If the past decade has taught Americans anything, it is the danger of treating Wall Street as the sole indicator of the nation's economic health. Those who lived through the Great Depression learned this lesson also. Because so many more Americans and American institutions are investors in 2011 than in 1929, the stock market is a better measure today than it was eighty years ago, but as we relearned in 2008, 2002, and 1987, it is still possible to be blinded to significant systemic problems within and beyond the equity markets if all one does is follow the ticker.Footnote ¹ To be sure, a focus on Wall Street does not condemn an economic policy or history to failure or irrelevance. But the limits of such works, defined by their urban gaze, have a way of echoing across professions and disciplines that rely in various ways on the work of economists.Footnote ²

A case in point for scholars of religion is Robert Handy's oft-cited 1959 presidential address to the American Society of Church History in which he argued that the religious resources of the United States had been in a state of depletion for at least four years before the bottom fell out of Wall Street in 1929 and the nation sank into fiscal crisis. He wrote, “I believe that it is important to distinguish between the economic depression of the 1930s and what may be called the religious depression.” Handy achieved this separation initially through the date frame he chose, 1925–1935, and then with evidence of decline from the 1920s such as a piece written about “Our Spiritual Destitution” that appeared “months before the stock market crash of October, 1929.”Footnote ³ As he documented additional cases of Protestant decline and neurasthenia, the reflections he offered on the cause or causes were connected, importantly though not solely, to his thoughts about periodization. Because the Great Crash did not come about until October of 1929, he argued, we must look elsewhere than economic catastrophe for the cause of declines in missionary service, ministerial status, and church charitable giving. Handy relied on a historical and economic framework that placed Wall Street at its center and privileged urban religious voices. If we look at other institutions and geographies, the economic and religious pictures change.

Take, for instance, two of the more significant symbols of the Great Depression: the bank and the farm—runs on the former, mournful walks away from the latter. Between 1920 and 1929 there were, on average, 635 bank suspensions and failures in the United States every year. These failures were not, however, distributed evenly across the forty-eight states; they were concentrated in America's agricultural areas where debt-heavy, unpredictable farm economies and overly aggressive lending and investing practices made banking especially perilous.Footnote ⁴ The Great Crash of 1929 exposed instabilities more extensive than these and raised by a factor of 2.5 the rate of bank suspensions and failures per year from 1930 to 1932. Four thousand banks failed or suspended operations in 1933 before President Franklin Roosevelt ordered a halt to all banking operations pending audits for viability—the famous Bank Holiday—and subsequently insured deposits up to ten thousand dollars. But instability in banking did not fall from the sky like a distraught investor in October of 1929; it was part of the warp and woof of rural economic life in the preceding decade.Footnote ⁵

A similar point can be made about American agriculture in the 1920s. First, as was widely noted at the time and as has been recorded in subsequent scholarship, farming as a way of life was in steady decline through the first three decades of the century. Whereas 40 percent of Americans lived on farms in 1900, only 25 percent—though still thirty million people—did in 1930. As important, the average quality of farm life was spiraling downward. Farm ownership was becoming more rare, more precarious. As historian T. H. Watkins writes, between 1910 and 1930 “the number of individuals who owned their farms decreased by nearly half a million . . . while those who lived on and worked farms . . . increased by more than 300,000.”Footnote ⁶

For those who hung on to their farms through the first two decades of the twentieth century, the Great War years were as good as it gets. The per-head price of hogs hit $22 in 1919; the per-bushel price of wheat was $2.16. The agricultural parity index, a measure of the dollars a farmer earns per dollar invested in operations, was even or better. By 1923 hogs were selling for $12.29 per head, wheat for $0.93 per bushel and parity was a dream. Without parity, farmers get by on debt, floating one year's unpaid expenses into the next, paying down rapidly compounding pre-harvest debt with diminishing post-harvest earnings. By 1930 agricultural debt in the United States had reached $9.6 billion, over half the size of the federal debt. By 1932 with hogs at $6.00, wheat at $0.38, and a back-breaking parity index of fifty-five cents on the dollar, the economics of agriculture made farming impossible for all but the wealthiest and those who had, in earlier decades, headed west to California.Footnote ⁷

