I've tried to research life in the 30s by watching really old movies from that time period, and also by talking to people who were physically present in the 30s and who are still alive today.
In the back of my mind I've had the idea of writing some kind of Cthulhu role playing module or solo adventure set in the 30s, with attention to the setting and historical detail. I've decided to jot my notes down here.
1.) People had no expectation of living a long and happy life, because people tended to die of disease
For me the 30s wasn't just about H. P. Lovecraft, but it was also about Robert E. Howard. That is to say, it was about toughness, and one aspect of that was lack of life expectancy and medical care we take for granted today, i.e. Howard's mother died of tuberculosis.
This has a lot of personal significance for me, since my day to day job pertains to tuberculosis, and I have recently become aware of lots of really terrible diseases and the things that they can do to people. In my opinion people today are simply not aware of various diseases that could make their lives truly miserable because the statistical odds of this happening are a lot smaller than in the 1930s. But I don't feel that most people take diseases seriously enough because most people haven't seen any examples of where disease really ruined someone's life, or killed them, because in some ways our society is very sanitized and commercialistic and most public media focuses on distracting things.
Today, for the most part, the United States doesn't have a uniformed public health service. Normally CDC guys don't wear their white uniforms. I've only seen one in uniform once, and that involved a special set of circumstances. They used to in the past. Why did we used to have a uniformed public health service, but not need one anymore? Because the public health service used to have to take people away. If one of your family members had active pulmonary tuberculosis, he or she might be taken away to a sanitorium. The person might recover or might not, and even if the person didn't die, his or her life could be totally jacked from the after affects of TB disease (lung damage, for example).
Exacerbating all this stuff was that many people didn't necessarily have good nutrition, which of course increases vulnerability to communicable disease.
It seems like today, a great many people take it for granted that they'll live a full life with a reasonable quality of life and therefore they focus on how to live life in a satisfying and happy manner if they can. Just look at the self help section of any bookstore.
But back in the 30s, it was different. I don't think people expected to live a long time, and there were a great many dooms that you would reasonably expect would befall you. Sometimes, talking to very old people, they tell me that people used to focus on social duty, or the idea of doing the right thing, and not on self-actualization, because people pretty much figured they were going to be miserable and die.
This brings me to my next point, which is...
2.) National unity and social duty
One very elderly lady told me that today the politics in the US are more acrimonious than they had ever been since the 1930s. She stated that even during tumultous times in the past, there was always more national unity. "People were so patriotic," she told me.
One elderly man shared his Vietnam War experiences with me. He told me that there was a big cultural clash with the older culture in the US and the anti war movement because among people of the older culture, it was pretty unthinkable to question the federal government. That if the federal government were going to, say, draft you and send you to Vietnam, that it must be, if not righteous, at least necessary. That was part of the reason that some veterans were so profoundly affected by protestors spitting on them etc. when they returned from the war.
I take all this to mean that probably in the 30s you probably had more faith in the federal government than today. Perhaps this tended to give the public more unity of purpose and action; when you read about the carnage and horror of World War I and World War II, I don't think that the US would be able to pull something off like that ever again, basically because everyone would question the government, and today's acrimonious party politics would completely derail any sort of unity or shared committment that would be necessary to perservere through a situation like that. The World Wars were much more horrific than the one we have today in terms of carnage and body counts and the magnitude of destruction and I think that if something like that happened today there's no way we'd be able to handle it.
3.) People were skinny!
If you watch movies or TV from the 30s through the 40s, you'll notice that people tend to be really skinny. I'm not talking about the stars, I'm talking about looking really carefully at the extras. Observe how the clothes even seem to hang on them.
Also, I watched a period advertisement for a refrigerator and notice that the refrigerator was small. I've visited some local parks that had re creations of homes from the 30s and noticed that the homes were smaller and the recepies were designed to try and make a lot from a little. I have gone and eaten real unsweetened doughnuts dredged in shortening during my time in Micronesia in order to get a feel for those.
I believe that there was food scarcity during that period of time.
4.) Crazy cowboy strength
Once, I happened to attending a grappling class being taught by Frank Mir. He was talking about "crazy cowboy strength" in reference to another MMA fighter.
This all clicked today when I spoke with an old lady. I was talking to her about how my World War II firearms, as well as pre World War II firearms that I've operated, tend to be really heavy, and tend to bruise you when you fire them, since the stock tends to just be wood and steel. Nowadays, however, firearms are all lightweight, plasticy, and soft, and you might as well brace the stock on your groin before firing because they're so ergonomic and comfortable to use.
She pointed out to me how historically, more of the economy was agrarian. More people were farmers. They tended to be physically strong. Even housewives were physically strong, she told me, and explained to me about drying laundry with a hand crank. I already had some knowledge of using washboards from my research.
