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The timing and severity of the Great Depression varied
substantially across countries. The Depression was particularly long and severe in the United States and Europe; it was milder
in Japan and much of Latin America. Perhaps not surprisingly, the worst depression ever experienced stemmed from a multitude
of causes. Declines in consumer demand, financial panics, and misguided government policies caused economic output to fall
in the United States. The gold standard, which linked nearly all the countries of the world in a network of fixed currency
exchange rates, played a key role in transmitting the American downturn to other countries. The recovery from the Great Depression
was spurred largely by the abandonment of the gold standard and the ensuing monetary expansion. The Great Depression brought
about fundamental changes in economic institutions, macroeconomic policy, and economic theory.
In the United States, the Great
Depression began in the summer of 1929. The downturn became markedly worse in late 1929 and continued until early 1933. Real
output and prices fell precipitously. Between the peak and the trough of the downturn, industrial production in the United
States declined 47 percent and real GDP fell 30 percent. The wholesale price index declined 33 percent (such declines in the
price level are referred to as “deflation”). Although there is some debate about the reliability of the statistics,
it is widely agreed that the unemployment rate exceeded 20 percent at its highest point. The severity of these declines becomes
especially clear when they are compared with America’s next worst recession of the 20th century, that of 1981–82,
when real GDP declined just 2 percent and the unemployment rate peaked at under 10 percent. Moreover, during the 1981–
82 recession prices continued to rise, although the rate of price increase slowed substantially (a phenomenon known as “disinflation”).
The timing and severity of the Great Depression varied substantially across countries.
Table 1 shows the dates of the downturn and upturn in economic activity in a number of countries. Table 2 shows the
peak-to-trough percentage decline in annual industrial production for countries for which such data are available. Great Britain
struggled with low growth and recession during most of the second half of the 1920s, due largely to its decision in 1925 to
return to the gold standard with an overvalued pound. Britain did not slip into severe depression, however, until early 1930,
and the peak-to-trough decline in industrial production was roughly one-third that of the United States. France also experienced
a relatively short downturn in the early 1930s. The French recovery in 1932 and 1933, however, was short-lived. French industrial
production and prices both fell substantially between 1933 and 1936. Germany’s economy slipped into a downturn early
in 1928 and then stabilized before turning down again in the third quarter of 1929. The decline in German industrial production
was roughly equal to that in the United States. A number of countries in Latin America slipped into depression in late
1928 and early 1929, slightly before the U.S. decline in output. While some less developed countries experienced severe depressions,
others, such as Argentina and Brazil, experienced comparatively mild downturns. The depression in Japan started relatively
late (in early 1930) and was, by comparison, mild. The general price deflation evident in the United States was also present
in other countries. Virtually every industrialized country endured declines in wholesale prices of 30 percent or more between
1929 and 1933. Because of the greater flexibility of the Japanese price
structure, deflation in Japan was unusually rapid in 1930 and 1931. This rapid deflation may have helped to keep
the decline in Japanese production relatively mild. The prices of primary commodities traded in world markets declined even
more dramatically during this period. For example, the prices of coffee, cotton, silk, and rubber were reduced by roughly
half just between September 1929 and December 1930. As a result, the terms of trade declined precipitously for producers of
primary commodities. The U.S. recovery began in the spring of 1933. Output grew rapidly in the mid-1930s:
real GDP rose at an average rate of 9 percent per year between 1933 and 1937. Output
had fallen
so deeply in the early years of the 1930s, however,
that it remained substantially below its longrun
trend level
throughout this period. In 1937–38 the United States suffered another severe downturn, but after mid-1938 the American
economy grew even more rapidly than in the mid- 1930s. U.S. output finally returned to its long-run trend level in 1942. Recovery
in the rest of the world varied greatly. The British economy stopped declining soon after Britain’s abandonment of the
gold standard in September 1931, though genuine recovery did not begin until the end of 1932. The economies of a number of
Latin American countries began to strengthen in late 1931 and early 1932. Germany and Japan both began to recover in the fall
of 1932. Canada and many smaller European countries started to revive at about the same time as the United States, early in
1933. On the other hand, France, which experienced severe depression later than most countries, did not firmly enter the recovery
phase until 1938. Causes of the Great Depression The fundamental cause of the Great Depression in the United States
was a decline in spending 
Many volumes have been written about the Great Depression
of 1929-1941 and its impact on the lives of millions of Americans. Historians, economists, and politicians have all combed
the wreckage searching for the “black box” that will reveal the cause of the calamity. Sadly, all too many of
them decide to abandon their search, finding it easier perhaps to circulate a host of false and harmful conclusions about
the events of seven decades ago. Consequently, many people today continue to accept critiques of free-market capitalism that
are unjustified and support government policies that are economically destructive. How bad was the Great Depression? Over
the four years from 1929 to 1933, production at the nation’s factories, mines, and utilities fell by more than half.
