1. The Great Depression
Aim: How did the underlying flaws of the 1920’s economy lead to the Great Depression?

2. Depression Causes Uneven distribution of the wealth
Agricultural Problems
Expansion of credit

3. Economy in 1929

4. The Stock Market Crashes
Commercial banks fail
Unemployment rises
Hawley-Smoot Tariff- raised prices on foreign imports.
The Depression goes global- The result of the Hawley-Smoot Tariff.

5. Effects of the Great Depression
On Farms
Falling crop prices.
Farmers lose their farms.
Tenant Farmers- Farmers who worked for bigger landowners rather than for themselves.
Drought in the Great Plains-
In Cities
- Production cutbacks in factories
By 1933, 24.9 percent unemployment rate.
Bread line- people lined up for handouts
Development of Hoovervilles.- shantytowns of tents and shacks built.
Minorities
African American sharecroppers were thrown off their land.
Americans urged repatriation of Mexican Americans.

6. The Dust Bowl Crops turned to dust=No food Homes Buried
Fields blown away
The Dust Bowl was the #1 weather crisis of the 20th century
The Dust Bowl

7. Hoovervilles
Referred to as “Hoovervilles” because of President Hoover’s lack of help during the depression.

8. Car for sale in New York

9. Families on the road, traveling west.

10. Leaving South Dakota for Oregon

11. Okies driving to California

12. Migrant families camped out

13. Cooking supper in a shanty, a temporary home

14. Farmers sometimes allowed migrant workers and families to camp while they were harvesting crops. This often led to “squatter camps” where people began living in thrown-together shacks.
Squatter’s shack

15. 18 year old mother at a migrant camp

16. A school for migrant worker’s kids

17. Christmas dinner for a migrant family

18. Breadlines became common, as people struggled to feed themselves and their families

19. Jobs were scarce as the unemployment levels soared

20. Migrant workers camp

21. Dorothea Lange’s photo, “Migrant Mother,” perhaps the most famous image from the Great Depression

22. In 1937, John Steinbeck published his novella “Of Mice and Men,” the tragic story of two migrant ranch workers, George and Lennie, during the Great Depression in California.