If you were around in the 1930's, what would you be doing?

[Spaldeen]

I'd probably be an out of work musician, trying to get on with the WPA.

[handmade34]

1. Farming

my passion, my dream, my once upon and maybe future

[Spaldeen]

2. Where would you be farming?

And would you trade a tune for some bread?

[handmade34]

4. music and farming

go together like grilled cheese and tomato soup! I would farm where there was good rich muck soil someone where fracking is outlawed. I am a vegetarian but I would raise pigs for local meat eaters, have an apiary, chickens and organic vegetables and small fruit. I would work on my custom design in the winter after crops had been harvested...

the book of my future farm is forth coming...


some of my bread... oh, or did you mean??
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[Spaldeen]

7. There is only one kind of bread you can eat

So I'd probably stick with the one you posted!

[TBF]

3. Socialists in the 1930's -

(it is interesting - the more things change the more they stay the same).

The Faction Fight of the 1930s—"Militants” and “Progressives” vs. “Old Guard"
Beginning in 1930, a long-running faction fight began to develop in the Socialist Party, pitting relative newcomers to the party, anxious to achieve “Socialism in Our Time,” against the organization's aging veteran cadres. In the words of historian Bernard Johnpoll, this was “more a struggle between generations than between ideologies. The ideological content of the struggle did not develop until the disagreement was almost two years old...” Basic differences between the two groupings were more over the question of tactics than principles, with the Militants seeking organized Socialist caucuses in the ranks of the trade union movement while the Old Guard adamently defended the historic separation between the political and economic arms of the workers' movement. The Militants sought to make a primary appeal to the intelligentsia and middle classes, believing that the working class would tend to follow the lead of the more educated citizenry, while the Old Guard held a more traditional perspective basing itself on the primacy of the working class. As Johnpoll notes, “the adherents of the Old Guard were, if anything, more Marxist than the militants.” The perspective on the Soviet Union further divided the two factions, with the Militants tending to be more supportive of the Soviet Union during this violent period of Mass Collectivization and the First Five Year Plan than were the more democratically-oriented Old Guard ...

More here - http://www.marxists.org/history/usa/eam/spa/socialistparty.html

[handmade34]

6. Emma Goldman

is one of my role models...

[TBF]

24. Yes, I love her. nt

[DFW]

5. I'd probably be ANOTHER starving musician

Either that, or I'd be spying on the Germans, wondering how a place with so many beautiful, charming women could be run by such a band of lunatics--probably the same way a Russian spy feels these days about Texas.

[Spaldeen]

8. Are you saying

You're a modern day Russian spy in Tex?

[DFW]

46. Close, but not quite

I can speak Russian, but I'm not Russian, and I'm stationed in Europe, not Texas.

Besides, if the Russians have stationed anyone to spy on Rick Perry, he's got to be the most bored spy in the world.

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

9. Maybe driving a taxi

just to get to drive some of the cars of that era. I've always loved American cars of the 1930s. Just yesterday I went to my mechanic's who had a 1939 Buick that's been in his family since it was new.

[Chan790]

10. I have no idea, I'd be better off though.

I'm an autodidact so basically the world would have been my oyster because I can teach myself anything...and I do mean anything...but I'm a terrible student in formalized education. Back then, pretty much any job was possible if you knew how to do it. I can do anything given a long enough learning curve. (As a comparative, I taught myself graphic design in a month and a half. I taught myself Javascript and JSON in a weekend. I learned fluent Latin during a summer break from middle school.)

College made it easier but even lawyers didn't have to have college degrees back then. I'd have been whatever I felt like teaching myself to be...from one month to the next.

[NV Whino]

11. Bootlegging

[RebelOne]

12. I was around in the 1930s. I was born in 1939. n/t

[First Speaker]

13. Trying to assassinate Hitler, I hope...

[Boom Sound 416]

14. Probably would have gone to Hollywood over NYC

[Aristus]

15. I'd be dressing like this:

For my fashion tastes, I was definitely born in the wrong era.

[brooklynboy49]

18. Give me a pair of Lees Riders and a flannel shirt

That's all I need, and I'm good to go.