People’s real disposable incomes dropped 28 percent. Stock prices collapsed to one-tenth of their pre-crash height.
The number of unemployed Americans rose from 1.6 million in 1929 to 12.8 million in 1933. One of every four workers was out
of a job at the Depression’s nadir, and ugly rumoUrs of revolt simmered for the first time since the Civil War.
The photograph became an icon of the Great Depression:
a migrant mother with her children burying their faces in her shoulder. Katherine McIntosh was 4 years old when the photo
was snapped. She said it brought shame -- and determination -- to her family. Katherine McIntosh holds the photograph taken
with her mother in 1936. Katherine McIntosh holds the photograph taken with her mother in 1936. "I wanted to make sure
I never lived like that again," says McIntosh, who turns 77 on Saturday. "We all worked hard and we all had good
jobs and we all stayed with it. When we got a home, we stayed with it."
McIntosh is the girl to the left of
her mother when you look at the photograph. The picture is best known as "Migrant Mother," a black-and-white photo
taken in February or March 1936 by Dorothea Lange of Florence Owens Thompson, then 32, and her children.
Lange
was traveling through Nipomo, California, taking photographs of migrant farm workers for the Resettlement Administration.
At the time, Thompson had seven children who worked with her in the fields. Photo See Lange's photos of the migrant family
"She asked my mother if she could take her picture -- that ... her name would never be published, but it was to help
the people in the plight that we were all in, the hard times," McIntosh says. "So mother let her take the picture,
because she thought it would help." The next morning, the photo was printed in a local paper, but by then the family
had already moved on to another farm, McIntosh says. "The picture came out in the paper to show the people what hard
times was. People was starving in that camp. There was no food," she says. "We were ashamed of it. We didn't
want no one to know who we were." The photograph helped define the Great Depression, yet McIntosh says her mom
didn't let it define her, although the picture "was always talked about in our family." "It always stayed
with her. She always wanted a better life, you know."
Her mother, she says, was a "very strong lady"
who liked to have a good time and listen to music, especially the yodeler named Montana Slim. She laughs when she recalls
her brothers bringing home a skinny greyhound pooch. "Mom, Montana Slim is outside," they said. Don't Miss Thompson
rushed outside. The boys chuckled. They had named the dog after her favorite musician. "She was the backbone of our family,"
McIntosh says of her mom. "We never had a lot, but she always made sure we had something. She didn't eat sometimes,
but she made sure us children ate. That's one thing he did do." Her memories of her youth are filled with about 50
percent good times, 50 percent hard times. It was nearly impossible to get an education. Children worked the fields with their
parents. As soon as they'd get settled at a school, it was time to pick up and move again. Her mom would put newborns
in cotton sacks and pull them along as she picked cotton. The older kids would stay in front, so mom could keep a close eye
on them. "We would pick the cotton and pile it up in front of her, and she'd come along and pick it up and put it
in her sack,"
They lived in tents or in a car. Local kids would tease them, telling them to clean up and
bathe. "They'd tell you, 'Go home and take a bath.' You couldn't very well take a bath when you're
out in a car [with] nowhere to go." She adds, "We'd go home and cry." McIntosh now cleans homes in the
Modesto, California, area. She's proud of the living she's been able to make -- that she has a roof over her head
and has been able to maintain a job all these years. She says her obsession to keep things clean started in her youth when
her chore was to keep the family tent clean. There were two white sheets that she cleaned each day.
"Even today,
when it comes to cleaning, I make sure things are clean. I can't stand dirty things," she says with a laugh.
Given the key roles of monetary contraction and the
gold standard in causing the Great Depression, it is not surprising that currency devaluations and monetary expansion became
the leading sources of recovery throughout the world. There is a notable correlation between the time countries abandoned
the gold standard (or devalued their currencies substantially) and a renewed growth in their output. For example, Britain,
which was forced off the gold standard in September 1931, recovered relatively early, while the United States, which did not
effectively devalue its currency until 1933, recovered substantially later. Similarly, the Latin American countries of Argentina
and Brazil, which began to devalue in 1929, had relatively mild downturns and were largely recovered by 1935. In contrast,
the “Gold Bloc” countries of Belgium and France, which were articularly wedded to the gold standard and slow to
devalue, still had industrial production in 1935 well below its 1929 level. Devaluation, however, did not increase output
directly. Rather, it allowed countries to expand their money supplies without concern about gold movements and exchange rates.
