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An article published in Russia claims that 7 million people are demographically unaccounted for during the Great Depression in the USA, and can therefore be assumed to have died as a result of the economic hardships, presumably mostly by nutritional deficiencies(?).

article: http://english.pravda.ru/world/americas/19-05-2008/105255-famine-1/

I do not know how to evaluate this claim. Can anyone help me understand why it has merit or not?

I read a similar question on this site: How many people in the US starved to death during the Great Depression?. This similar question does not deconstruct the Russian researcher's claims, just refers to them as "demonstrably false".

I would have commented on that question, but I do not have enough reputation to do so (this being my first day on this site).

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Maya
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  • it might also be worth asking this question on http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions?sort=newest – Himarm Mar 11 '15 at 18:56
  • @ Himarm what is the difference between this site and that one? – Maya Mar 11 '15 at 19:17
  • Just the first sentence, that's pretty damn sloppy logic. I hope you are caricaturing it. – T.E.D. Mar 11 '15 at 19:19
  • TED if you don't mind sharing your thoughts, I would appreciate hearing them as an answer. I asked this question because I need help with this. Thank you. – Maya Mar 11 '15 at 19:27
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    Possible duplicate http://history.stackexchange.com/q/12297/10203 – Jeff Lambert Mar 11 '15 at 19:38
  • @watcher (aptly named) beat me by a minute. Thought I was having some severe deja-vous. I'm going to go ahead and close this copy, because I don't think there's much doubt, and that's actually one of our better questions. Highly rated, highly-rated answer, and first hit I got with Google. You might consider voting on posts there, since you are interested. – T.E.D. Mar 11 '15 at 19:41
  • maya the difference between the history site and skeptics is they look at the actual article itself, and you will get more details on why the article itself is false, for example this article could be written by a known anti-western writer purposely to slander the west or other things like that, essentially they will look at all angles to answer your question if you have concerns about the article itself. here your only going to get a strictly historical answer on the situation. – Himarm Mar 11 '15 at 20:49
  • How to evaluate the claim? As Russian propaganda. Which does not qualify for discussion on this site. – Alex Mar 11 '15 at 20:59
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    I get all my factual information from Pravda. – TheMathemagician Mar 12 '15 at 11:14
  • Nothing is wrong with the Russian's research. It uses the exact same methodology which Anglosphere establishment uses to extract 20-30 million deaths from famine or other reasons in other countries. The problem with this is that, the methodology is not supposed to be used against Anglosphere establishment. A simple case of exceptionalism. PS: "Russian propaganda" is not a phrase that negates statistics or scientific methodology. – unity100 Dec 17 '19 at 21:09

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The United States did not experience famine conditions during the Great Depression. Consider that a major economic problem during the Depression was that there was too much food. This "excess" supply made food too cheap, which bit into farmers' profits. To address the "problem" of overproduction, the government paid farmers not to plant crops:

The Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) was a United States federal law of the New Deal era which reduced agricultural production by paying farmers subsidies not to plant on part of their land and to kill off excess livestock. Its purpose was to reduce crop surplus and therefore effectively raise the value of crops.

Obviously, destroying food didn't sit well with many people, so in October 1933 Congress created the Federal Surplus Relief Corporation. The FSRC

aimed to divert commodities such as apples, beans, canned beef and cotton to local relief organizations. In December 1933, the agency distributed three million tons of coal to the unemployed of Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, North Dakota, South Dakota and Iowa and in September 1934 shipped 692,228,274 pounds of foodstuffs to the unemployed in thirty US states.

The FRSC eventually branched out into school lunches, and by 1939 it was serving lunches to around 900,000 children daily. The FSRC was just one of the many alphabet agencies created during the New Deal. Other major agencies included the Works Progress Administration employed millions of men and the Civilian Conservation Corps employed 3,000,000 men in nine years,

The basic effectiveness of these poverty relief programs is evident in the fact that historians and economists are consistently unable to find increases in American mortality attributable to the Great Depression (with the exception of suicide).

I'm not claiming that there wasn't poverty, hunger, and hardship during the Depression: there definitely was death due to starvation during the 1930s. But in no sense did the United States experience anything on the scale of the Holodomor. Would Hoover (who helped address Russian famine after WWI) or FDR (father of the modern American welfare state) have allowed around 5% of the population to starve to death when the nation literally had more food than it knew what to do with?

