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| Slide 1 (The Great Depression) |
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Depressions were nothing new to the US, however they have never experienced one as severe and long lasting as The Great Depression which started in 1929 and ended in 1939.
It started with an ordinary recession in the summer of 1929 but as consumer spending dropped, goods began to pile up which slowed down production, and yet the stock prices continued to rise way beyond reason.
With the stock market crash in October 27, 1929 The Great Depression was in full affect. 12.9 million shares were traded that day , it’s known as “Black Thursday”. Five days later “Black Tuesday” over 16 million shares were traded. |
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| Here are pictures of the front page of news papers from the great depression when the stock market crashed. |
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12.9 million shares were traded on , it’s known as “Black Thursday”. Five days later “Black Tuesday” over 16 million shares were traded.
Theses trades made the shares worthless. It wiped out millions of investors and sent everyone on Wall Street into a panic.
Causes of the Great Depression included insufficient purchasing power among the middle class and the working class to maintain high levels of production, falling crop and commodity prices prior to the Depression.
The stock market's dependence on borrowed money; and wrongheaded government policies, including high tariffs that reduced international trade and contracted the money supply. |
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By 1930, 4 million Americans looking for work could not find it; that number had
risen to 6 million in 1931.
By spring of 1933, when FDR took the oath of office, unemployment had risen from 8 to 15 million and the gross national product had decreased from $103.8 billion to $55.7 billion.
Forty percent of the farms in Mississippi were on the auction block on FDR's inauguration day. Although the depression was world wide, no other country except Germany reached so high a percentage of unemployed.
Harlem had an unemployment rate of 50 percent and property owned or managed by blacks fell from 30 percent to 5 percent in 1935. |
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These pictures show the struggle families were going through in living and work conditions.
Picture on the left shows a father wearing a sign trying to find a job to provide for his three kids and wife.
while the picture on the right shows you the filth and cramped living conditions families had to deal with. |
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Farmers in the Midwest were hit the hardest by economic downturns and the Dust Bowl. Schools, with budgets shrinking, shortened both the school day and the school year.
Despite assurances from President Herbert Hoover that the crisis would run its course, it only continued to get worse the next three years.
Many sank into despair and shame after they could not find jobs. The suicide rates increased from 14 to 17 per 100,000.
The protest that did occur were local, not national: "farm holidays," neighbors of foreclosed farmers refusing to bid on farms at auction, neighbors moving evicted tenants' furniture back in, and local hunger marches. |
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Luckily the reform introduced by Franklin D. Roosevelt put a damper on the effects the depression.
It produced a major political realignment creating a coalition of big-city ethnics, African Americans, organized labor, and Southern Democrats committed, to varying degrees, to interventionist government.
It strengthened the federal presence in American life, spawning such innovations as national old-age pensions, unemployment compensation, aid to dependent children, public housing, federally-subsidized school lunches, insured bank depositions, the minimum wage, and stock market regulation. |
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| These pictures show just how many people were affected by the depression and how they were in desperate need for assistance.The unemployed lined up to get free meals. |
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