Countries that took greater advantage of this freedom saw greater recovery. The monetary expansion that began in the United
States in early 1933 was particularly dramatic. The American money supply increased nearly 42 percent between 1933 and 1937.
This monetary expansion stemmed largely from a substantial gold inflow to the United States, caused in part by the rising
political tensions in Europe that eventually led to World War II. Worldwide monetary expansion stimulated spending by lowering
interest rates and making credit more widely available. It also created expectations of inflation, rather than deflation,
and so made potential borrowers more confident that their wages and profits would be sufficient to cover their loan payments
if they chose to borrow. One sign that monetary expansion stimulated recovery in the United States by encouraging borrowing
was that consumer and business spending on terest-sensitive items such as cars, trucks, and machinery rose well before consumer
spending on services. Fiscal policy played a relatively small role in stimulating recovery in the United States. Indeed, the
Revenue Act of 1932 increased American tax rates greatly in an attempt to balance the federal budget, and by doing so dealt
another blow to the economy by further discouraging spending. Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, initiated in early 1933,
did include a number of new federal programs aimed at generating recovery. For example, the Works Progress Administration
(WPA) hired the unemployed to work on government building projects, and the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) gave
large payments to farmers. However, the actual increases in government spending and the government budget deficit were
small relative to the size of the economy. This is especially apparent when state government budget deficits are included,
because those deficits actually declined at the same time that the federal deficit rose. As a result, the new spending programs
initiated by the New Deal had little direct expansionary effect on the conomy. Whether they may nevertheless have had positive
effects on consumer and business sentiment remains an open question. United States military pending related to World War II
was not large enough to appreciably affect total spending and output until 1941. The role of fiscal policy in enerating recovery
varied substantially across other countries. Great Britain, like the United States, did not use fiscal expansion to a noticeable
extent early in its recovery. It did, however, increase military spending substantially after 1937.
Those of us long in tooth have difficulty understanding
why folks these days worry so much about an economic recession. The Great Depression of 1930-34 that we lived through was
a genuine wide-wasting foot-stomping calamity. The historic designation of "great" - as in large -- is totally inadequate.
It was a defining event that totally rearranged our concepts of government, social responsibility and employer-employee relations.
United States population at that time was 123 million, a little less than half that of today. Fortune Magazine estimated that
34 million men, women and children (28 percent) were without any income what so ever. In the absence of unemployment compensation
programs, the federal government had no way of determining actual figures. Average weekly pay for those who had jobs was $16.21.
Purchasing power of money was three times that of today, but pay was less than today's government-mandated minimum wage.
Five thousand banks failed during the Great Depression. More than 237,000 families were evicted from their homes. Two million
men were "bumming around" the country at any given time searching for work. Many cities patrolled the roads to prevent
transients from seeking work where long-term residents were jobless. Those that sneaked by were arrested -a practice that
was ineffective because men broke windows or accosted strangers in order to get a meal and bed in jail. Every city had a "soup
kitchen" where long lines of hungry people - mostly men - waited. Women with children went to the head of the lines.
Shantytowns of scrap lumber and tents -- without water or sewers -- sprang up in wasteland near cities. They were called Hooverville's
after President Herbert Hoover who took office in 1929 as the world economy collapsed. Laid off workers formed labor unions
to bargain "job security." My first assignment as a high school newspaper reporter was to cover the bitter 1936
"sit-down strike" at General Motors factories in Flint, Michigan.
Personal Recollections
I
was a nine-year-old boy at Flint, when the Depression was heralded by the stock market crash of 1929. Men abandoned their
families to the charity of working relatives, 60 cents a day in city welfare and once-a-month handouts of surplus farm products.
Farmers were in equally dire straits because foreign markets had collapsed. A devastating three-year drought compounded their
miseries. It is with great pain that I recall those days. My father abandoned my mother, me and two younger sisters. Once
in awhile we got a $5 bill in a letter from him without message or return address. Fortunately there were three uncles nearby
with jobs who helped us out. Mother waited tables for a dollar a day plus tips - 50 cents on a good night. I peddled handbills
and caddied at a golf course on weekends. My right shoulder today is an inch lower than my left as a result of toting a golf
bag before my growth stopped. We lost our home, moved to cheap rent places, then attic apartments. Mother gave up her possessions
for back rent. She would not "go on welfare." That was a disgrace. Finally - when we were really starving - she
went to the "surplus depot" and brought home a peck-sack of dried peas. For ten days we had nothing but pea soup
for breakfast, dinner and supper. I still hate pea soup.
