The Waltons weren't poor

It is probably as realistic as Little House on the Prairie.

Share cropping. Where a family had a pitch on someone else's land and grew a cash crop. Usually cotton in the deep south. The landlord took 60% of any profit. Given the depression and the growing of cotton in places like Egypt, the traditional market of nw England wasn't buying what it did. Plus banks were virtual monopolies in the areas they controlled... charging interest rates as they liked.

Add to that the lack of education, the chronic inbreeding and the over supply of labour the civil war lead to...where there were millions of black people who were 2 generations before not paid for their labour...

Growing their own food was a way of surviving back then. They were landowners, but they were cash poor. The show was based on a real family and the creator acknowledged that they were ‘richer than they knew’, having supportive family, a business and land. The area operated on a barter system.
But Grandpa did experience genuine poverty, being born in the 19th century with post civil war scarcity, when there was no infrastructure and food scarcity. It was his back breaking hard work that developed the land (Walton’s Mountain, gained initially from old squatters rights that he then inherited) and started the saw mill. So HE knew genuine near starvation poverty. The subsequent generations were poor but not nearly on the same level of deprivation.
In reality, a family like them were unlikely to have had electricity and indoor plumbing. Their table would not be as full as showcased. But it’s TV, a family show, so sanitised.

My grandparents were born in the late 19th century and had four full siblings each.

One of my grandmother's had step-siblings who all died of "consumption" now known as TB. Her father's first wife died leaving him with small children. My grandmother was orphaned at 15 and widowed at 48 much like her father was when two of her children were young.

I was born mid-20th century. My parents were one of three and four respectively, I'm one of six, although one sibling died as an infant.

You're right. Apparently John-Boy Walton has an estimated net worth of $6 million.

They just pretend to be poor, don't they?

My grandmother's grandmother was born about 1850. She raised her children on the North Dakota prairies. She had about 11 children, of whom only 4 made it to adulthood.

I dunno, if you were born 1895 & your grandmother was telling you about her 7 children who didn't survive long, I think you'd be minded to see a large family as a welcome blessing.

When the work dried up there was food growing, hunting and fishing. Slum dwellers had lung diseases, TB, dysentery and all the diseases overcrowding, lice and fleas spread/caused, with no access to land or hunting. They had the extreme cold and damp. Personally I'd take my chance in Appalachia.

Haven't RTFT, just your updates but - like most Brits when it comes to America - you're confused.

1. The Depression was caused by the Federal Reserve cutting the money supply in half. It wouldn't matter how much timberland a family owned if no one had the cash to buy the lumber produced from their sawmill.

2. Seven children wasn't unusual before contraceptives and legal abortion. Especially true in families whose income was reliant on cheap/free labour.

3. Appalachia has suffered from the loss of coal mining and manufacturing but still ranks better than the UK economically.

From The Atlantic:

How Britain Became as Poor as Mississippi
A case study in self-sabotage

https://archive.ph/luE3x

Yes, but if they were so poor that all they could do was curl up in a ball in their house (due to lack of clothing to go outside, and funds for a door hinge) and wait for a passing rat to make its way into their cooking pot, they wouldn’t have been able to make more than two episodes before it got very samey and predictable.

That still doesn't make them poor though. There's a difference between broke and poor. Poor is when you have no options. Broke is a temporary lack of funds.

I never got that. I always thought the issue was that they had ‘fallen’ due to the Depression.

In America, owning a massive house on a massive bit of land is not the indicator of wealth that it is in the UK

Not necessarily an indicator of wealth even in the uk. Plenty of landed gentry have had house and land but drove old cars, wore old clothes and would have struggled to raise the cash to fix a leaking roof.

Yeah, John Boy with his fancy novel writing aspirations and starting a newspaper and shit. Poor, my arse.

In America, owning a massive house on a massive bit of land is not the indicator of wealth that it is in the UK, especially in rural area or outer suburbs.

I visited the mid-West on a work-related thing, and our hosts apologised for having to drive us through the poorer part of town to get somewhere.
I was surprised, and looked around. The "poor" housing was still big houses by UK standards, on big plots of land, just very run-down and scruffy, with no care for the gardens. Indeed, in the US if you say 'garden' it means a cultivated and cared-for area, not just the land surrounding your house.
There is so much land, and everything is bigger. The cars are bigger, the rooms in the houses are bigger, even the fridges are bigger.

