Breadline: Stories of the Great Depression

Narratique Studios

Ten true stories of hard times and the people who got through them. A reporter caught in the storm that named the Dust Bowl. Teenagers riding the rails. Women carrying library books by mule up Kentucky creeks. A stranger in Canton, Ohio, who answered his neighbors' letters. Veterans driven out of Washington. Farmers bidding a nickel to save a neighbor. Harlem rent parties, the Tree Army, and a boxer who paid back his relief. Researched from archives and oral histories; voices other than the narrator's are dramatized re-creations. A Narratique Studios production.

Episodes

  1. Sep 29

    Cinderella Man

    James J. Braddock was a washed-up boxer with a broken hand, working the docks and living on relief. Then in June 1935, as a 10-to-1 underdog, he took the heavyweight title from Max Baer. Six days later, he paid back the relief. This is the story told straight, including the parts Hollywood got wrong.Sources: Official James J. Braddock website and FAQ; Smith & Singer auction record of Braddock's canceled relief check (June 19, 1935); New Jersey Boxing Hall of Fame; contemporary fight records. Voices other than the narrator's are dramatized re-creations. Cover photo: Arthur Rothstein, 1936, FSA/Library of Congress.Breadline is a Narratique Studios production.

  2. Sep 29

    The Tree Army

    Thirty dollars a month, twenty-five of it sent home. From 1933 to 1942, about three million young men joined the Civilian Conservation Corps. They planted billions of trees, built more than 800 parks, and learned to read by lamplight. The story starts on a rainy mountainside in Virginia, on the first night of the first camp.Sources: CCC Legacy, "Camp Roosevelt Beginnings" and "History"; National Park Service, Shenandoah National Park, "The Civilian Conservation Corps"; PBS American Experience, The Civilian Conservation Corps; DPLA, "Roosevelt's Tree Army"; Britannica. Voices other than the narrator's are dramatized re-creations. Cover photo: Arthur Rothstein, 1936, FSA/Library of Congress.Breadline is a Narratique Studios production.

  3. Sep 29

    Rent Party

    Harlem, Saturday night. The landlord won't wait, so the tenants throw a party: a quarter at the door, fried fish in the kitchen, and a stride piano player who might be one of the greatest in the world. The episode covers Langston Hughes's rent-party cards, James P. Johnson, Willie "The Lion" Smith, Fats Waller, and mutual aid with style.Sources: Langston Hughes, The Big Sea (1940); Beinecke Library, Langston Hughes rent party card collection (via Hyperallergic and Open Culture); Riverwalk Jazz (Stanford), "The Harlem Big Three."Music note: the stride piano in this episode is an original composition, not a period recording. Voices other than the narrator's are dramatized re-creations. Cover photo: Arthur Rothstein, 1936, FSA/Library of Congress.Breadline is a Narratique Studios production.

  4. Sep 29

    Penny Auction

    Iowa and Nebraska, the early 1930s. When the bank forecloses on a neighbor, the whole township turns up at the sale. They bid a nickel on a horse and a penny on a plow, and they make sure nobody bids higher. The episode also covers the Farmers' Holiday Association and the day farmers in Le Mars, Iowa, dragged a judge out of his courtroom.Sources: Wessels Living History Farm, "Penny Auctions" (Harvey Pickrel oral history); Ferner Nuhn, "Like a Thick Wall," The Nation, March 8, 1933 (via History Matters, GMU); Notes on Iowa, "Le Mars Farmers' Revolt"; Encyclopedia of the Great Plains (UNL). Voices other than the narrator's are dramatized re-creations. Cover photo: Arthur Rothstein, 1936, FSA/Library of Congress.Breadline is a Narratique Studios production.

  5. Sep 29

    The Woman in the Photograph

    Nipomo, California, March 1936. Dorothea Lange takes about half a dozen pictures of a tired mother in roughly ten minutes. One becomes the defining image of the Depression. The woman in it was Florence Owens Thompson, and for forty years almost nobody knew her name. Both halves of the story are told here, Lange's and the family's.Sources: Library of Congress Research Guide, "Migrant Mother"; Dorothea Lange, "The Assignment I'll Never Forget," Popular Photography (1960); History.com, "The Real Story Behind 'Migrant Mother'"; PBS Antiques Roadshow, "The Story of the Migrant Mother." Voices other than the narrator's are dramatized re-creations. Cover photo: Arthur Rothstein, 1936, FSA/Library of Congress.Breadline is a Narratique Studios production.