Finally the landlord ordered us to leave - he needed money
also -- and kept Mother's cherished piano for back rent. She never played again. We moved our beds into the basement of
an uncle's home, and his family set us at their own meager table. My mother, maternal grandmother and three aunts pooled
resources. Our rented house was crowded - but home. Our meals were sparse, yet we all laughed when we read in a discarded
newspaper the menu for prisoners at the county jail. They had the same meal that day - not much - as we were eating. A morning
ritual was everyone assembling to make cardboard inserts for shoes whose soles had worn through. By the end of day the inserts
would be worn through also. The point of this depressing tale is that it was not unusual back then. Today's generation
cannot comprehend the demoralizing impact that a deep, economic depression has on a nation -- thank God.
It is unclear exactly when hobos first appeared on the
American railroading scene. With the end of the American Civil War in the mid 19th Century, many soldiers looking to return
home took to hopping freight trains. Others looking for work on the American frontier followed railroads westward aboard freight
trains in the late 19th Century.
In 1906, Prof. Layal Shafee, after an exhaustive study, put the number of tramps
in America at 500,000 (about 0.6% of the U.S. population). The article citing this figure, "What Tramps Cost Nation",
was published by The New York Telegraph in 1911 and estimated the number had surged to 700,000.
The population
of hobos increased greatly during the Great Depression era of the 1930s. With no work and no prospects at home, many decided
to travel for free via freight trains and try their luck elsewhere.
Life as a hobo was a dangerous one. In addition
to the problems of being itinerant, poor, far from home and support, and the hostile attitude of many train crews, the railroads
employed their own security staff, often nicknamed bulls, who had a reputation for being rough with trespassers. Also, riding
on a freight train is a dangerous enterprise. The British poet W.H. Davies, author of The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp,
lost a leg falling under the wheels whilst trying to jump a train. One could easily get trapped between cars, or freeze to
death in bad weather. When freezer cars were loaded at an ice factory, any hobo inside was likely to be killed
It's hard to get a handle on a hobo. That's
part of his character: he's hard to pin down, no address, no strings attached, free as the wind at his heels.
The hobo exists as a literary and cultural character, part of our western mythology and our enduring romance with freedom:
he's a singer of song, a ribald teller of tales, riding the rails with the boxcar blues. While he exists in that mythology
as well as in a hobo culture maintained in contemporary hobo conventions and literature, the formation of his character came
in the years between The Civil War and World War Two. This site seeks the hobo: who he was and where he came from, what he
means and where he went.
Media has both vilified and mythologized the hobo. As a vagrant and a social pariah, he
was legislated against and imprisoned; more benevolent citizens considered him in need of reform and public assistance. Images
in cartoons and early film portrayed a comical - if not desperate - character, always optimistic but terminally unlucky. Meanwhile,
tramp autobiographies romanticized his life on the road and his quintessential American pioneer spirit. In sum, the public
has been made quite aware of the hobo, but has perhaps remained by and large ignorant to the reality of his existence.
By most serious study, the hobo was an unskilled migratory laborer, an itinerant and seasonal worker. He was mostly
white, American born, and able bodied. He was born of the American drive westward, the opening of industry in the West in
the latter half of the 19th century. He was born on the railroads that carried him from cities where he congregated to the
far reaches of the country where he worked to earn a "stake". The hobo was a member of the 'bottom end'
of the industrial work force, filling the gaps in industrial and seasonal labor's stops and starts. In reality, the hobo
was a by-product of the rapid industrialization of the country in the half-century beginning at the close of the Civil War.
One of the myths about the Black Tuesday crash was that
many bankrupt investors committed suicide that day. A London newspaper reported erroneously that 11 busted-brokers jumped
from their office windows in despair. The rumor started as the result of the suicide -- witnessed by Winston S. Churchill
on a visit to New York City -- two weeks before the crash. A vice-president of the Earl Radio Corp. jumped to his death from
the Savoy-Plaza Hotel. His suicide note read: "We are broke. Last April, I was worth $100,000. Today, I am $24,000 in
the red." A week after the crash, J.J. Riordan, president of the County Trust Company, took a pistol from a teller's
cage at his bank, went to his home in downtown Manhattan, and shot himself. The news was suppressed until after the bank closed
at noon Saturday to avoid causing a run on the bank. There is no record of jumpers during the pair of crashes, and none ever
in the New York financial district. Nonetheless, Will Rogers, a popular humorist, quipped, "When Wall Street took that
tail spin, you had to stand in line to get a window to jump out of."
Ironically, Congress adjourned in November
1929 without action on the suspect Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act and did not return until the spring of 1930. By this time the Great
Depression was well underway.