I guess the Walton's had the means for a semi-subsistence life, but were cash poor.

They don't claim to be poor, though. They see themselves as struggling with somethings but having enough to get by just like most of their neighbours. If anything they seem to think they are luckier than most.

Relative costs have changed hugely since the 1930s and were different in rural America compared to the UK (which even in the 1930s didn't have that sort of low population density). So land was cheap, housing, somewhere to grow veg,keep a cow, etc. not the sort of challenge it is now. In the US a car was less expensive than in the UK by a long margin (60% of households had a car by the 1930s, with rural households being far more likely).

But they wore the same clothes for a lot longer, didn't wash clothes as often, didn't have as much leisure time, didn't have expensive hobbies, didn't go on holidays, or even day trips often, didn't have great health care for the most part. They mended things rather than replaced them. We see that as poor nowadays, but that was just what almost everyone did then. It wasn't poor, it was life.

Great tv (34 on freeview, 157 Sky) 1pm-4pm weekdays and Sunday morning omnibus

Weren't they fairly self-sufficient? They were fairly handy with fixing things, had chickens, a cow, grew their own vegetables etc. Probably, one of their biggest expenses would have been fuel for the truck.

They all looked like they were very practical, all having jobs to do and willing to get their hands dirty wearing their dungarees!😂

Use to love it as well - such a wholesome programme. Good night Johnboy!

Up until around 1880, the median number of children that a woman would give birth to was around five. This gradually fell to about 2.4 by the 1920s.

Women gave birth to more children, but fewer of them survived. When infant mortality improved, more children survived, so women began to have fewer of them. The era of big families of twelve children who all lived to grow up only lasted a generation or so either side of 1900.

Also more opportunities for women meant they were more likely to have good jobs and be financially independent therefore have less incentive to marry early.

As for the Waltons, they got by, but any emergency, such as Pa being unable to work, or someone needing hospital treatment, or the sawmill needing repairs, would leave them struggling.

And as pp said, it's a tv show and was supposed to be a feelgood family show. No-one would want to watch a show which was all about lives of unrelieved misery.

OOH Where can I watch it. I loved it so much, and that theme tune!

The only reason why my grandparents didn't have more than 5 children was that she kept on miscarrying (plus one neonatal death). My grandfather had good luck in employment because he was a good groom and initially travelled from breeder to breeder, stables to stables, wherever there was work and one of his employers decided that he should learn to drive, meaning he was later able to get driving jobs.

After WWI, with unimaginable sights, death and loss leaving entire areas bereft of youth and a traumatised generation, people wanted life and hope, which meant children. What's more, I think the Walton children were all born prior to 1929 - and nobody's going to be able to go back in time to practise abstinence in a time of relative plenty, are they?

If I remember rightly, the effects of serving in WWI were also a frequent feature in the episodes and went on to have the next generation doing it all again, along with a lot of bartering going on because there wasn't money.

Not everyone knew how to limit families - or make them. When Marie Stopes was doing her work, there was a couple who didn't know you had to do a bit more than literally sleep together to have children.

However, I would have expected rural families to have a little more idea of how mammalian conception works, if they had a cow for milk.

Appalachia was and is one of the poorest parts of the US. the Waltons were relatively okay: they had a decent house and food on the table. But don’t underestimate rural poverty. In the 1930s US, that meant barefoot kids with hookworm in clothes remade from flour sacks, eating cornmeal and salt pork (pellagra was an epidemic in the South), and no work to be had outside the mines. The biggest tell on the Waltons is that they could afford to keep their children in school. They didn’t drop out for lack of shoes.

"Not everyone had big families. My very working class parents born in the 1920s were 1 of 4 children, and 1 of 3 children, no sibling deaths."

Of course not, I don't think that anybody is saying that though. There was a rapid fall in household size in the UK after the First World War but that was a continuation of an ongoing trend since the 1880s.

Up until around 1880, the median number of children that a woman would give birth to was around five. This gradually fell to about 2.4 by the 1920s.

So, even in the 1920s, your parents came from larger than average families.

But there certainly were families with more children at that time.

I guess that I'm about half a generation younger than you, my parents were born in the late 1930s. My dad was one of six children as was my mum (although one of her siblings died at a young age).

A generation earlier than that, my grandparents (born between 1906 and 1914) one was one of nine children, one was one of seven children and two were each one of six children. My dad had 13 sets of aunts and uncles and my mum had 11 sets of aunts of uncles