Depression Apples

It may be the most emotionally powerful photograph to come out of the Great Depression: the well-dressed, unemployed businessman hawking apples for a nickel on a city street corner. It’s a poignant image-the stoic gentleman attempting to preserve a vestige of dignity for himself and his family. But is it an accurate reflection of the era? After all, no more than 5,000 out of 10,000,000 unemployed Americans actually sought relief selling apples.

Indeed, the skeptic has good reason to suspect historical sensationalism. University of Wisconsin historian Stanley Schultz writes that the street corner vendor is little more than a “stereotype,” one that’s “become romanticized in popular culture.” As he sees it, the actual suffering was “much less dramatic, and thus more dismal.”

But the collective experience of apple vendors should not be dismissed, for it reverberates well beyond their numbers. Ultimately, thousands of men spent thousands of hours on New York street corners during the Depression due to the efforts of a man named Joseph Sicker.


In 1930, just after the Crash, Sicker became chairman of the Unemployed Relief Committee of the International Apple Growers Association. Sicker’s approach to the problem of mounting unemployment was simple. He would start, as he put it, “an apple selling crusade.”

Sicker began his mission during “National Apple Week” in September, 1930. With a startup fund of $10,000 donated by the produce industry he arranged to sell boxes of apples to unemployed businessmen at rates that were about 10 percent below market price. Every morning the unemployed would meet at 66 Harrison Street to purchase a $2.20 box of 88 apples for $2.00 a box. From there they would fan out into the city (via carts or cabs they hired) to set up shop, tell their tales of woe to the ranks of the employed, and sell their subsidized apples. When they day was over they owed Sicker $1.75 to offset costs.

For a brief moment the vendors did well-very well. Although Sicker provided cardboard signs that read “Unemployed: Buy Apples 5 cents each,” many sellers devised their own price schemes. The New York Times reported that, in the fall of 1930, just after the program started, venders were selling apples as high as 50 cents a pop and grossing more than $16 a day. Clearly, some sellers were cultivating a “client base” willing to pay above market price to help a good person get through a bad time. Needless to say, as The Times noted, “Unemployed men and women flocked into the profitable trade,” becoming visible “on almost every street corner.”

And that, of course, was the problem. Come spring of 1931, the program was shot through with vendors. About 4000-5000 in fact. And they found themselves working under much less forgiving economic circumstances. Gone were the days of the 50 cent apple. Now all apples went for a nickel, and tips were rarely given. Factor in the cost of carting apples to a desired location, and it turns out that the typical vendor was netting about a penny an apple.

“This might have been a subsidized program, but the laws of supply and demand were still felt.”

This might have been a subsidized program, but the laws of supply and demand were still felt. And increasingly, they hurt.

Still, it was the Depression, and most vendors had no choice but to keep at it, collectively buying about 320,000 apples a day from the Association throughout 1931. Vendors offloaded so many of Sicker’s subsidized apples that he had to start importing supplies from Washington State-New York apples were gone. Eventually, Sicker’s Association was having to buy apples for $2.50 a box rather than $2.20-refusing all the while to pass costs on to the vendors. The Times explained, “The association’s problem is how to stop this unprofitable business without destroying a means of livelihood for so many men and women.”

Making matters worse was the fact that retailers were also getting slammed. One letter writer to The Times noted, probably correctly, that “it would be better for the retailers of the city to buy off all the apple sellers.” Feed and clothe the poor vendors, he added, “but get them off the street corners between the shop doors.” This plan might have made economic sense, but it ignored the fact that work-even if it was only selling apples-conferred self-respect, something that may have been just as important as money to many of the (male) vendors.

For better or worse, by the fall of 1931, relief came in the form of another economic endeavor: shoe shining. In 1931, before the influx of former apple peddlers, a conventional New York City shine cost a dime. The new guys offered it for a nickel. As one former apple-selling “freebooter” put it, “Yeah, business is better now. People don’t mind spending a nickel. They say, ‘what’s 5 cents anyway.’ But a dime-that’s money.” The Times observed, “men who last winter were selling apples [are] now carrying a rag, a bottle, and a box as stock in trade.” Shoe shiners, after making an initial capital investment, no longer had to pay carting fees or cover Association costs.