Still unaware of the damaging effect of tariffs, Congress completed action on Smoot-Hawley
and passed it in the Senate on June 13 by just two votes. Inasmuch as it passed after the Depression was well underway, it
was not realized that the debate and certain passage spooked the forward-looking stock market. Passage of the act continued
to hamper recovery. A hundred thousand companies closed. It took years for a new science of economics to realize that tariffs,
the uneven distribution of gold and Federal Reserve inaction had done the damage - not the stock market.
President
Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in 1933. He closed all banks for ten days to stem panic withdrawals, outlawed gold coinage,
set farm quotas and established government make-work programs (who can forget the WPA and the CCC?) to pump confidence and
money into the U.S. economy. Yet, it was not until Smoot-Hawley was scrapped -- and America armed for World War II -- that
the U.S. economy regained vitality and that unemployment returned to normal.
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The initial decline in output in the United States in
the summer of 1929 is widely believed to have stemmed from tight U.S. monetary policy aimed at limiting stock market speculation.
The 1920s had been a prosperous decade, but not an exceptional boom period; wholesale goods prices had remained nearly constant
throughout the decade and there had been mild recessions in both 1924 and 1927. The one obvious area of excess was the stock
market. Stock prices had risen more than fourfold from the low in 1921 to the peak reached in 1929. In 1928 and 1929, the
Federal Reserve had raised interest rates in hopes of slowing the rapid rise in stock prices. These higher interest rates
depressed interest-sensitive spending in areas such as construction and automobile purchases, which in turn reduced production.
Some scholars believe that a boom in housing construction in the mid-1920s led to an excess supply of housing and a particularly
large drop in construction in 1928 and 1929. By the fall of 1929, U.S. stock prices had reached levels that could not be justified
by reasonable anticipations of future earnings. As a result, when a variety of minor events led to gradual price declines
in October 1929, investors lost confidence and the stock market bubble burst. Panic selling began on “Black Thursday,”
October 24, 1929. Many stocks had been purchased on margin, that is, using loans secured by only a small fraction of the stocks’
value. As a result, the price declines forced some investors to liquidate their holdings, thus exacerbating the fall in prices.
Between their peak in September and their low in November, U.S. stock prices (measured using the Cowles Index) declined 33
percent. Because the decline was so dramatic, this event is often referred to as the Great Crash of 1929. The stock market
crash reduced American aggregate demand substantially. Consumer
purchases of durable goods and business investment fell
sharply after the crash. A likely explanation is that the financial crisis generated considerable uncertainty about future
income, which in turn led consumers and firms to put off purchases of durable goods. Although the loss of wealth caused by
the decline in stock prices was relatively small, the crash may also have depressed spending by making people feel poorer.
As a result of the drastic decline in consumer and firm spending, real output in the United States, which had been declining
slowly up to this point, fell rapidly in late 1929 and throughout 1930. Thus, while the Great Crash of the stock market and
the Great Depression are two quite separate events, the decline in stock prices was one factor causing the decline in production
and employment in the United States. Banking panics and monetary contraction The next blow to aggregate demand occurred in
the fall of 1930, when the first of four waves of banking panics gripped the United States. A banking panic arises when many
depositors lose confidence in the solvency of banks and simultaneously demand their deposits be paid to them in cash. Banks,
which typically hold only a fraction of deposits as cash reserves, must liquidate loans in order to raise the required cash.
This process of hasty liquidation can cause even a previously solvent bank to fail. The United States experienced widespread
banking panics in the fall of 1930, the spring of 1931, the fall of 1931, and the fall of 1932. The final wave of panics continued
through the winter of 1933 and culminated with the national “bank holiday” declared by President Franklin Roosevelt
on March 6, 1933. The bank holiday closed all banks, permitting them to reopen only after being deemed solvent by government
inspectors. The panics took a severe toll on the American banking system. By 1933, one-fifth of the banks in existence at
the start of 1930 had failed.
Black Thursday shook Michigan
harder than almost any other state. Stocks of auto and mining companies were hammered. Auto production in 1929 reached
an all-time high of slightly more than five million vehicles, then quickly slumped by two million in 1930. By 1932, near
the deepest point of the Depression, they had fallen by another two million to just 1,331,860 — down an astonishing
75 percent from the 1929 peak.Thousands of investors everywhere, including many well-known people, were hit hard in the 1929
crash. Among them was Winston Churchill. He had invested heavily in American stocks before the crash. Afterward, only his
writing skills and positions in government restored his finances.Clarence Birdseye, an early developer of packaged frozen
foods, had sold his business for $30 million and put all his money into stocks. He was wiped out. William C. Durant, founder of General Motors, lost more than $40 million in the
stock market and wound up a virtual pauper. (GM itself stayed in the black throughout the Depression under the cost-cutting
leadership of Alfred P. Sloan.) 