Edit to add: But I really liked the women's styles of the '40's, from the haircuts down to the shoes. I'm not a fashion maven, but I've always liked the '40s look.

[Skittles]

16. kicking racist, sexist, homophobic ass

Last edited Sun Apr 6, 2014, 09:57 PM - Edit history (1)

[brooklynboy49]

17. If I were around in 1939

I'd probably be glued to a seat in my local movie theater. What a year for movies!

[No Vested Interest]

19. Keeping house, reading more books than I do now. nt

[Joe Shlabotnik]

20. I'd like to think I'd be a Spanish anarchist.

But in reality I'd probably be a drifter, a proto-beatnik leaving a trail of children and venereal diseases all over the country. Riding the rails, hitchhiking and working odd jobs in between checking out jazz bands in every city, and country blues guitarists in every rural juke joint.

[Behind the Aegis]

21. Gay and Jewish? Hmmm..I don't know if I would even be alive.

Don't mean to be a downer, but I have to take that into consideration. Likely, I would be working in a factory or something, unless I also retained my language abilities, then it is possible I could be doing something a little more covert.

[Vashta Nerada]

22. I'd be having a bully day.

Bully!

[Tabasco_Dave]

23. Dating Miss Crabtree!

[LeftishBrit]

25. Very likely died at birth or in infancy...

If lucky to avoid that, might well have ended up as a victim of Hitler.

Even if my family were all already in Britain by that time, I might still have died, when I had pneumonia as a kid; and if I avoided that, would probably have had a pretty miserable life. As indeed many people did at that time.

I am very glad not to be living in the 1930s, bad as some aspects of modern life are!

[malthaussen]

27. Starving.

Depending on time and age, I'd probably be a Premature Anti-Fascist.

-- Mal

[Ptah]

28. Blacksmith

[charlie and algernon]

29. hopefully working for the FDR Administration to end the depression

[raccoon]

30. If you're a woman, probably housework. Other possibilities:

Dance marathon

Hopping a freight.

[Brother Buzz]

31. I'd be an underutilized master carpenter making fly screens for the rich widow lady in town

Sanded, primed, undercoated then top coated; the best, tightest, most accurate screens found in the realm. That, and tending the vegetable garden in the backyard.

[Tom Ripley]

32. Fomenting revolution and looking for sturdy lampposts

[haele]

33. Wouldn't be around in the 1930's.

I would have been a miscarriage by week 22 in the late 1880's, might have even seriously hurt or killed my mother in the process.
Significant advances that had been made in obstetrics/pre-natal medical care during the 1950's was the only thing that allowed my mother to "keep" me and deliver safely.

But if I had survived as "someone else's" child, I probably would have been:
- A housewife who is a seamstress on the side,
- A housewife who is a nurse/midwife on the side,
- A housewife who is a fortune teller on the side,
- A housewife who is all of above on the side,
- A "retired" WWI Woman's Auxilliary-cum- school teacher,
- Or an aging coochie dancer.

You're talking my grandparent's generation, who, though they encouraged education and curiosity, were very traditional. Both Grandfathers were borderline John Birchers - they were democrats, were fearful of communists and not exactly pro-union (which was odd, one grandfather worked in Pennsylvania coal mines while he was in High School to save for enough college to get a liberal arts degree and move to California - he worked there from age 12 to age 16).

My parents were tail-end Depression Era babies (hey, I would have been my own grandma!), and they were the ones who got the opportunities to break out of the traditional expectations.

Haele

[politicat]

34. Dead.

My mother had pre-eclampsia with me so likely we wouldn't have survived. I had pneumonia (required hospitalization) when I was 11 months old. Without antibiotics, I would have likely died. Had it again when I was 6.

Supposing I had survived, I would be stuck on a backwater farm, milking cows and being fed whey because the milk, cheese and eggs were sold to pay for fuel, taxes and absolute necessities. Going on my grandparents and great-grandparents, I would have lost half my teeth through (no fluoride in that well water) decay and malnutrition by age 30, would have permanently damaged bones and carb-related obesity due to malnutrition. I would have little access to a quality education because, while it was expected that girls would complete high school, girls were officially barred from the higher maths and sciences until the 1960s in that school district, and were required to take 4 years of home Ec. Assuming I managed to somehow get into college, I could not have afforded it and would have been allowed only a few professions, and that education would have been geared towards an MRS degree.