  6. Sep 29

    The Bonus Army

    Summer 1932. Tens of thousands of First World War veterans come to Washington to ask for the bonus they had been promised. They build the largest Hooverville in the country within sight of the Capitol. On July 28, the U.S. Army drives them out with cavalry, tanks and tear gas. They lost that night. Four years later, they won the argument.Sources: AUSA Land Warfare Paper 63, "Confrontation at Anacostia Flats: The Bonus Army of 1932"; Military Times, "Eisenhower, Patton and MacArthur and the stain of the Bonus Army"; D.C. Police Memorial records; Congressional votes of 1932 and 1936. Voices other than the narrator's are dramatized re-creations. Cover photo: Arthur Rothstein, 1936, FSA/Library of Congress.Breadline is a Narratique Studios production.

  7. Sep 29

    Mr. B. Virdot

    Canton, Ohio, December 1933. A newspaper ad offers money to families in need. All they have to do is write a letter and tell the truth. Seventy-five years later, a grandson opens an old suitcase and learns who B. Virdot really was, and what the man behind the name had been hiding.Sources: Ted Gup, A Secret Gift (Penguin Press, 2010); Ted Gup, "Hard Times, A Helping Hand," The New York Times, Dec. 22, 2008; Smithsonian Magazine, "A Yuletide Gift of Kindness"; NPR interview with Ted Gup. Voices other than the narrator's are dramatized re-creations. Cover photo: Arthur Rothstein, 1936, FSA/Library of Congress.Breadline is a Narratique Studios production.

  8. Sep 29

    The Book Women

    In the hollows of eastern Kentucky, where the road was often a creek bed, the WPA paid local women $28 a month to deliver library books on horseback and muleback. Their routes ran 100 miles a week. They rebuilt ragged magazines into handmade scrapbooks, and families waited on fence posts for them to arrive.Sources: Smithsonian Magazine, "The Horse-Riding Librarians Who Were the Great Depression's Bookmobiles"; The Kitchen Sisters, "The Pack Horse Librarians"; Northern Kentucky Tribune, "Pack Horse Library Project"; Jeanne Cannella Schmitzer, Register of the Kentucky Historical Society (1997). Voices other than the narrator's are dramatized re-creations. Cover photo: Arthur Rothstein, 1936, FSA/Library of Congress.Breadline is a Narratique Studios production.

  9. Sep 29

    The Boxcar Kids

    An estimated quarter of a million teenagers left home during the Depression to ride the freight trains. This episode covers the railroad bulls, hobo jungles and mulligan stew, and the truth about the "hobo code." It also covers the Scottsboro Boys, and the loneliness that riders remembered sixty years later.Sources: PBS American Experience, Riding the Rails (Michael Uys & Lexy Lovell, 1997); Errol Lincoln Uys, Riding the Rails: Teenagers on the Move During the Great Depression; Encyclopedia.com, "Riding the Rails, 1929–1941"; Ian Savage, "Trespassing on the Railroad" (Northwestern Univ.); Atlas Obscura on hobo graffiti. Voices other than the narrator's are dramatized re-creations. Cover photo: Arthur Rothstein, 1936, FSA/Library of Congress.Breadline is a Narratique Studios production.

  10. Sep 29

    Black Sunday

    April 14, 1935. A warm, clear Palm Sunday on the southern Plains turns black in minutes, as a wall of dust rolls across Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas. An AP reporter caught in it gives the disaster the name we still use. We look at how thirty years of plowing and one long drought set the stage, and how a soil scientist named Hugh Hammond Bennett turned the storm into a law. We also meet the "next-year people" who stayed.Sources: National Weather Service Norman, "Black Sunday, April 14, 1935"; PBS American Experience, Surviving the Dust Bowl; USDA NRCS, "A Brief History of the NRCS"; History.com, "Black Sunday"; We're History, "The Southern Origins of Soil Conservation." Voices other than the narrator's are dramatized re-creations. Cover photo: Arthur Rothstein, 1936, FSA/Library of Congress.Breadline is a Narratique Studios production.

  • 10 Episodes

About

Ten true stories of hard times and the people who got through them. A reporter caught in the storm that named the Dust Bowl. Teenagers riding the rails. Women carrying library books by mule up Kentucky creeks. A stranger in Canton, Ohio, who answered his neighbors' letters. Veterans driven out of Washington. Farmers bidding a nickel to save a neighbor. Harlem rent parties, the Tree Army, and a boxer who paid back his relief. Researched from archives and oral histories; voices other than the narrator's are dramatized re-creations. A Narratique Studios production.

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