Sacramento and the Catholic Church: Shaping a Capital City

6. Catholic Social Provision: The Depression and World War II, 1930–1945

“Sacramento is starting a new decade confidently expecting the next ten years will be as prolific in accomplishments and development as the past,” wrote the relentlessly upbeat Bradley Riter in the January 4, 1930, edition of the Sacramento Bee.1 However, the decade of the thirties was anything but pleasant as the city and county coped with an economic cataclysm that was the equivalent of the floods, fires, and disease of the 1850s. The Great Depression traveled relatively slowly across the United States—slithering out from the corridors of Wall Street, devastating the financial and industrial colossus of the East and Midwest, driving farmers and ranchers into poverty and off their land, and setting in motion an internal refugee crisis that eventually made its way to California. Sacramento initially absorbed the shock waves of the October 1929 crash and subsequent industrial collapse. But by late 1930 the number of unemployed rose ominously.2 Sacramento’s fragile social services fell apart under the deluge of jobless residents and also the thousands of transients who camped along riverbanks and in the vacant lots of the California state c h a p t e r 6 Catholic Social Provision The Depression and World War II, 1930–1945 “The gentle sunshine of charity” 160 capital. The Depression finally broke down the purposeful volunteerism that had made Sacramento an “indomitable” city. Sacramentans of this era could not push back the onslaught of the Depression as they had done with the raging waters of the Sacramento and American rivers. They could not lift their city above the flood of economic despair as they had lifted their streets so long ago. The Depression completely overwhelmed private enterprises like the Catholic Church, which had traditionally aided the city by helping the indigent. Church leaders did what they could, but they simply could not come to the city’s assistance as they had in the past. In order to survive, social services had to be supplemented by federal dollars—either in direct relief payments or through wages and salaries that came from the new defense bases located in Sacramento County. sacramento and the depression Sacramento’s economic decline came gradually. But almost overnight the city became painfully aware of bad times when the huge California Cooperative Producers Canning Company closed its doors in September 1930, at the height of the canning season, leaving its employees without wages. The failure of this important industry threw shock waves into the other local canneries. Taking advantage of a glutted labor market, cannery operators reduced the wages of those they did employ and favored minority workers, who were less inclined to complain about the diminished income. This jolt to an important local industry was doubled in the winter of 1932 when a killing freeze virtually destroyed the citrus and many of the vegetable crops of the valley.3 The ripple effect reached into the rail yards. Demand for railroad cars lagged, as did the ability to fund repair work on engines and cars. Southern Pacific found its business reduced by 22 percent during the 1930s, with a $34 million loss. More than 2,200 Southern Pacific employees were reduced to three-day weeks.4 Layoffs and work reductions hit Western Pacific, too. Unemployment soared to 10 percent in Sacramento County in 1930. By 1932, 27,000 were without work.5 The national scourge of bank failure hit in January 1933 when the California National Bank and the California Trust and Savings Bank closed their doors. The California National Bank had more than 9,000 commercial accounts, including some Catholic parishes, and the Trust and t h e d e p r e s s i o n a n d w o r l d wa r i i 161 162 s a c r a m e n t o a n d t h e c at h o l i c c h u r c h Savings some 36,000.6 In order to prevent additional closures, airplanes and armored vehicles, carrying $13 million in cash, were quickly dispatched from San Francisco.7 Declining wages, layoffs, and straitened budgets created expected downturns in Sacramento consumption. Annual family income, pegged at $1,805 in 1929, fell to $1,344 by 1933. Railroad shop payrolls, one of the major employers of the city, fell from $5.4 million in 1929 to $1.7 million by 1933.8 In 1932...