Were I an adult in the 30s, I would probably be doing what one great-great-grandmother was doing -- putting her three older children in an orphanage and working in something bootlegging related (moll? Runner? We don't know) as a means of making enough money to support her children someday.

I have no illusions that the past was a better place. I would have been miserable.

[KamaAina]

35. Riding the rails.

Hobo all the way.

[jmowreader]

36. Either farming or mining

In 1930s Idaho, the male children of men who worked in manual trades knew they would work in the same place their fathers did; most of the time, you didn't even have to apply. The foreman knew John Smith had a son named Arthur, and as soon as Arthur turned 18 he would just report to the paymaster to be put on the rolls. Tradesmen who owned businesses would train their sons to install boilers or roofs so they could all work together - how many "White and Sons Plumbing" or "Peters and Sons Landscaping" companies are there?

My dad's family was from South Idaho; some of them were dairy farmers, some hog farmers and there was at least one egg farmer in there. My mother's family was from North Idaho, and they mined lead.

In the 1930s you didn't choose your path as you do today. Back then, your path was determined at birth as surely as your eye color was. Professionals had their path determined the same way; father taught son the law, and sent him to the bar exam as soon as he was ready.

We can kid about being a beatnik or an underemployed sculptor, but what you really would have been, is what your father did.

Women would have followed the same career path: they would have been housewives and mothers like their mothers were. If mom was a teacher or a store clerk her daughters would have also been that, but they would also have been housewives and mothers.

[RandoLoodie]

37. Working the fields

if there was a crop. Probably migrating to California or to somewhere there was work.

[sakabatou]

38. Painter

[tabbycat31]

39. Probably dead

The illness I had in high school that caused me to miss a month of school killed my great grandfather in the 20s. Probably would have killed me too.

[JPZenger]

40. I'd like to say "Trying to Kill Hitler" but would probably be trying to clean dust out of my windows

I'd like to think that if I was alive and healthy in the 1930s, I would have been plotting on ways to kill Hitler. Some people were in the late 1930s. However, I probably would have really been stuck in the Dust Bowl, trying to grow a few vegetables to survive in the dry dirt.

[av8rdave]

41. Flying DC-3s

How cool would that have been?

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

43. The "Gooneybird"

I flew in one as a commercial passenger in the late 60s from Richmond, Virginia down to Savannah, Georgia when Delta Airlines still used them on southern runs. They were so comfortable (huge plush seats with plenty of leg room). It was kind of strange how low they flew above the towns in their flight path. You could see people and cars moving below. It was a wonderful experience. My dad flew them in the Air Force as the C-47. I thought it was a beautiful design.

[Major Nikon]

47. Still can

There's a lot of them still around. I know a guy that owns one, but it hasn't flown in years.

[av8rdave]

49. I know it's still doable, but...

I would have loved to fly them in commercial service had I been born at the appropriate time.

[Major Nikon]

50. Low altitude, a lot more turbulence, slow airspeed, primitive avionics, breaks down all the time....

Oh wait, sounds a lot like my airplane!

[geardaddy]

42. If I were the age I am now

I would be dead. Kidney transplants were decades away.

[Art_from_Ark]

44. Working in a government job and earning a nice pension

[Brigid]

45. Probably working in a diner on Mississippi,

Waiting for Everett, Pete, and Delmar to come in one day.

[LynneSin]

48. wondering who invented a time machine that took me back to the 1930s

and wondering where the hell is my iphone.

[Callmecrazy]

51. I'd try to get on at Hoover Dam

[kwassa]

52. Playing the Savoy Ballroom in the battle of the bands between Benny Goodman and ...

Chick Webb.

[Gidney N Cloyd]

53. Something with radio shows- dramas, etc. Writing, voicework, sound effects.

Got my undergrad degree in broadcasting and really enjoyed that stuff.

[Rhiannon12866]

54. My grandmother said girls had a choice of being a nurse or a teacher...

I would probably have made the same choice she did.

BTW, and my grandmother did work for the WPA during the war.