The Waltons weren't poor

[Redflagsabounded]

I'm watching an episode and a neighbour comes by saying he's been living on skimmed milk and wild onions for 2 years. Grandpa sympathises and pipes up that he's lived on the edge of poverty his whole life. The show description says follow the family through the hardships of the Depression. Admittedly, there are episodes where the children walk to and from school with no boots/shoes. Generally speaking it's presented as a poor family.
But

• they had 7 kids (people then did know how babies were made and didn't have to have large families despite lack of contraception, the pull out method is not infallible but been used forever)
• they own a bloody mountain full of timber, and run a sawmill business
• they have livestock, chickens for eggs, and garden for veggies
• they own a truck
• they own a massive house
• everyone's well fed and well clothed, just maybe not always the latest 'smart' outfits when they want one

They were in no way 'poor' for the 1930s.

AIBU?

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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...

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

Grandpa Walton had a brilliant name- Zebulon. I would have loved to have been brave enough to call my son Zebulon!

My main memory of the Waltons is the sound that the car horns made.

Mr Godsey and Corabeth were amusing

I think we need to remember this was filmed in 70s, a big time of cultural change, hence the emphasis on racial integration and acceptance etc, and the popularity of the "love conquers everything" theme, but yes i think highly unrealistic in 1930s. Coincidentally, I am reading Spencers mountain by earl hamner, autobiographical but fictionalised too. This is what the waltons is based on. They did not live in a big house on their own property but in a small house that was owned by the mill and quarry company that owned all the houses and was the employer. The family struggled for shoes and some of the kids shoes were communal, you might say. The mother is telling the dad all the time that the kids need shoes. The clothes belonged to the oldest and then passed down. John boy or Clay boy in this book is the first boy to be allowed to finish high school as most had to get jobs, join the company. The school teacher talks about company men being old and bent at 40. The waltons or spencer or hamner family had owned all of the mountain but the many sons sold their bits off to the company. Only the dad has retained a small parcel of land on the mountain and refuses to sell. He dreams of building a house on the mountain and has been planning it for 17 years since he got married. but, as yet only got the basement dug out. Havent finished the book yet so cant say if he ever builds it.

Re the contraception, in the 30s. Thanks to your comment I found out about the comstock laws that affected access to contraception, and also about the Virginian Sterilisation Act where thousands of people were forced to have operations, mostly women.......in the name of eugenics, so yeah, that doesnt quite fit with all the tolerance in the show.
On the plus side, in spencers mountain , the dads brother marries "a jew" and no one actually knows what that is precisely, despite going to church every sunday. Wicked old Grandpa absconds with the new bride to get some of the recipe in buckingham county!
I dont really like the LHOP tv show, but I do end up watching the Waltons when I find its on! I was allowed to watch it at my auntie marys house when I was 11.

Yup im sounding like a waltons weirdo!

This is the cutting edge pop culture analysis I come to MN for 😂

I have real fondness for The Waltons. Watched it as a kid and then found it a couple of years ago playing late at night on some obscure TV channel.

The sitch with Mary Ellen's husband was very odd. John Boy was painfully earnest, and Jim Bob was a bit...Deliverance.

I love watching the show. I have read that families who lived on farms had an easier time because they could have gardens, raising animals, and an easier life. Many people had large families to help on the farm and the Walton’s had food and land but had very little in money.

Although she wasn't born until the 40's I think Dolly Parton has a better claim to being dirt poor than the Waltons. She was one of 12 and spent her early childhood in a one room shack. Things started to look up when she was a bit older because they moved to a two room shack. You didn't see that level of deprivation in the Waltons even though they were living through the depression.

Her parents were illiterate and she grew up eating squirrel.

But that level of poverty wouldn't have made for a hit feelgood show.

Haha so true, this thread is cracking me up 🤣

My favourite moment in Yellowstone was discovering that Teeter is Michael Landon's daughter. https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRui9dFxQVCXx0Cd4lSmQMtNAjlILzM9q0gyUhc48cAOH-ccLTxflvLTFRX&s=10

Those of us who are old enough remember Michael Landon as Little Joe in Bonanza.