[Color] Pictures from the Great Depression

[Schmitty]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1388179/Rare-Library-Congress-colour-photographs-Great-Depression.html

Here's a few interesting ones:

[AK shooter]

Those are some great pictures. I grew up near Shriever, Louisiana and probably fished in that same spot when I was a kid.

http://i540.photobucket.com/albums/gg329/AKshooter_photo/e501d943.jpg

[chili]

Very cool. Those old color photos are always interesting.

[RandyCOG3]

Interesting. As the webpage says, these were photographs taken by a Gov't agency. If we think >$.50 for a single shot of 7.62X51 NATO was costly, I can only imagine how much it cost for each of these crisp, clear pictures, because there would probably have been 3 pics taken for each, one on either side of what the exposure "should have been", and then you only know what to actually print after the negatives are processed, which costs money, too.

We're all familiar with the discrimination against, famously, the Tuskegee Airmen, somebody must have really stuck his or her neck out to get a lot of pictures taken of what would have been called "negroes" at
that time. Out of all of those pictures, I can see exactly one picture of what might have been an "Indian", and one that might be an Hispanic female, maybe. No Asians of any sort (many having been put in pens, in
the desert). It's possible that the "Indian" <my reference to the term of the time> could be an Hispanic, or Asian, or just some Caucasian that has spent too much time on the trail. Marlboro Man.

Having been around my parents... and other relatives of that era...and lots and lots of retirees here in FL... I've never heard anybody, ever, refer to WWII as having anything to do with the Great Depression.
They didn't have much, but, they universally felt the sacrifice of tires, gas, etc., stuff that they had taken for granted. Yes, it's said that the wartime economy put an end to the GD., I'm just saying that
people seemed to have "enough" sugar, and chocolate, and gasoline prior to that, according to the people that I've known that lived through it.

I don't want to be misunderstood: I'm grateful that somebody went out and took all of these pictures. And, I haven't bothered to look through the archives that the British author did. Any words above,
that seem awful, are not MY words, just being period-correct, maybe to point out just how awful things must have been for many people, beyond the sacrifice Joe Average paid. There never was any
shortage of Negroes, or Indians, or Asians willing to pick up a rifle, fly a plane, drive a truck, or to toil at home. And they weren't always referred to by names such as these by their fellow Americans.

RandyCOG3

[Nazgul]

I saw those too and thought they were great photos...My grandmother lived in a dugout up in Wyoming about the turn of the century.

[jdowney]

I have to admit being a little surprised the British reporter didn't make some comment on the cowboy's rifle in his saddle scabbard. No doubt he was too busy painting the Great Depression as a purely American problem to notice it :D

There was another thread about these pics last year, they were posted on a Denver Post blog. These pics and a bunch more like them.