The Harness Maker's Dream: Nathan Kallison and the Rise of South Texas

Seven: The Great Depression

Et SEVEN The Greal Depression T HE STOCK MARKET CRASHED on "Black Tuesday," October 29, 1929, just after Texas had come through a stunning decade of rising prosperity. Its citizenry had grown by nearly 25 percent, to a total of 5,824,000. A bumper crop of cotton had been sold, and the twin economic pillars of agriculture and oil were thriving. On the Edwards Plateau, home of the Kallison Ranch, the cattle and goat industry established Texas as the nation's leading producer of hides, mohair, and Angora wooL The Great Depression took San Antonio and its optimistic citizens by surprise. Nathan grew concerned and apprehensive as he read about the unbelievable losses of homes, fortunes, and everyday jobs that were causing such great suffering in state after state. Yet the growing crisis seemed far away from his hardworking family's success in San Antonio, Even a full year after the stock market crash, the San Antonio Express-News was still reporting that the local economy was sound, Late into 1930, news stories debunked "talk of depression and money shortage" and bragged that San Antonio was "one of five cities in the country in which men ofbillions were looking to invest their money," Economists, the newspaper editors declared, were predicting "better times in store for Texas and the rest of the United States,'" The reality of hard times, however, soon could not be ignored, When the Depression finally came down hard on San Antonio, Nathan and his sons Morris and Perry watched from their store in dismay as thousands of destitute citizens stood in long lines across Main Avenue in front of the Bexar County courthouse, waiting to '"' THE HARNESS MAKER'S DREAM receive welfare payments of $3 per family or small amounts of surplus farm products. The San Antonio schools were forced to layoff several hundred teachers and to pay the remaining faculty with scrip in denominations of twenty-five cents, fifty cents, and one dollarIOUs that might never be redeemed.' Homelessness followed joblessness as the local economy crumbled . Shantytowns called "Hoovervilles" sprang up on the outskirts of San Antonio and in thousands of other cities and towns across the nation. Built by homeless squatters, they were nicknamed derisively for President Herbert Hoover, whom many blamed for the crisis and its attendant miseries. Compounding wretchedness for its own poor, San Antonio was the only major city in the United States that refused to provide aid to out-of-work and starving citizens. Although the Bexar County government did distribute relief funds and food supplied by the state and federal governments, the Bexar County political machine allocated some of those funds to feather its own nest, using relief money to bloat its payroll to 252 patronage employees. In addition, aid came with strings attached. As Bexar County Relief Commissioner Tex Alsbury testified before an investigating committee : "We told them [social workersI if they wanted more money to give out, that they better vote with us, and we got them to get the precinct vote. The people were out of work and money. They were hungry and they lined up to vote.'" By July 1934, there were 14,484 families on relief.. Especially hard hit was San Antonio's mostly poor Mexican American population, second largest in the country after Los Angeles-83,000 of the city's 230,000 residents in 1930. City agencies generally denied relief to Mexicans. What aid these citizens did receive came from a few middle- and upper-class Mexican organizations , and from Our Lady of Guadalupe Church, headed by Father Carmelo Tranchese, a charismatic priest and champion of the poor.' Nathan and Anna listened to the nightly news on their living room console radio. The "better times in store" never came. The Depression was dealing an enormous blow to the nation's economy n, THE GREAT DEPRESSION and to millions of its citizens, whether they lived in cities, small towns, or on farms and ranches. Investments disappeared. Although stories about New York stock brokers and bankers leaping to their deaths out of skyscraper windows are more myth than fact, statistics show that the suicide rate in 1929 was almost double the rate at the start of the decade." The 1929 crash had erased 90 percent of the value of all stocks, wiping out the lifetime savings of millions of people and devastating American industry and business. The size of the nation's...