Maine History Online

How did Maine people cope with Depression-era unemployment? Proud and fiercely independent, they generally considered "going on the town" disgraceful except in cases of extreme emergency.

An experiment in federal counter-cyclical spending, the New Deal deliberately used the deficit to pump money into the economy and boost consumer power. This Maine people considered a political sacrilege.

Between 1940 and 1941 defense spending in Maine leaped from $130 million to $500 million, reducing unemployment dramatically.

Like all Americans, Maine people fought in World War I, suffered the economic disaster of 1929-1939, and adapted to the federal government's new role in the national economy. But in Maine a unique constellation of forces determined a different path through these momentous events.

Sixty percent of Maine's 800,000 people still lived in the countryside in 1930, and as in earlier times, each community wove family, work, and religion into a unique set of relations and identities. More than three out of four Maine people in 1930 were native born of native parentage – the highest proportion in New England – and this homogeneity reinforced a strong sense of tradition.

Out-migration continued into the 20th century, but population declines merely reinforced the conservative bent among those who remained – generally town elites with a strong stake in traditional local society.

Rural Maine had not changed significantly in the 19th century. Towns and villages still provided the essentials of life: barbershop, blacksmith's forge, general store, Grange, and a scattering of professional offices, churches, mills, and artisan shops. These local services provided goods and equipment for the farm family and processed their corn, grain, livestock, dairy products, wool, timber, and hides.

Rural Maine was a gritty world of unheated bedrooms, kitchen pumps, and outdoor privies, but few had reason to believe this would change. As always, activities followed the patterns of nature: horizons expanded during summer and contracted in mud season; the pace of work quickened as the days grew warmer, culminating in the fall harvest. This continuity lent credence to the sense of permanence; in a hundred subtle ways everything in Maine moved with the seasons.

Isolation and Outside Forces

Isolation bred independence and a strong sense of individual responsibility. Families worked together, ate together and hunted, fished, and gathered berries together. Children settled near their parents, and generations came and went around the "home place," guided by a culture of hard work, adaptability, and competence.

Men worked in the woods and fields, and women tended the home, the garden, the barnyard, and the henhouse. They bathed kids and washed clothes in tubs in the kitchen and sent them off to school clean and well groomed.

There were subtle changes, however. Roads, radios, telephones, and theaters provided new vectors for urban culture. Two-thirds of Maine's farm families owned automobiles by 1930, and Rural Free Delivery broadened their consumer reach.

Farmers working the lime-rich soils of Aroostook County harvested about one-eighth of the total U.S. potato crop by 1930 and enjoyed substantially higher incomes than those in the rest of the state. But they were increasingly subject to distant influences like railroad agents, express companies, bank managers, food processors, farm-equipment dealers, commission merchants, and seed and fertilizer suppliers.

Central Maine farms were prosperous as well, each producing a mix of crops ranging from hay, potatoes, apples, sweet corn, and blueberries to poultry, eggs, milk, and butter.

Here, too, farmers were subject to outside forces difficult to understand or anticipate, and like farmers all across the country they had expanded during World War I and suffered declining markets in the 1920s.

In more remote districts, farmers mixed commercial cropping with subsistence, meaning growing larger vegetable gardens and keeping livestock for family consumption, selling pulpwood, maple syrup, Christmas trees, or firewood to keep the farm together, and moving endlessly from farm chores to off-farm work in what autobiographer Mark Walker called "treadmill lives." Better roads and rural electrification eased these burdens, but improvements were uneven.

Coastal counties, where nearly half the farms were engaged in mixed activity, experienced dramatic population losses after the turn of the century, evident in deteriorating buildings, neglected orchards, vacant schoolhouses and churches, and shuttered mills and shops. During the 1920s more than 40,000 Maine people left the countryside. While this was consistent with trends in rural America generally, fewer in-migrants replaced those who left Maine.

These changes generated a variety of political and social tensions. Maine people searched for villains among the poor, the newcomers, the corporations, and the federal government, and this unsettled mood conditioned their response to the New Deal. They would emerge from World War II a different people, but for the time, they clung to their immediate points of reference: the country store, Grange hall, church, and the annual town meeting.

Rural life, as historian Richard Condon notes, stood on the brink of modernity.