Looking back at the Great Depression from the vantage point of half a century later, it can be difficult to grasp how extensively working people's lives were disrupted. Historians' tendency to reduce the crisis of the thirties to a series of impersonal events – the stock market crash, unemployment, mortgage foreclosures, bank failures – obscures the reality of these disasters as people experienced them. The following portraits recapture some of the ways that the early depression materially and emotionally devastated Chicago workers and their families, as it undermined the survival strategies that they had developed during the 1920s.

For John Norris, a structural iron worker, the Great Depression meant the ruin of his carefully laid plans for retirement, to say nothing of his family's present livelihood. In 1927, Norris had invested his life savings in a two-apartment building costing $17,500. He put every penny that he had saved into the down payment and planned to pay off the rest over the next ten years from his earnings, his wife's boarders, and the rent from the second apartment. But by the later 1920s, Norris began to face more frequent layoffs from work. In no time, he lost his job entirely. The boarders were in no better shape and finally left, owing $300.