ABSTRACT
In the decades leading up to the outbreak of the Second World War, the circumstances that conditioned the lives of white South African men changed dramatically, sometimes traumatically. Their expectations of society also changed. Although not all were reduced to the extremes of poverty, most white households suffered hardship, or at least some sort of economic reverse during the early 1930s, when the Great Depression struck South Africa. South African historian Colin Bundy has shown that poor whiteism was only 'discovered' by the respectable reaches of colonial society as a social problem in the 1890s, as whites began to be dispossessed of their land, especially in the Cape and Transvaal. As racial integration began to emerge as an urban phenomenon, white poverty and its moral and social consequences attracted the attention and concern of contemporary commentators. A series of political battles erupted over the policy choices available to deal with the crises of poor whiteism.
