Hooverville Of the many Hoovervilles set up in Seattle, Washington, alone, this particular shantytown near the shipyards was the largest. It lasted nine years.

Young and hungry A toddler begs for change in one of the homeless camps.

Anger and frustration Unemployed military veterans, members of the Bonus Expeditionary Force that served during the Great War, clash with Washington, D.C., police at Anacostia Flats in July 1932.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt Preparing to deliver the first of his popular “fireside chats” to a national radio audience. This message focused on measures to reform the American banking system.

The galloping snail A vigorous Roosevelt drives Congress to action in this Detroit News cartoon from March 1933.

Federal relief programs Civilian Conservation Corps enrollees in 1933, on a break from work. Directed by army officers and foresters, the CCC camps were operated like military bases.

Construction of a Dam (1939) One of the most famous and controversial of the artists commissioned by the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration was William Gropper, who painted this mural displayed in the Department of the Interior building in Washington, D.C. Based on his observations of dam construction on the Columbia and Colorado Rivers, Gropper illustrates the triumph and brotherhood that emerged from the New Deal’s massive public projects during the Great Depression.

Norris Dam The massive dam in Tennessee, completed in 1936, was essential in creating jobs and expanding electricity under the TVA.

Dustbowl 

Dustbowl Dodge City, Kansas 1933

Dustbowl Oklahoma

Okies on the run A sharecropping family reaches its destination of Bakersfield, California, in 1935, after “we got blowed out in Oklahoma.”

Labor union violence This 1935 photograph captures unionized strikers fighting “scabs,” or nonunion replacement employees, as the scabs try to pass the picket line and enter the factory.

Huey Long As the powerful governor of Louisiana, Long was a shrewd lawyer and consummate “wheeler-dealer” politician.

Promoters of welfare capitalism Dr. Francis E. Townsend, Rev. Gerald L Promoters of welfare capitalism Dr. Francis E. Townsend, Rev. Gerald L. K. Smith, and Rev. Charles E. Coughlin (left to right) attend the Townsend Recovery Plan convention in Cleveland, Ohio.

“There’s no way like the American way” Margaret Bourke-White’s famous 1937 photograph of desperate people waiting in a Louisville, Kentucky, disaster-relief line captures the continuing racial divide of the era and the elusiveness of the “American Dream” for many minorities.

Federal art project A group of WPA artists at work on Building the Transcontinental Railroad, a mural celebrating the contributions of foreign newcomers that appears in the immigrants’ dining hall on Ellis Island, outside of New York City.

Social Security A poster distributed by the government to educate the public about the new Social Security Act.

Campaigning for a second term Roosevelt campaigning with labor leader John L. Lewis (to the right of Roosevelt) in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.

Eleanor Roosevelt Intelligent, principled, and a political figure in her own right, she is pictured here addressing the Red Cross Convention in 1934.

A Paramount Picture (1934) The glamor of actress Claudette Colbert’s Cleopatra is sharply contrasted with the exhaustion of the average theatergoer in this painting by Reginald Marsh. The growing popularity of movies offered Americans escape from the daily challenges of the Great Depression, though Marsh’s work suggests that this was fleeting at best.