After World War I, the United States enjoyed a prosperous
decade called the Roaring Twenties. Interrupting the period of prosperity was the stock market crash in October of 1929. This,
along with several other causes, led to the world wide economic depression known as the Great Depression. Historian Studs
Terkel said that the Great Depression was a “holocaust” . Terkel said the Great Depression was a “holocaust”
because of the numerous families who were left jobless and poverty stricken by the economic disaster. Much like a holocaust,
the Great Depression scarred its survivors – physically and mentally – with memories of the “Hard Times”
(Terkel 83). The Great Depression lasted through the presidencies of Herbert C. Hoover and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. While
Herbert Hoover was the president during the beginning of the Great Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and his New Deal, was
instrumental in repairing and reforming the United States economy during the Great Depression.
The Roaring Twenties
was accurately described by Charles Dickens, in his book A Tale of Two Cities, as the “best of times and the worst of
times.” The decade was a Second Gilded Age because of the new technology that allowed people like Charles Lindbergh
to fly across the Atlantic Ocean in the Spirit of St. Louis. Henry Ford was also part of the technological revolution, when
he created the Ford Model-T and revolutionized the assembly line. He was also the first businessman to pay his assembly
line workers five dollars a day. Along with technology, there was also a cultural revolution during the Second Gilded Age.
In athletics, Babe Ruth became an all American symbol as baseball grew into a national pastime. The writers of the decade,
known as the “Lost Generation,” highlighted the end to Victorianism, and the start of naturalism and the realistic
interpretations of war. Ernest Hemmingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, T.S. Elliot, and Robert Frost were some of
the “Lost Generation” writers. The writers of the period focused on the effects and reality of World War I, the
southern culture, and the women’s rights movement. Included in this cultural revolution was the Harlem Renaissance.
Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Marcus Garvey, and Louis Armstrong led this revival of African American culture and civil
right’s movement. Langston Hughes wrote about the racial struggle of African Americans to gain equal rights. Zora Neale
Hurston was also a writer who supported
African American women as they looked for a better position in society. Marcus
Garvey believed that African Americans and Caucasian Americans were equal. He also believed that the United States was meant
for Americans and that African Americans should return to their country of Liberia, in Africa. Louis Armstrong and the Jazz
influence on the Harlem Renaissance brought about a new age in music as well a revival in the African American culture. Together
the cultural revolution and the technological revolution created a prosperous time in the United States. Yet, everything has
an opposite, and during the 1920’s there were many disillusioning events, such the wave of fear of Communism, known
as the Red Scare. During World War I, in 1917, the Bolshevik Revolution overthrew the czar of Russia and V.I. Lenin came to
power, bringing communism to Russia. With the rise of communism, democratic countries – such as the United States –
feared that they would loose their existing government. Moreover, African Americans and immigrants did not enjoy the social
improvements of the 1920’s due to the growth of the Klu Klux Klan (KKK) and the immigration restrictions, such as the
Immigration Act of 1924. In 1915, one of the first films made was Birth of a Nation by D.W. Griffith. The film supported the
KKK and degraded African Americans and Northern Reconstruction supporters (Kennedy 451). The Emergency Quota Act of 1921,
and the Immigration Act of 1924, limited the
percent of immigrants entering the United States. The acts especially limited
the immigration of Northern Europeans and completely closed off the immigration of Japanese persons to the United States.
Americans also feared that communist or anarchist immigrants would try to change the government. In one case, Italian immigrants
Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were charged with being anarchists and murdering two personnel at a shoe factory in Milford,
Massachusetts. After being
found guilty and imprisoned, they were sentenced to be executed in 1927. In their last speech,
Sacco said that the United States is divided between “the oppressed class and the rich class, and there will be always
collision between one and the other” (Sacco). This division of the classes and even nationalities was further widened
during the late 1920’s. The Great Depression was a result of several factors, including the failure of leadership of
the presidents during the 1920’s, the farm depression, and the stock market crash. The presidents during the 1920’s,
Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover, followed the laissez-faire government policy. Even when the depression
occurred, Hoover believed in his “Rugged Individualism” and that America would eventually work itself out of
the depression without any government interference. He also believed that, “the primary cause of the Great Depression
was the war of 1914 to 1918.”
