1. Life during the Great Depression
(How depressing!)

2. Overview of Causes What were the main causes of the Great Depression?
Overproduction in agriculture and manufacturing.
Uneven distribution of wealth; the rich got richer but didn’t buy more to equal their percentage of wealth
Easy credit hid the country’s economic problems.
Stock speculation

3. Short Term Effects Bank Closures Businesses Closing High unemployment
Homelessness

4. Politics in the Mix
Hoover was hands off at first and wanted the regular business cycle to take care of itself
Opposed direct federal public assistance.
Economist John Maynard Keynes argued that after the crash, the government failed to interfere in the economy, allowing it to plummet.

5. Later when the cycle did not reverse,
Hoover reduced taxes
Asked for wealthy to volunteer their resources and help on local and state levels.
He wanted “trickle-down” economics”
Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) $2.5 billion
Give money to banks so that they can loan to businesses
Public Works Projects:
Hoover Dam project

6. “Brother Can You Spare a Dime?”
By 1933, unemployment was 24.9%
Hours and wages were cut for the working.
Free food offered by local charities
breadline

7. “Why should I be standing in line,
Just waiting for bread?
Once I built a railroad, I made it run,
Made it run against time.
Once I built a railroad, now it’s done---
Brother can you spare a dime?”

8. Poverty in America Unemployed and homeless in the cities
“Hoovervilles”
Makeshift shantytowns of tents and shacks built on public land or vacant lots

9. Men and teens traveled the country looking for work
“Rode the Rails”
Hobos

10. Farmers Farmers had land and equipment repossessed
“We had been poor, but we knew every night there was a bed there, and this was our room….But that all of a sudden changed. When you’re small, you can’t figure these things out. You know something's not right and you don’t like it , but you don’t … let that get you down. You sort of just continue to move.”
~Cesar Chavez
Family lost their( his fathers) home in California

11. Effect on Families
Some men rose in strength while others collapsed in despair, literal depression
Abandonment
Birthrates plummeted
Teens left home and “rode the rails”
Women worked at odd jobs
Children left school

12. Minorities Last hired, first fired
Unemployment for African Americans hovered around 50% by 1932—double the national average.
“The Negro was born in depression. It didn’t mean much to him…It only became official when it hit the white man.”
Mexican Americans competed with whites for farmhand jobs in the west

13. The Bonus Army
1932
WWI vets
Came to D.C. to get the bonus Congress had promised they would be given in 1945
20,000 marched on D.C.
Driven out
MacArthur, Eisenhower, and Patton
Goodbye Hoover

14. Bonus Marchers at the Capitol

15. U.S. Army vs. the Bonus Army
Can Hoover be re-elected after this?

17. Quick Write
Brainstorm one problem below and think about how you might have solved the problem back then.
Unemployment across the nation
Farmers debt
Mid-west Drought
Urban poverty

18. Migrant Mother By Dorothea Lange
Most famous picture of the Great Depression

20. What created the Dust Bowl?

21. Dust Bowl Great Plains experienced a drought in the 1930s.
Natural grasses had been ploughed up
Named the Dust Bowl
Dust clouds: displaced twice as much dirt as was scooped out of the Panama canal.
“The Dirty Thirties”
Lung Diseases and some go crazy

22. Leaving the Midwest
“Okies” =people moving out the Dust bowl of Oklahoma
Many travel to California

23. Tested by extreme hardship, this generation of Americans forged a character and will strong enough to overcome economic ruin and restore prosperity.