Photoshopped.
-Tom
P.S. Those are frickin’ beautiful. Great link, Adree!
The guy in the last photo:
looks like he could be undead.
Some great images of regular Americans before everyone had to have straight, shiny white teeth.
The link is broken but I saw these pics before. Notice how half the schoolchildren have no shoes. Tough times.
Wow, I just spent half the day from work looking at these but I can’t remember where I got the link. Wheee!
Great shots.
They seem to have blown up the entire blog since you posted this, but it’s available in Bing’s cache still
Yeah I’ve seen those photos before too, they probably posted them without permission which is why the blog is gone. I think they were part of a Life magazine series, but I’m not sure.
Everyone looked really weatherbeaten back then. Stylin’ clothes though.
Check out the ones from early 20th c. Russia. Good stuff!
Look at all those thin people.
They certainly wore very silly hats.
The great depression did wonders for everyone’s waistline. Well, that and no Triple Cheese Monsterburger with Grilled Cheese Buns®. And no internet.
Where are the fat people?
God, there was no middle ground back then. If you weren’t born into a rich family then you were dick broke and had to toil away to put food on the table.
My dad grew up on a New England farm in the 30s and 40s, this must have been what it looked like. Amazing.
Awesome. Thanks Adree!
God, there was no middle ground back then. If you weren’t born into a rich family then you were dick broke and had to toil away to put food on the table.
I always hear of the post-WWII era as being the golden age of the middle class in America. Surely some of the groundwork was being laid in previous decades?
#28 looks like it’s straight out of a sci-fi RPG rulebook.
I think there was a middle class before and even during the Depression, it’s just that so many of them lost their jobs that the poor and unemployed made up a much larger percentage of the population.
I think people say that because incomes went up a lot for middle class families after WW2. If by “groundwork being laid” you mean large numbers of middle class families were pushed into poverty by a collapsing economy, allowing the recovery to appear even larger, than yeah.
No, by “groundwork being laid” I meant there must have been some kind of a middle class in decades previous, rather than them springing into being whole cloth after WW2. I get that the depression hit employment hard, but the sentence I quoted gave the impression of there being essentially only rich and poor in those days, which is not my understanding of American history.