Today’s members of the middle and professional classes wonder daily what the new normal will be. They’re aware, some vaguely, others acutely, that during this period—the most chastening experience in their lives—their families’ habits and attitudes are changing both conspicuously and imperceptibly. They chew over what further adjustments are prudent; they worry over what additional ones may become necessary. And perhaps most disquietingly, they speculate whether the adjustments they’ve made in the face of unprecedented uncertainty—and whether that uncertainty itself—will become enduring features of their lives. These books suggest answers, some trivial and some profound. The Lynds’ focus on the myriad ways the Depression was altering the lives and spirit of the middle classes makes Middletown in Transition especially enlightening—and in many ways unsettling. Although it certainly chronicles grim want and hunger (though not starvation) among the working class and unemployed middle classes, the dominant themes are emotional: unrelenting fear and dashed hope.

The defining characteristic of the middle classes has always been their orientation toward the future. The Depression ruined schemes for such baubles and pleasures as the new car and the winter vacation. But it also at best disrupted and at worst (and often) destroyed carefully wrought plans for so-called investments in the future: the substantial house in the stable neighborhood, the savings account, and, most important, what was then and remains the cynosure of American middle- and professional-class family life—a college education, or a certain kind of college education, for the children. Even today, that investment largely determines the opportunities parents seize or forgo, the towns they move to, the rhythm of a family’s daily life. The Depression rendered any careful planning for the future, an activity that depends on predictable conditions, all but impossible, or at least crazy-making.

Again, most earners in the middle classes were still employed, but their livelihoods were in daily jeopardy; throughout the country even those at the apex of the professions—doctors and lawyers—saw their incomes drop by as much as 40 percent. Moreover, although professional-class families had invested and saved prudently (or so they thought), many had been ruined. Leaving aside the losses in the stock market, a form of investment overwhelmingly confined to members of the middle and upper classes, throughout America from 1929 to 1932, some 9 million savings accounts were wiped out (savings accounts, too, were largely limited to members of the middle and upper classes, who alone had extra dollars to put away). More important, even those families not ruined knew that their reverses—those gargantuan declines in the values of their homes and portfolios and the all but universal drastic declines in income during what were supposed to be their peak years of wealth-building—were irretrievable. They’d never get back to where they’d been, to the foundation on which just a few years before they had assumed their future would be built (not unlike, say, parents of today who have for years carefully contributed to now-clobbered 529 plans for their adolescents). Disaster was always imminent; the future was at best chancy and diminished. Inescapably, Muncie’s middle classes endured year after year of an emotional state that resembled, as the Lynds put it,

the crisis quality of a serious illness, when life’s customary busy immediacies drop away and one lies helplessly confronting oneself, reviewing the past, and asking abrupt questions of the future.

Such psychological inferences may be squishy, but all of these accounts agree on one workaday detail of middle-class life: the effort to maintain the highest-possible standard of material living in an age of reduced circumstances meant that the physical burden of the new normal fell overwhelmingly on women. The hours of what were then called servants were cut, or those workers were fired altogether (just as is now happening with the hours and jobs of housekeepers, nannies, and—at least here in Southern California—gardeners), but the tasks they performed remained to be done. And “domestic” work that had previously been performed outside the home shifted to the household. Home-baked bread replaced store-bought; home preserving became de rigueur (one of the few bright spots in Muncie’s economy during the Depression’s early years was that its Ball Brothers plant, the country’s largest manufacturer of fruit jars, was blessed with capacity production). Clothes and household items were mended rather than replaced. Today, the twice-weekly takeout dinners from Boston Market or the Whole Foods deli counter, along with the regular expeditions to California Pizza Kitchen or Outback Steakhouse, have been reduced, and children and adults are more frequently brown-bagging their lunches—which means that more meals are being prepared at home. Eighty years ago, it was wives and mothers who overwhelmingly took up the slack. Surprise, surprise: little has changed today.