So why is it the apple peddler that gets all the glory? After all, at the height of the Depression-or at least when unemployment was the highest-the apple selling craze had diminished, yielding to shoe shining (at least in Manhattan). I think the answer has to do with symbolism. There’s something more noble in the image of two Americans standing together and exchanging a nickel for an apple than there is in one man hunched around the feet of another, face down, grunting it out. When we think about how resilient Americans were to have survived the Depression, we (understandably) prefer to imagine equals helping equals rather than the haves humoring the shoe-scrubbing talents of the have-nots.


They are still selling apples on the streets...


Link to the iconic apple seller photo?


This is why the more successful subsidized work programs focused on infrastructure development. In my college days, it always gave me pause for thought as I walked along the university neighborhood sidewalks that were stamped, "WPA." Granted, this may have had a damaging effect on other local contractors, but I doubt that this was the case at the time in Arizona (where boom times didn't come until the baby boom).

Why don't we now see more direct government employment in areas where we still need the work performed, and where having government control once again makes economic sense? I know of plenty of unemployed men who would proudly perform the back-breaking work required of construction or related jobs if it means that they can keep their families sheltered and fed. Unfortunately, this time, a reasonable wage for any menial job doesn't come close to covering the substantial mortgage payments to which these white collar folks are now beholden.

So isn't this recession unique in that it largely boils down to mortgages? And couldn't we create a great deal of stimulus by addressing this problem more directly through a debt relief program?

It seems that in any recession or economically disadvantaged subgroup of our population, the quickest way out of turmoil is also the best. Here's a great article from the Atlantic about how our current joblessness situation, combined with the overall economic crisis will likely change the face of America in ways that most analysts are not yet ready to confront:


Andrew D. Smith

I'd like to echo JDL.

You simply can't spend a full paragraph calling something the most iconic image of the Great Depression without adding that picture to the post or (if money issues forbid that) linking to it.

What picture are we talking about here?


i dont get this post- it seems to open by saying that the actual suffering during the depression was less than implied by the apple plight, then it ends by saying the actual suffering during the depression was worse than implied by the apple plight, namely shoeshining


If selling an apple or shining a shoe is still considered the "dignity of work", I'd rather have a bullet in my head. The obvious purpose of these "employment" schemes was to avoid the indignity of being a "beggar" and arrest for vagrancy. Don't kid yourself, these weren't wage making "jobs", they were no different from the 'flower offered as a gift' scam in exchange for a hand out based on pity.


Link to (A) photo of businessman selling apples


KC (@6), your comment astonishes me.

Do you really believe that selling vegetables from the back of a pickup or at a farmer's market is undignified? That the guy who totes a bucket of flowers or pushes an ice cream cart through the local playground is better off dead? It might be a painful come-down for someone with an ingrained sense of privileged entitlement (you, apparently), but is your sense of worth so fragile that you'd rather die than do some kind of honest, if menial and poorly paid, labor?

Six dollars a week (equivalent to $80 in current dollars) in net profit wasn't a lot of money, but it was enough to put food on the table. It wasn't much, but it was far better than nothing.


It doesn't make any difference whether you have MBA or graduated from law school, or was a businessmen, or worked for F500 company, etc if you are Unemployed!!
It is always equal among the Unemployed !!!
For the same logic, someone with a MBA works as waiter for
whatever reason, his occupation is server just as any server in any restaurant. His MBA makes no difference Whatsoever!!

Ann T. Hathaway

The question of undignified work starts in the post, where shoe-shining somehow confers less dignity than apples.

One is a selling a product, the other a service.
There are ways to make connections with customers either way.
And since our industry is running toward service-oriented, we'd better figure out how to make service industry a dignified profession.

Mr. McWilliams, you didn't think that out very well.

Ann T. Hathaway


#8, htb

Typical Republican attitude.


Where can I shine shoes and sell apples? Or would that be greedy?

Nina B.

This is the image most associated with selling apples in the Great Depression:


We still have fruit vendors on the streets of Manhattan - it's one of the things I love about this city - and they're not subsidized, so they must be making a profit.

A bit off-topic, but I'd like to see Freakonomics take on the Manhattan fruit phenomenon.