Economic struggles did not begin in 1929. For men and women engaged in farming, the struggles had been building for ten years. Life on the brink of poverty and landlessness was, well, life. To say this is not to suggest that the sense of ecclesiastical irrelevance and clerical decline expressed by Handy's mostly urban, liberal clergy was somehow related to the myriad economic instabilities of farming. By considering this building crisis in agriculture one might be able to account for the 1920s-era declines in church contributions he noted, but my larger point is that his mainline subjects were actually irrelevant in multiple ways. True, their college roommates were no longer listening to them, and Robert Speer and John Mott could no longer bring the fire. At the same time, they (and Handy) seem to have been fairly inattentive to stories of economic decline developing beyond their communities and, therefore, are a poor index of religious engagement with such micro and macro crises. To proceed as if 1929 marked the onset of economic hardship and to examine religious programs and discourses apart from the communities in which they were situated is to obscure both the profundity of the crisis and the creativity of religious engagement with it.

One way to reexamine and re-narrate the religious history of America's Great Depression is to examine locally interactions between religious discourses and the era's myriad economic, social, and geographical particularities. A more geographically aware approach promises to provide a clearer picture of the central human issues of the Great Depression: poverty and economic suffering, and the relationship between these conditions and modern capitalism. I would like to focus on California, where poverty, agriculture, Christianity, and New Deal liberalism converged in particularly intense ways. One set of sites in and around which to study this convergence is the migratory agricultural labor camps established in California by the Farm Security Administration (FSA) beginning in 1935. The most immediate goal of the camps was to provide sanitary living space to some of the hundreds of thousands of Anglo and African American agricultural laborers who had made their way to California. But a significant aspect of the camp program was to rehabilitate, reform, and even civilize a marginal people—poor farming families—made still more marginal when the place they occupied at the bottom of the agricultural ladder vanished.

Like the Franciscan missions that predated them by four centuries, these missions sought to gather in the dirty and degraded and to save them from “savagery” by modeling civilization and encouraging their participation in it. The records of these camps attach identities, bodies, histories, and futures to “poverty” and “economic suffering.” They give us a sense of the religious lives of at least some migrants. And they allow us to reflect in an informed way about how the religious discourses, clerical and lay, and religious institutions interacted with the men, women, and children that modern capitalism had kicked to the curb.

Three brief profiles in poverty offer an apt starting point. In March of 1936, Thomas Collins was serving as camp manager of the Arvin Migratory Labor Camp in Kern County, California, not far from Bakersfield. A New Dealer to the core, Collins conducted a survey of roughly fifty families in the camp in order to establish a baseline against which to measure rehabilitation efforts. Among those interviewed were D. D. McCullough, formerly of Kim, Colorado, and J. R. Pace, who listed his last permanent home as “near Tulsa, Oklahoma.” Pace, a forty-five-year-old father of three, joined California's migratory labor population in late 1935 because, he told Collins, “[it] cost me more to plant and cultivate than I could get from [the] sale of [my] products.” Between 1930 and 1935 when he finally gave up on tenant farming, Pace fed and housed his family on an average of $233 per year or sixty-four cents per day. D.D. McCullough's situation had been almost the same but with more mouths to feed. McCullough lost his crops completely in 1930, 1932, and 1933 and left his farm in 1934. The seven McCulloughs lived for the first five years of the 1930s on whatever they could scratch from the land and an average of $165 per year or forty-five cents per day.Footnote ⁸ In August of 1940, with the FSA migrant camp program almost five years old, Lillian Mills, clerk of the Brawley Camp in Southern California's Imperial County, wrote that poverty and hunger remained a problem among migratory laborers, especially in the slack summer months. “One family in camp last month was actually hungry for a number of days before anything could be done to help them.” Ineligible for FSA aid, frustrated by overload at state aide offices, turned away by the Red Cross, and required to wait three weeks for unemployment benefits, the family would have starved to death, Mills wrote, had it not been for the spirit of fellow migrant campers summed up with the motto, “As long as I have anything to eat, you can eat too.”Footnote ⁹

These families paint a rather classic picture of Anglo American migratory farm labor in California's agricultural valleys: knocked off of the land by the brutal economics of farming and a historic drought, living hand to mouth, waiting for the next crop. These are but three families in a multi-racial and multi-ethnic migratory labor force that numbered as many as 500,000. This force had long been a fixture of California state agriculture but was reconfigured and re-racialized through the addition of large numbers of Anglo migrants during the Depression years.Footnote ¹⁰ In part because of this re-racialization but also due to the sheer scale, religious voices from across the state, clerical and lay Catholics, Jews, and Protestants drew on theological resources dating to the late nineteenth century to address the issue of disparity and the meanings of poverty and wealth. California echoed with religious voices attempting to speak to and through poverty.