There were parts of the country were people were less
affected than in others. People still went to the movies, listened to the radio, played golf and tennis, took vacations, and
went about their lives as though nothing was wrong, trying to ignore the desperate looks of people they often passed on the
streets, sitting on benches, too proud to beg, but still hoping for a handout of a dime or a quarter that might buy a sandwich
and a cup of coffee.
In the Roaring 20s nobody thought an economic disaster of such proportion could ever touch
the United States. In the aftermath of the Great War, while Europe was still cleaning up the mess, caring for
the wounded and mourning the dead, Americans felt a sense of disdain for the rest of the world, a European-centered world
that could not manage its affairs any better than it had done in the past. America had problems of its own to
be sure: racism, religious differences, adjustments to the post-industrial age. But the mood of the 1920s was upbeat and positive,
and as President Coolidge said, the business of America was business.
Then it hit in October 1929. The Depression
was caused by many factors, but it was triggered by the stock market crash. The sudden loss of wealth had a snowball
effect. Banks found themselves short of funds as margin buying had eaten up credit, and now those margins could not be met
because the value of stocks had plunged so rapidly. As people stop buying, merchants found they could not sell their wares,
so orders to factories dried up, and people were laid off. Income continued to fall, and the cycle repeated over
and over in a downward spiral. The country produced 8 million cars in 1928 and 2 million in 1932. Unemployment
percentages varied from 15% to 25% and even higher in some areas. In hard hit regions, entire towns seemed hopelessly stuck
in poverty.
Aside from war, the United States government had never faced a crisis of such magnitude. And
because government's traditional relationship with business had been one of laissez-faire, tempered by relatively mild
regulation that began in the Progressive Era, many people could not envision the government providing solutions for problems
which government had not apparently caused. Furthermore, Communism had engulfed Russia, and Socialist parties
were strong all across Europe, but America had been through a red scare, and labor agitation and hints of “socialistic
solutions” were seen by many as un-American, unnecessary, even dangerous. The income tax was relatively
new, and government revenues were ample for most needs. But the burden of caring for the unemployed and unemployable
soon became so large that local, state and national government, let alone charitable organizations, lacked funds to deal forcefully
with the problem. And as wages and incomes fell, raising taxes hardly seemed the solution.
To make
things worse, the middle of the United States went through an era known as the dust bowl, as farmlands dried up primitive
irrigation projects were unable to keep the growing. Farmers discovered that with the falling prices they could
not earn enough from the sale of their produce to cover the costs of getting it to market, so farmers burned their corn to
keep warm, slaughtered their livestock for their own food and dumped milk in the streets.
President Hoover, a man
who had been responsible for the food production program during the Great War, and whose activities in saving the Belgians
from starvation had been recognized far and wide, ironically found himself in a position which seemed hopeless, and which
in which the government itself seemed helpless. President Hoover did not do nothing, however. The
actions he took were unprecedented, far more than government had ever taken before in interfering with the affairs of private
business. But it was far too little to stem the tide of depression that was sweeping across the country.
In 1928, the year in which President Hoover had been elected by a huge landslide, Franklin Roosevelt, whose political career
had apparently been ended by infantile paralysis in 1921, was elected governor of New York, one of the few bright spots for
Democrats during that year. Having learned progressive politics under President Wilson, Roosevelt began to address problems
of depression aggressively from the governor's mansion in Albany. By 1932 his willingness to experiment seemed
appealing to Democrats, who nominated him for president in that year.
Franklin Roosevelt was not capable of ending
the depression by himself. But he was willing to try almost anything, and try he did. What he brought to Washington,
and what he gave to the American people, was a sense of hope, even as those on the left accused him of being a closet capitalist,
and those on the right accused him of being a betrayer of his patrician class, if not an outright socialist. Roosevelt
took it all in stride, commenting that since he was being attacked from both sides of the political spectrum, then he must
be doing something right.
What FDR tried to do was called the New Deal, and although it did not in it of itself
end the Depression, it changed the relationship between the government and the American people forever, and its legacy is
still with us. Memories of the Great Depression have all but disappeared except among the very old, but the effects of the
Depression have never completely gone away.
