the 1920s and 30s, there was an increase in closed factories and facilities. Thousands of people were kicked out of their jobs every month, raising unemployment rates and scaling back production even more. Unemployment hit 25 percent in 1933 and didn’t go down much until the 1940s. Iron and steel industries were hit the worst, with soil pipe factories, mills and mines following suit. As many people had been employed within factories and industrial plants, a large number of the lower to middle class of Alabama was hit hard by this depression. Factories closed at an exceptionally high pace and didn’t reopen for many years, if they ever did. As those factories closed, and hundreds of thousands of people lost their jobs, the number of people who fell below the poverty line rose. With unemployment at such a high rate, though, it was nearly impossible to find another job after being fired. With the production field shrinking, and more people losing their jobs, there were less opportunities to find more. Factories fired people and didn’t look for replacements, but as that was happening all across the state, unemployment rose at a staggering pace. Employment didn’t begin to return to a ‘normal’ rate until 1938, finally stabilizing in 1941 after Franklin Delano Roosevelt changed policies and implemented relief protocols to assist the unemployed and impoverished. This change didn’t help the decade of lost jobs and poverty that was created by the Great Depression, but it helped the surviving families regain their livelihood and some semblance of their life before this surge of unemployment.

Citations

Brownell, Blaine A. “Birmingham, Alabama: New South City in the 1920s.” The Journal of Southern History 38, no. 1 (1972): 21–48. https://doi.org/10.2307/2206652.

Dass, Permeil, "Deciphering Franklin D. Roosevelt's Educational Policies During the Great Depression (1933-1940)." Dissertation, Georgia State University, 2014.

doi: https://doi.org/10.57709/4903264

“Public Education in the Early Twentieth Century.” n.d. Encyclopedia of Alabama. https://encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/public-education-in-the-early-twentieth-century/.

“Great Depression in Alabama.” n.d. Encyclopedia of Alabama. https://encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/great-depression-in-alabama/.

Stephen Beauregard Weeks. 1971. History of Public School Education in Alabama. Greenwood.

(https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED541810.pdf)

“National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL).” National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Home Page, a part of the U.S. Department of Education. Accessed October 24, 2023. https://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp.