The Little Girl Who Fought the Great Depression: Shirley Temple and 1930s America (2 page)

Shirley’s immense popularity reveals much about the ways in which Americans and many others around the world coped with the demands of this pivotal decade. The bright arc of her celebrity illuminates the dynamic relationship between the Hollywood film industry and movie fans, and between Shirley’s performances and fans’ dreams, as well as among those fans, the studio system, and the Temple family itself. Altogether, Shirley Temple allows us to explore the intricacies of Hollywood and consumer culture in the Great Depression more fully and freshly than any other figure of the decade. By placing Shirley Temple and her fans within the context of FDR and his constituents, we can see how popular entertainment as well as New Deal politics helped Americans to surmount the Great Depression. The forces set in motion by their smiling faces have shaped American life ever since.

CHAPTER 1 SMILE LIKE ROOSEVELT

In 1910 Gertrude Krieger and George Temple met at Henry K. Kramer’s dancing cotillion for adults in Los Angeles. Actually, she was not yet an adult but a shy, willowy seventeen-year-old high school junior with jet-black hair. She loved to dance, and the large ballroom playing phonograph records gave her an irresistible outlet. Still, she nervously entered this public stage, and to steady her resolve, she came hand in hand with a female classmate.
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Soon a short, compactly built young man of twenty-two approached. Not her equal in height, he nonetheless had a muscular body, an easy smile, an affable manner, and a fondness for bad puns. A snappy dresser, belying his modest clerk’s salary, he wore a three-piece suit and pearl-gray spats. He danced energetically if awkwardly, lead arm pumping up and down, no match for her in grace or practice. He immediately liked Gertrude and determined to make her like him. Gradually, she did.

Both had moved to Los Angeles in 1903 as children with their families, she from Chicago, he from Pennsylvania. Each had also lost a father and known financial uncertainty. By that fateful day in 1910 when George met Gertrude at the cotillion, he was still living with his mother and, along with his elder siblings, helping to support her. George and his sister, Grace, worked at the Southern California Edison Company, he as a clerk, she as a stenographer, while George’s older brother, Herbert, clerked in a hardware store, and younger brother Francis soon took a job as a messenger. For her part, within a year of their first dance, Gertrude was helping to pay her family’s bills as a stenographer.
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George and Gertrude married in 1913 and started their own household. Gertrude bore their first son, Jack (John), in 1915 and Sonny (George Francis Jr.) four years later. Yet family ties continued to bind. Gertrude’s mother, Maude, chain-smoking, sharply opinionated, bossy, increasingly morose, would live with or near her daughter and son-in-law and be supported by them for the rest of her life. Both the Temple and Krieger families knew how parents and children often had to pull together to sustain one another.

Still, all about them they could witness the boom of Los Angeles’s economy of oil, agriculture, maritime trade, banking, industrial manufacture, construction, moviemaking, and tourism. During the 1920s the city expanded by roughly eighty square miles through forty-five separate annexations. Newcomers poured into the county at the rate of 350 a day for ten years, and the city more than doubled its population from 577,000 to almost 1.24 million, making it the fifth largest in the country. Residents basked in what one journalist called “an easy optimism. . . . Anything seems possible; the future is yours, and the past?—there isn’t any.”
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George could confirm this optimism in the incremental improvements of his family’s life. To aid his advancement, he supplemented his limited education with night-school and correspondence courses in typing, bookkeeping, and accounting. By 1920 he had inched his way up to chief clerk for Southern California Edison and lived with his wife and young sons at 419½ Ocean Front Avenue, along with other white transplants from the Midwest and East, in the suburban beach resort of Venice. A year later, the family moved a short way to what were probably larger quarters at 125 Breeze Avenue. And by 1927 they resided in a stucco bungalow with a radio in the living room and a car in the garage in the quieter town of Santa Monica. George now worked as assistant branch manager for California Bank, where the city and the country’s speculative frenzy mounted almost day by day.

That year Gertrude Temple made a fateful resolution. In her mind it was not merely a hope but a determination: she and her husband would conceive a third child, that child would be a girl, ideally with naturally curly blond hair, and she would be named Shirley. The frustrated ballerina and movie-entranced mother launched her daughter’s career in the womb by exposing her to classical music, uplifting literature, great works of art, scenes of natural beauty, and romantic films. Her resolution and faith in prenatal aesthetic influences tapped popular beliefs and placed her within a tradition of stage and screen mothers who claimed to have willed their children into existence.
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A dimpled, brown-eyed Shirley Temple was duly born on April 23, 1928. She immediately became her mother’s pet project, displacing her older brothers as the center of Gertrude’s life. George too delighted in indulging his little girl, and, at age forty, he could confidently anticipate his family and career humming smoothly onward. After all, the economy boomed as never before, and its future glowed brightly. A lifelong Republican, as was Gertrude, George could also feel the city, the state, and the country’s government in the secure hands of the Grand Old Party. Indeed, the 1928 Republican presidential nominee, Herbert Hoover, himself a Californian and a self-made multimillionaire, epitomized sober, steady leadership.

Few national leaders in 1928 inspired confidence as did Herbert Hoover. For over a decade he had been one of the most respected figures in American government, and for almost two decades one especially praised for his ability to deal with calamities, whether of famine or flood. During the Great War, he spearheaded private food relief to German-occupied Belgium and coordinated American efforts to increase food supplies for U.S. troops and underfed allied nations, then organized food relief for millions starving in Central Europe at war’s end and in famished Russia in 1921. When, in the greatest natural disaster in American history, the Mississippi River flood of 1927 created a vast inland brown sea a thousand miles long and fifty miles wide, Hoover again took center stage in directing public and private efforts to help victims and stamp out disease. As secretary of commerce in both the Harding and Coolidge administrations, he was perhaps the most dynamic of all cabinet officials. Had his public career ended then, he would have been celebrated in history as a brilliant administrator and one of the greatest humanitarians of his time.