WW1 had ended in 1919. The Great War had been particularly
good for American farmers: since European farms were unable to produce while the war was being fought on their territory,
many American farmers increased their own production, cultivating more land for crops and buying new equipment to help them
with their work. With less competition and higher prices for their goods, American farmers prospered. But after the war was
over, when the demand for their produce eclined
and European farms returned to work, prices began to fall, leaving American
farmers with er-cultivated fields, unnecessary equipment, no market for their crops and enormous loans and mortgages, with
no money to pay them off. Throughout the 1920’s, American farmers faced loss of income, bankruptcy, foreclosure. They
were already in a depression by October 1929. The stock market crash now meant not only lost savings from stocks or the bank,
it also drove produce prices even lower. With unemployment at an all time low, no one in the country was working enough to
earn the money to buy what the farmers grew. It often cost more to grow, harvest and sell the crops than the prices they sold
for; in some cases in California, it was cheaper to destroy the crops than to pay the workers to pick them. Meanwhile, many
Americans, especially children, were living below poverty level, tarving. President Hoover, the nonpolitical humanitarian
Quaker inaugurated only 7 months earlier, made numerous efforts to contain the crisis, such as tax reductions, stabilization
of wages and prices including agricultural prices through the Federal Farm Board), and maintained or increased spending on
public projects. Unfortunately, these efforts were not enough to rescue America from its downward spiral, and soon the makeshift
shelters erected around the country by citizens who had lost their homes were being called “Hoovervilles.” The
Bonus Army Riot only solidified this public opinion. In 1932, 20,000 WW1 veterans and their families marched from Portland,
Oregon to Washington, DC, seeking immediate payment on wartime bonuses they were to be awarded in 1945. After two months of
encampment, protests and growing violence, President Hoover ordered a peaceful evacuation of the Bonus Army. Instead, Chief
of Staff MacArthur led an army attack against the men, women and children of the Bonus Army camp. When Hoover accepted public
responsibility for the riot, his presidential fate was sealed. That November, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected President.
In contrast with Hoover, FDR was a gregarious and popular candidate, winning a landslide election victory. Americans were
desperate for change and they believed FDR could and would deliver on his promises of relief and reform. During the first
few weeks of his presidency, known as the Hundred Days, the Roosevelt administration set more legislation into action than
any other comparable period in history, before or since. Over the coming years, Roosevelt’s New Deal established a steady
stream of welfare and work relief programs, including the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), Civil Works and
Public Works Administrations (CWA/PWA), Works Progress Administration (WPA), National Youth Administration (NYA), and the
Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), a program employing young men ages 17-24, whose impact on national forests and state parks
can still be seen today
Born an early Baby Boomer, I grew up hearing stories
about the Great Depression. Not a great deal has ever been written about the effects the Depression had on Brantford, Ontario,
which I now call home. Having been raised on a farm outside of the city, I heard stories of the hardships that country folk
endured during that bleak period but not much about the city. Country folk fared pretty well during that bleak decade. Though
there were many things they could not buy, they grew their own food and traded with neighbors. Even in Brantford the years
of 1929 to 1939 were not as bad as they were in the larger cities. Some say they remember few hardships while others remember
food shortages and the lack of work available. Some people’s lives were touched forever by those ten years that seemed
like an eternity. The drought in the Prairie Provinces seems to have been one factor that affected Brantford. The city’s
industries such as Massey’s and Cockshutts manufactured farm equipment. Suddenly, there was no demand for these products.
At Cockshutt’s a lay off resulted. Only a skeleton crew of foreman, assistant foremen and maintenance workers were kept
on. All laborers were laid off with the hope that when the economy picked up they would be called back to work. But the economy
didn’t pick up.
Of those men laid off, some found work but many didn’t. Some of the men left town,
hoping to find work elsewhere. Some men created their own work. One local man told of buying vegetables from local farmers
and walking door-to-door selling them. Others pulled weeds for ten cents an hour.
There was one significant factor that
helped some of the men through the Depression. In 1932, the erection of the Cockshutt Bridge helped to relieve the unemployment
situation. Though the construction company had its own crew, it needed men to haul supplies and dig ditches. They received
twenty-five cents an hour for the backbreaking labor. The men didn’t complain about low wages nor long hours for they
knew there was always someone willing to take their place. Often, men were standing on the sidelines in hope that someone
would either get fired or quit. Being in the right place at the right time often paid off.
Unemployment and lack
of money were everyone’s troubles. It is said that even the mayor couldn’t make his house payments for some time.
The mayor didn’t allow his personal troubles keep him from the people. It is said he walked the streets of the downtown,
talking to unemployed men who lined the streets. As a result, he came to know their needs and concerns and was sympathetic
to their problems. There came a time when putting food on the table became a major cause of concern. Most residents relied
on the wages from their jobs to pay the mortgage and provide the necessities of life. When the cash run out, city residents
could not rely on their garden or slaughter a cow to provide meat as the country folks did.
During that era, there
was a small privately owned grocery store in every neighborhood. The proprietor often knew his customers on a first name basis.
Many people bought groceries during the week and paid for them when they got paid on Friday. Credit was readily available.
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