LEARN NC

North Carolina History Digital Textbook Project

The Great Depression: Impact over time

By Kristin Post

1.6 Teacher's guide: Future economy

Introductory script

You may think about the Great Depression as a negative event in United States history, and it was very devastating. However, people have memories that are not always negative. Now that you’ve thought of the positives and negatives, think about what you would do if you had to live through something like the Great Depression. Listen to Stan Hyatt as he discusses the skills he thinks are important if this were to happen.

Preliminary questions

  1. On a sheet of paper, students will draw a line through the vertical center, labeling one half “positive impacts” and the other half “negative impacts.”
  2. Based on what students have heard so far, they will spend a few minutes filling out their sheet with positive and negative impacts of the Great Depression, as described by Stan Hyatt.

The recording

Play the Future Economy oral history excerpt. Running time: 2 minutes 34 seconds.

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Transcript

Stan Hyatt
Yes, I think it’s important that we pass down all the traditions that we possibly can. I asked my kids, and they think it’s funny when I ask them this question. I try to get them — or did when they were younger — try to get them to go out and help me garden. And there’s some work in gardening, having to dig and prune, and spray, and all that stuff you do gardening, plant things. I said, “Well, what would happen if the economy got bad again? Like, I’ve seen it when I was real little, or even worse before I was born. What would happen if that happened today and you couldn’t go over to Ingles in Mars Hill and buy bread and milk and so forth, what would you do?” I don’t want to be pessimistic or a forecaster of doom coming in the future, but to me that’s a valid question. That was, I guess, something my grandmother and others instilled in me. You have to be knowledgeable enough to take care of yourself and not depend on everybody else to lay things in your lap.
Rob Amberg
I think it’s good to be in a place where you can be, depend on yourself, too. Not every place is like that.
Stan Hyatt
I think Madison County, North Carolina has got to be up at the top of the list. I’ve met people over there, I have a neighbor that can sit down and make wagon wheels from scratch. I have people that can — they’re carpenters, they’re plumbers, they’re automobile mechanics. They can do anything. I’m not that gifted myself. I don’t want to mislead you and you think that I am, but these people in Madison County, because it was so shut in for so long and isolated somewhat geographically and by the road situation from the rest of the world, they learned to survive. I’m convinced that the older people over here could do just about anything to make a living if everything collapsed economy-wise and everything, and that to me is a very valuable thing to be able to do. They could make it. I feel like that a lot of people in the cities that have all the conveniences today, if we ever went into bad economic times, they would really suffer.

Follow-up questions

  1. Do you agree with Stan Hyatt? Do certain people have an advantage over others in certain economic times?
  2. What is the likelihood Great Depression could happen again?
  3. If the economy collapsed and food and money were scarce, what kinds of things would be important for families to know how to do?
  4. How would you go about learning those things in this day and age?
  5. How important do you think it is to be “knowledgeable enough to take care of yourself?”