At least three different though sometimes overlapping religio-economic discourses filled the California air with reflections on the Christian significance of living on $220 per year, losing one's farm, and seeing one's children starving while living in a ditch. The first discourse, which one might call the Gospel of Cosmic Catastrophism, was characterized by an intensely apocalyptic tone, the projection of economic struggles onto a cosmic screen, and the tendency to deny or obscure the meaningfulness of an act, action, or condition as such. Especially adept in Cosmic Catastrophism was Biola's The King's Business in which Louis Baumann and a steady stream of clergy nationwide interpreted national and world events through their understanding of the biblical lens. In February of 1938 Alva McLain, president of Grace Theological Seminary in Akron, Ohio, proclaimed that part of the message of the book of Daniel was “that every step toward a planned economy enforced by a dictatorial central government is a step toward war.” Baumann endorsed this interpretation, writing, “More and more thinking of leaders of nations, and of masses of their followers, is falling into the prophesied error of rebellion against God, of exaltation of man's wisdom as sufficient to solve human problems.”Footnote ¹¹ Strong hints of this gospel are also present in less polished sources. O. V. Owens, a resident of the FSA camp at Indio, wrote two lengthy letters to the camp's newspaper, called The Migratory Clipper at the time. On April 6, 1940, he detailed the prophetic significance of numerous events touching the lives of migrants.

Here economic processes and outcomes are only secondarily economic. Their primary significance is to validate a particular scriptural interpretation focused on the coming apocalypse.

A second discourse common in California was a Gospel of Christian Collectivism. Often, though not always, this evangel was found on the left end of the theological dial. This gospel was related to the Social Gospel in that it saw problems and solutions in terms of the collective and tended to focus on solutions that, whether or not they called for a change to the overall economic order, sought to establish and build out from communal cohesion. A thirteen-part series of radio addresses on cooperative agriculture delivered in the spring and summer of 1935 by Father Charles Philipps of Saint Sebastian's Church in Sebastopol, California (San Francisco Archdiocese) is one especially clear example of this gospel. On August 13, 1935, he concluded this series with an address titled, “The Rehabilitation of Farm Life in California.” He wrote,

Shackles would be thrown off and farm life rehabilitated, Philipps made clear, only through consumer cooperatives organized and run by farmers themselves. A murkier example because of its scant documentation and also because of an apparently intense “patriarchal” structure was a squatters' camp near Lloyd Frick's Ranch in Arvin, California. Thomas Collins encountered this group while surveying local living conditions, and he reported that the campers wanted to remain untouched by the government, unmixed with those who were not “Full Gospel” Christians, and to farm cooperatively. “They prefer to remain aloof from others,” Collins wrote. “We believe the cooperative farm project they have in mind is a good one, in as much as they are a semi-permanent resident group.”Footnote ¹⁴ Lest we confuse this group with Father Philipps, they appear to be the same collective that was so suspicious of modern medicine that they allowed a small child to die rather than call a doctor. Collins reported further, “It is understood they will not enter the Kern Migrants Camp for fear physicians will be called in case of sickness.”Footnote ¹⁵

A third common discourse on the California scene was the Gospel of Righteous Poverty. This discourse focused on the God-directedness of poverty, the spiritual benefits of living in want, and the virtues of those who had lost everything and then lost more. Emerging radio evangelist Charles Fuller preached this gospel frequently. Fuller's young ministry was diverse, and the evidence here comes from the “Heart to Heart Talks” that were actually written by his wife Grace and sent out in paper form, signed by Charles. Grace wrote in 1933, “These are indeed strenuous days for all of us. . . . On this wilderness journey across the burning sands, each trial can be turned into a veritable oasis of shade and cool refreshing water if we listen to God speaking to us from the Cloud.”Footnote ¹⁶ In March of 1934 she continued:

Ray C. Mork, manager of several FSA camps in California, turned to this gospel as well. He was a less consistent evangelist but preached it occasionally in the segment he contributed to the Covered Wagon News, the weekly mimeographed paper written by and for the residents Mork's first camp near the Coachella Valley town of Indio. On April 8, 1939, he wrote about the first wedding in the camp since its opening in late 1937. The ceremony joined Bertha Brewton and Vester Pickle. Reflecting on this momentous day for the two, Mork wrote, “The birds of the air have their nests . . . but the son of man has not where to lay his head. . . . There wasent any silks and satins, there wasent any big cars driven by schauffers [sic], nor was there splendor nor was there outward showiness of brass and gold, just two simple hearts, honest, sincere. Folks to whom marriage is an act of God, not just another adventure.”Footnote ¹⁸ Poverty and homelessness, he reminded his readers, are Christ-like. Outward wealth and internal riches are not equally righteous.

These examples of the Gospel of Righteous Poverty share the belief that struggle breeds virtue, that true comfort and material comfort are not the same thing, and that God is in the suffering. What more can we learn about these voices and their engagement with poverty by situating them in their local contexts? As with many gospels of righteous poverty, Charles and Grace Fuller's mantra that “every cup of bitterness contains sweetness we can know no other way” has a hint of the odor of opium. But is the Fullers' case different because Charles was the son of a California fruit grower, ran a fruit packing company before entering the ministry, and owned his own orange grove in Placentia, California, until he lost it in 1934?Footnote ¹⁹ Can we see in Fuller's gospel an attempt—and a wildly successful one at that—to thread the needle between the fractured lives of some in his audience and the business interests of the people from whom he came? Fuller's ability to navigate so keenly was shaped, we might conclude, by California agriculture; not just by any land, but by land that nurtured orchards that produced peaches that required pickers who were paid by foreman hired by companies that sold fruit to the nation.

Ray Mork, who was explicit about the “missionary” dimension of his work, was also shaped by the land as he implemented the FSA's program of rehabilitating and reintegrating migrant farm laborers. He was deeply invested in the effort to address the squalid, dehumanizing, de-Americanizing conditions in which migratory agricultural workers (fully 50 percent of the agricultural work force in California) had been living for decades. Mork was passionate, some might say dictatorial, in his insistence that tent platforms and migrant bodies be kept clean and free of alcohol; that the camp grounds be well groomed and sanitary; that under the right conditions these dislodged masses could be redeemed and taught the “essentials” of modern American capitalist democracy: cleanliness, community spirit, family cohesion, sober living, democratic engagement, limited freedom of religious practice, and, in his case, workers' rights.

In the voluminous documents Ray Mork generated as the manager of the camps at Indio and Shafter, his explicit references to religion are few and far between. But the tears he confessed to shedding at the Brewton–Pickle wedding in the spring of 1939, not to mention his testimony in the afterglow, indicate a commitment to the Gospel of Righteous Poverty that was alternately pastoral and missionary. By emphasizing the virtues of the poor in the context of a camp wedding, he was recognizing the full humanity of the campers and, simultaneously, claiming legitimacy for the FSA's program of reform. Like a Protestant missionary thrilled to see a well-dressed “heathen” child sit politely through Sunday School, Mork praised the couple for choosing marriage, committing to family and community, and validating his program, his vision of American civilization, and the proper ordering of institutions within it.

Many levels of analysis remain to be done on this material and on troves documenting similar programs in different regional cultures with perhaps different theological engagements during the late 1920s and 1930s. Students returning to Robert Handy's sources today might delve more deeply into the local sources of their pastoral neurasthenia and the words and actions of those who were not so afflicted. His is a tantalizing offering to today's student of religion in twentieth-century America, both because it marks a problem overdue for rethinking and because, in spite of his promise that many dissertations and books on religion in inter-war America were forthcoming, the field remains quite bare when it comes to the Depression years. This is changing, and as it changes students will do well to refine Handy's terms and adjust his gaze. By doing both we gain a clearer sense of when, where, and how economic crises and religious voices interacted. We can see more clearly the scars left when the knife of poverty cut more deeply than usual into American flesh. We can also learn a great deal about the nature of the bone in which that knife temporarily lodged.