I've also spoken to a midwesterner who attested to the physical prowess of agrarian workers.
Today we have a national diabetes epidemic because apparently most people are literally soft and lead sedentary lifestyles.
I conclude that a high proportion of the general population possessed what we now refer to as "crazy cowboy strength". This is why they were able to wield bolt action rifles on the run with pinpoint accuracy, but nowadays people complain if they have to use a mini 14 instead of an M4 carbine.
5.) Lack of leisure time
I suspect that with higher poverty levels and less food, people generally had less leisure time in the 1930s and 1940s. This probably contributed to national unity if people didn't really have time to sit down and think about politics.
In the context of a role playing game, I feel this means that characters from that time period would have less diverse skills.
6.) Smaller role of financial institituions
One old lady told me that the economic depression we're in right now is unquestionably worse than the Great Depression, which she lived through, due to financial institutions. Back then, she told me, people usually didn't lose their houses, and you didn't need money because you had all your pre-consumerist poor people powers and skills, like generating food at low cost, or manual laundry. You could simply live without cash because you had the skills to do so.
Today, though, people cannot live without cash since they need income to pay the mortgage, and even if you decided to stop paying the electricity bill so you could do manual laundry to save money, you wouldn't really be able to do that because without electricity your house would decay. Also you wouldn't be able to find a washboard or hand crank drying apparatus so easily.
Basically, today we cannot survive outside of a consumerist framework where we borrow ridiculous amounts of money. You are forced to spend money in order to survive because you cannot get very many things today except as a consumer product.
Back in the 30s, people had knowledge and skills to allow them to simply physically survive. There weren't these complex abstract sets of rules forcing them to spend money.
7.) Gun-fu
If you look at pistol, submachinegun, and rifle techniques used in those days, they are basically inferior to what people practice today, elderly caucasian revolver magicians from YouTube nonwithstanding. That makes sense given that the techniques we use today evolved from those older techniques. Incidentally that's also why I get furious at anyone who claims that studying some thousand year old martial art is somehow going to be more combat effective than studying modern martial arts or combative sports.
You also had people running around with some ridiculous weapons, like .38 caliber revolvers loaded with lead round nose cartridges that didn't really do anything. I guess that is because there wasn't the scientific study of ballistics and wounding like today.
My research suggests that automatic handguns were generally less reliable than today. The 1911s were probably more reliable than a lot of European 9mm models at the time, but even a modern 1911 tends to be less reliable than a lot of combat handguns of modern origin. My modern, high quality 1911, when perfectly cleaned and oiled with a new extractor, seems to have a stoppage rate which is sometimes as low as 0.6 or 0.7 percent, but before I changed the extractor and started using extra lube, sometimes it would be more like 1.7 percent! That's with me firing as quickly as I can while still being accurate, since firing as quickly as possible can make stoppages a little more probable than if you're firing slowly with plenty of time between shots.
Basically that sounds pretty good, but many operators today expect better from their handguns, and will choose to run with a Glock, Sig, HK USP, or something like that, which are supposed to be more reliable. I am under the impression that older automatics from the earlier part of the 20th century were unreliable in comparison to the 1911, but that the 1911 tends to be less reliable than those designs.
So I gather that people had these powerful mondo rifles which are more impressive and devastating than typical military pattern rifles used today which were viable at the time due to crazy cowboy strength, but that the handguns tended to be a bit on the weak side, and that the techniques used included things like the chicken wing rifle stance, and shaolin submachinegun stance (firing from the hip from a low stance), and people didn't really know everything we know today about tactics and trauma and wounding.
As an aside, the first gun control legislation in the US arose because of the St. Valentine Day's Massacre. Before that you used to be able to mail order a Thompson submachinegun. I am very upset at the St. Valentine Day's Massacre because I really want a Thompson submachinegun.
I want one of those M1A1s because I love the open chamber design, and I use .45 ACP in all my competitions.CONCLUSION:
So, in conclusion, people living prior to the 50s were apparently wiry, stoic, expecting a miserable death at any moment which happened all the time, and focused on social duty. They also wielded gigantic reliable .30 caliber battle rifles, but they didn't eat very well. They carried revolvers because their magazine-loading handguns tended to malfunction at rates in excess of 1%. Many were agrarian, implying a certain practical knowledge of nature and survival in a rural environment.
That's pretty compelling and intense stuff, for a RPG setting!
If we start to introduce otheworldly horrors in the style of Lovecraft, that's becoming pretty intense as well. Hardcore, stoic men with big rifles and cowboy aspects do battle against the sanity destroying incomprehensible. In terms of the mental aspects, it's just like a game of D&D or something with knights versus the sanity destroying incomprehensible, but the knights were probably a little better fed, whereas the 1930s people would have had more unwavering faith in the federal government, and firearms.