Walking up Broadway, from Soho to 110th Street, I count an average of one fruit place (grocery store, deli, or bodega with mountains of fruit outside) every two blocks. Other avenues have them too. And I didn't count mobile carts.

Our population density on the West Side is about 731 people per block (calculated from So each fruit store serves roughly 1500 people. Though of course some of those people are tiny children, without teeth to bite an apple; and surely some of them buy their fruit indoors, at Whole Foods or Trader Joe's.

Yet the fruit stores all have hundreds of oranges, apples, bananas, melons, etc. on display, and they all seem to stay in business. We must eat an awful lot of fruit.


David Chowes, New York City

Many persons will be selling apples in the street for probably 25 cents each.

They will be buying them from Del Monte, United Fruit Company and other huge corporations whose CEO's will be getting $25M + stock options + a hefty bonus.

michael malta

When I was in college I drove a taxicab in Manhattan. It was a hoot. I made more money than any student I knew and got to meet all sorts of cool people and I love to drive and to this day use the skills I acquired to zip around town like a maniac.

Then I got a "real" job and another job and couldn't stand working 9-5 and wearing monkey clothes, so, at 25, graduate of Columbia University, I went back to driving a cab. And hated it. What was cool as a student made me feel like an utter failure as an adult. I dreaded meeting anyone I might know. Took any bad 'tone' on the part of customers as a personal insult and basically humiliated by the work.

Until, one day, I picked up this group of Aussies who were native new yorkers. It had been almost twenty years since they had been back. All day and then all the next day they had me drive them around town. They couldn't get enough of the magic city and through their eyes I understood that I had the best job in the world -- a job I enjoyed greatly for years as I worked my way through grad school and eventually began the next phase of my life.

And too this day, if it is raining and the streetcorners are filled with folks begging for a cab, I feel almost compelled to pull over and offer someone a ride.

The point? It isn't the work, it's the attitude. Dignity lies within. Any job, especially a job that involves dealing with the general public can be a link to what is best in life, or it can be degrading and humiliating -- it all depends on what is inside of the person doing the job.



My dad, who was born in the States 1913, was taken back to Poland, and got himself back to the US around 1933. It was just before he turned 21. He got permission from his mother in Poland to leave before age of majority by saying that it would be better to leave in the summer, rather than enduring the depression in the winter. He went back to Detroit, and sold apples and pencils, and got his food free in bars with the price of a beer. This was on the way to enrolling in college, and working nights in a small parts factory. I think apple selling was not always a vocation, per se, during the depression.


I liked the fact that Joseph Sicker fund of $10,000 donated by the produce industry he arranged to sell boxes of apples to unemployed businessmen at rates that were about 10 percent below market price. By doing so he encourage unemployed workers to buy the apple and self it at market price. This is good because by doing so jobless people will income which is good. What I really liked was the fact that some sellers were cultivating a "client base" willing to pay above market price to help a good person get through a bad time. Which is good because one of the reason why there was such Depression was due to imbalance of wealth distribution but now money is flowing from the top classes to the bottom.

By doing so it makes the economy productive now that the demand for apple had risen and people now have jobs. This helped some people during the Great Depression because it provided income for jobless and it also created job whether your were a seller or a producer. It is hard to imagine how such little investment can make such a huge impact on the life of others.

If Hoover would have funded money on providing jobs the people would not have suffered so much because people will have job. By funding jobs the government not only let money flows to those who need it but its also make the economy productive which is important for a country to advance.



This is one of the best essays I've ever read in the Washington Times. Dubner's humorous conversation with that twinkle-eyed rogue Glenn Beck was pretty good too.

Mark Smallwood

The talk of the apple sellers as a "subsidized work program" implies that this was a government program. It was the work of a private trade association which was trying to recover sales and profits after it had been decimated by the injudicious destruction of thousands of apple orchards across the country by prohibitionists. Prior to the 1930s there was not a strong tradition of eating apples in America, contrary to popular belief. Most apples were used in cider, hard cider, and for livestock consumption. Prohibitionists chopped down tens of thousands of heirloom cider apple trees and the apple growers began looking for a new way to sell their wares. This is also how and when the phrase "An apple a day keeps the doctor away" became popular.