The answer: probably not. The basic humanity of the two presidents aside, the well-known economist Amartya Sen argues that electoral pressures in functioning democracies tend to prevent famine. And indeed, the first presidential election after the start of the Depression brought in an administration and Congress devoted to using the power of the state to distribute food and resources to needy Americans.

two sheds
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  • I cannot answer the question of "would Hoover or FDR have allowed around 5% of the population to starve to death", but I will say that my personal opinion is yes, they would. There might simply have been no mechanism for the surplus food to be distributed. Redistribution of wealth is not a strong point of USA policy. – Maya Mar 11 '15 at 19:16
  • @Maya: There were plenty of mechanisms for the food to be distributed, e.g. the Civilian Conservation Corps. – two sheds Mar 11 '15 at 19:20
  • Yes, but the CCC was only open to young men, and operated during the second half of the crisis. That leaves out a lot of people. – Maya Mar 11 '15 at 19:26
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    My Grandmother's father was a doctor in rural Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl. She told me she witnessed him multiple times write out "prescriptions" for food to starving children brought into his office because they seemed sick. When you consider that about 1/6th of the people in this state today have issues with hunger, dial back to a time when we didn't have today's safety net, and this answer just doesn't jibe with reality. – T.E.D. Mar 11 '15 at 19:26
  • @T.E.D.: I hear you. But 7 million people starving to death? That's hunger on a scale that the United States has never experienced. That's qualitatively different than the shameful extent of hunger we still have in the country. – two sheds Mar 11 '15 at 19:29
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    For the record, the "prescriptions" were redeemable at the restaurant in his building, he paid for them, and the amount was put on the patient's account. I'm told he died with 10s of thousands of dollars owed in those accounts. His kids were not allowed to pay for much of anything whenever they went home. – T.E.D. Mar 11 '15 at 19:30
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    I'm not saying the exact number in the question is reasonable (and the stated methodology in the question frankly looks highly sketchy). But 0 isn't reasonable either. – T.E.D. Mar 11 '15 at 19:31
  • I would be extremely surprised if there was not a significant amount of starving to death, or in other words, dying of malnutrition during a time of such hardship. Anecdotes such as TED's lend support to that idea. I don't want to speculate on the numbers, I want to deconstruct or verify the Russian's research methods. – Maya Mar 11 '15 at 19:33
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    @T.E.D.: I didn't mean to imply the number was 0. I know that in some years around a hundred starved to death in NYC alone. That's America for you: we will tolerate "marginal" people suffering and starving to death. But those numbers just don't scale to anything in the millions. – two sheds Mar 11 '15 at 19:38
  • @ two sheds, I don't think your link to Amartya Sen's article about famine and democracy in Africa really has anything relevant to say about the responsiveness of USA government to it's people in the 1930s. I looked it up and the voting percentage of the US population in the 1930s that voted was 30%. Poor people would have been affected much more severely by the hardships of the 1930s. To say that because in theory they could vote that that should have protected them from famine, is to my mind an unsupportable assertion. – Maya Mar 11 '15 at 19:51
  • @Maya: Turnout was low in the 1930s, it's true. But well over 30% of the adult population was eligible to vote. – two sheds Mar 11 '15 at 19:56
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    I think democracy, in particular the USA form, gives disproportional influence to the rich, over that of the poor, and this same dynamic was in place at the time of the Great Depression. I can provide links if necessary. – Maya Mar 11 '15 at 19:59
  • @Maya: No need, I am properly cynical about American democracy. But I still maintain the US has never experienced a mass famine. – two sheds Mar 11 '15 at 20:02
  • References to USA famine conditions would not be a popular subject for discussion in the USA, however, they have occurred. for example: http://civilwartalk.com/threads/famine-in-the-post-war-south.94503/ – Maya Mar 11 '15 at 20:11
  • @Maya: Yes, but those were brought on by crop failures in a still occupied territory in the wake of a devastating war--you can't do anything about that. It's a different scenario than the Great Depression. – two sheds Mar 11 '15 at 20:17
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    there were crop failures and drought during the Great Depression: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl – Maya Mar 11 '15 at 20:21
  • @Maya: They certainly were tragic for the many families directly affected. Like T.E.D. said, life was very rough in Dust Bowl communities. But even the Dust Bowl article you linked talks about efforts to reduce agricultural production in the "Government Response" section. – two sheds Mar 11 '15 at 20:26