In the context of the 1920s, Hoover’s very colorlessness befitted his technocratic competence. The financial titan Bernard Baruch, who had served as head of the War Industries Board during the Great War, said admiringly, “To Hoover’s brain facts are as water to a sponge. They are absorbed into every tiny interstice.” A longtime friend and member of Hoover’s cabinet, Ray Lyman Wilbur, likened Hoover’s mind to a searchlight that he could turn full-blast onto any subject at will. “Sedate, laconic, undramatic, berating nobody, asserting nothing that his laboriously gathered facts and figures would not sustain,” in the words of a Washington reporter, Hoover provided a figure of immense security amid the vicissitudes of the Jazz Age. In the public mind, he seemed to be a man who had “never known failure.”
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The presidential election of 1928 was his first campaign for elective office, and Hoover’s overriding theme was prosperity. In accepting the Republican nomination, he painted a vision of a nation steadily climbing on a broad, smooth highway through pastures of plenty. His honeyed words would quickly acquire a bitter aftertaste: “We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land. The poorhouse is vanishing from among us. We have not yet reached the goal, but, given a chance to go forward with the policies of the last 8 years, we shall soon with the help of God be in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from this Nation.”
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Running against New York governor Alfred E. Smith, Hoover achieved one of the most sweeping victories in modern American history. With 58 percent of the popular vote, he won forty states (including four in the hitherto solidly Democratic South) and 444 electoral votes to Smith’s eight states and 87 electoral votes.

Less than eight months after Hoover’s inauguration, beginning on October 23 and tracing a jagged but inexorable descent, the New York stock market crashed. By mid-November, the Dow Jones index of industrial stocks, which had climbed to a dizzying peak of 381.17 on September 3, plunged to 198.60 by the closing bell on November 13—a loss of 48 percent. By any measure, this was a panic.

Hoover, along with others in government, banking, and industry, tried to calm investors. Seeking to minimize the crash, he first termed it a recession, then, in preference to the term “panic,” a depression. The country had seen depressions before, including the devastating Panic of 1893 and, most recently, the recessions of 1907 and 1920–22. Hoover thought the nation was in far better shape to deal with this one than it had been previously. In his annual message to Congress on December 3, 1929, he described the economy as fundamentally sound. The nation’s woes, he made clear, were more psychological than structural. “The long upward trend of fundamental progress” had induced “over-optimism” and hence “a wave of uncontrolled speculation in securities, resulting in the diversion of capital from business to the stock market and the inevitable crash.” Now giddy optimism had yielded to “unwarranted pessimism and fear.” He reassured the nation that the Federal Reserve System, the strength of American banks, and the cooperative efforts of business institutions and state and local governments protected the economy from the depressions of earlier times. The panic was over. “We have reestablished confidence.” Nonetheless, by the end of the month, industrial production had fallen 12 percent from its peak the previous June.
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As Hoover and others continued to beat the drum of confidence, the stock market revived and shuffled upward. By April 17, 1930, the Dow Jones average had climbed nearly a hundred points (to 294.07), recovering almost 40 percent of its losses. Nonetheless, employment and national productivity had started to slide in the summer of 1929, months before the October stock market crash, and, together with credit and prices, they continued their slump. In early March Hoover predicted that “the worst effects of the crash upon unemployment will have been passed in the next sixty days.” Again in May, as his sixty-day prediction came due, he declared the country had “passed the worst of the great economic storm.”
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Hoover’s calls for confidence in the fundamental soundness of the American economy and the character of the American people were accompanied by impatient dismissals of his critics. “Gentlemen, you have come sixty days too late,” he snapped in June 1930 to one delegation of concerned citizens representing the National Catholic Welfare Conference. “The depression is over.” In fact, the Depression was rapidly spreading across the globe, affecting virtually every important economy except the Soviet Union.
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By October 1930, Hoover’s words changed somewhat, but his insistent tune and beat remained the same. Now, he acknowledged, “This depression is world-wide. Its causes and its effects lie only partly in the United States.” Still, he emphasized the fundamental strength of American banking and business institutions to achieve new levels of prosperity for all. “I always have been, and I remain, an unquenchable believer in the resistless, dynamic power of American enterprise.” At this time the humorist Will Rogers said, “There has been more ‘optimism’ talked and less practiced than at any time during our history.”
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In fact, pessimism once again turned to panic. In November 1930 a rush of depositors overwhelmed Louisville’s National Bank of Kentucky. The panic rapidly spread to affiliated banks in Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri, and then to Arkansas, Iowa, and North Carolina. By December the crisis of confidence forced New York City’s Bank of United States to lock its doors in the largest commercial bank failure in American history up to that time. Although it was a private corporation, its name misled many to regard it as a national institution, further shaking confidence. The inability of the Federal Reserve System to mount a successful rescue deepened the dread. Still, the optimistic talk continued. Hoover and members of his cabinet, along with many leading industrialists and financial leaders, kept insisting that the worst of the Depression had passed and that recovery was imminent. Meanwhile, the gross national product declined from $181.8 billion in 1929 to 164.5 billion in 1930 and then to 153.0 in 1931. Jobs steadily disappeared. In 1929 only 3.2 percent of the labor force was totally unemployed. Their ranks swelled to 8.7 percent in 1930 and to 15.9 percent in 1931. The percentages of the partially employed grew even faster, as more and more industries cut production.
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