Federal Writers' Project – Life Histories/2021/Fall/Section018/Mr. and Mrs. Early Dull

Overview

Location of Yadkinville, North Carolina: Coordinates: 36°7′58″N 80°39′39″W

Mr. and Mrs. Early Dull was interviewed by Clalee Dunnagan for the Federal Writers' Project on February 27, 1939. They worked mainly as tenant farmers in Yadkinville, a town in Yadkin County, North Carolina.

Biography

Marriage

Early Dull and Nellie Wilson (Mrs. Early Dull) met for the first time in a celebration held in the town for the soldiers coming back from France, and they soon fell in love with each other after it and got married.

Work Life

Early Dull worked in a coal mine in West Virginia before he got married. After his marriage with Nellie, he came back to North Carolina and they began farming on a rented place in Yadkin County. In 1923, Mr.Early quit farming because prices were so low he couldn't make anything from it and went to do carpenter work. However, three years later, in 1926, Mr. Early returned to the farm because house-building was slow. But as most of the family's land was on the river bottom, the farm was not any better, every year the water gets up and ruins the corn.

“ Many of our North Carolina farmers are desperately poor, live in wretched houses, and are scantily provided with even the necessities of life. ” — A sociologist from the University of North Carolina wrote in 1929

Social Context

The Great Depression

Crowd gathering at the intersection of Wall Street and Broad Street after the 1929 crash

The Great Depression refers to the global economic recession that ran between 1929 and 1933.

The Great Depression began in the United States with the stock market decline on October 24, 1929, which further developed to the Wall Street Crash of 1929 on October 29, which swept the world. The Great Depression brought about a devastating blow to both developed and developing countries. The unemployment rate in the United States had increased to 25%, in some countries, it has even reached 33%.

All major cities in the world have been hit hard, especially in areas that relied on heavy industry. Construction projects in many countries were shut down, and the price of agricultural products dropped by about 60%.

Unemployment

The Great Depression caused persistently high unemployment rates in the United States, where the unemployment rate increased by over 20 percentage points between 1929 and 1933.

The unemployment rate raised so much during the Great Depression due to:

1. People who lost money on the Wall Street Crash (1929) started to spend less
2. Negative multiplier effect
3. Fall in money supply and deflation
4. Agricultural recession
5. Trade war
6. Wrong policies

Tenant Farmers

Tenant farmer on his front porch, south of Muskogee, Oklahoma (1939)

Before the Great Depression, hard times have already hit North Carolina’s farmers because of overproduction of cash crops, falling crop prices, rising farm costs, poor conservation practices, and other problems. Both cotton and tobacco’s price plummeted, and these crops had damaged the soil, making cultivation even more difficult.

During the Great Depression, with jobs being lost in manufacturing and the service sector, US agriculture was also going through a prolonged downturn for two decades, making the original situation even worse.

Moreover, the number of tenants increased around 1935, the farm tenancy also grew, many farmers were negatively affected by high land prices, low selling prices, natural disasters, etc.

“ Well somebody told us Wall Street fell. But we were so poor that we couldn’t tell. Cotton was short and the weeds were tall But Mr. Roosevelt’s a gonna save us all. ” — from “Song of the South,” written by Bob McDill about the Great Depression-era and recorded in 1989 by the band Alabama

References

• Bishop, RoAnn. “Agriculture in North Carolina during the Great Depression.” NCpedia, January 1, 2010. https://www.ncpedia.org/agriculture/great-depression.

• Dunnagan, Clalee. "Poor People Can't Get Nowhere."Federal Writers' Project Papers, 1936-1940. https://dc.lib.unc.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/03709/id/773/rec/1

• David E. Conrad, “Tenant Farming and Sharecropping,” The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry.php?entry=TE009.

• History.com Editors. “Great Depression History.” History.com. A&E Television Networks, October 29, 2009. https://www.history.com/topics/great-depression/great-depression-history.Â

• Margo, Robert A. “Employment and Unemployment in the 1930s.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 7, no. 2 (1993): 41–59. https://doi.org/10.1257/jep.7.2.41.

• Pettinger, Tejvan, and Karthik. “Unemployment during the Great Depression.” Economics Help, April 1, 2020. https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/162985/economics/unemployment-during-the-great-depression/.

• Sam Moore. “U.S. Farmers during the Great Depression.” Farm Collector, September 19, 2011. https://www.farmcollector.com/farm-life/u-s-farmers-during-great-depression.

• Segal, Troy. “What Was the Great Depression?” Investopedia. Investopedia, April 23, 2021. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/g/great_depression.asp.

• “Why It Happened.” Digital history. Accessed October 24, 2021. https://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtid=2&psid=3432.