1. Practice test questions
13.2 PP and
Practice test questions

2. Economic Hardship Shakes the Cities
The stock market crash signaled the end of boom times and the beginning of hard times. As investors mourned their losses, Americans watched the economy stagger into the Great Depression. In the cities and on the farms, desperate poverty gripped the nation. Even after prosperity returned, those who lived through the crisis would remember the pain and worries of the depression. Tested by extreme hardship, this generation of Americans forged a character and will strong enough to overcome economic ruin and restore prosperity.

3. Economic Hardship Shakes the Cities
1. Unemployment
: 3.7%
1933: 24.9%
Effect: hunger and homelessness
Factory workers that kept their jobs would take pay cuts; sometimes becoming unemployable when they could not take care of their appearance

4. Why do you think this unemployment office required guarding?
Economic Hardship Shakes the Cities
Unemployed men gathered outside a busy New York City unemployment office during the 1930s. New York police officers stood guard.
Draw Conclusions/Shoulder Partner:
Why do you think this unemployment office required guarding?

5. Economic Hardship Shakes the Cities
Analyze Graphs: How many millions of people lost their jobs between 1928 and 1933? During which years did unemployment increase the most?

6. Rural America Struggles with Poverty
In cities and towns across the nation, Americans faced a terrible plight. The numbers of the unemployed, homeless, and hopeless increased like a casualty list in some great war. In rural America, people fared no better. In fact, sometimes their condition was even worse. Farmers had been suffering even before the Great Depression. Falling commodity prices and accumulating debt had made it a struggle for farmers to keep their heads above water. Many failed to stay afloat and sank so deep that they lost their farms.

7. Families lost their farms to banks The Dust Bowl
Rural America Struggles with Poverty
Crop Prices Fall
Families lost their farms to banks
The Dust Bowl
Effect: Many families were forced to migrate (2.5 million people left the Plains states)

8. Draw Conclusions: Why did commodity prices fall after 1919, even though the Great Depression was years away? NOTE: Farmers were already suffering BEFORE the “Great Depression”.

9. Dairy farmers poured out their milk as part of a 1932 protest.
Rural America Struggles with Poverty
Dairy farmers poured out their milk as part of a 1932 protest.
Infer/Shoulder Partner:
What can you infer about the price farmers received for milk in 1932?

10. Analyze Maps:
Which two states appear to have been hardest hit by erosion?
What is unusual about California's location compared to other destinations?

11. Combined with the severe drought, how did the planting of wheat lead to the loss of topsoil and the dust storms?

12. Dust Bowl Questions
1. What features of land and climate make the Great Plains a good farming region?
Rich soil, ample growing season and flat land
2. What features of land and climate make the Great Plains a poor farming region?
Frequent droughts and strong windstorms
What caused the black blizzards of the 1930s?
-- drought and heavy winds that blew away topsoil exposed by poor farming practices
How did farmers destroy the regions natural protection against severe weather?
-- farmers destroyed the sod, which had a complex root system that held in topsoil and prevented it from eroding

13. Hard Times Hit Most Americans
One of the ironies of the depression was the word itself. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, an economic slump was called a “panic” or a “crisis.” President Hoover used the word depression to describe the state of affairs because he thought it sounded less severe than the other terms. But before long, Hoover’s “depression” gave way to the “Depression” and then the “Great Depression.” The term described not only a state of mind, but also an economic reality. It showed a despondent America, filled with people overwhelmed by seemingly inescapable poverty. Not only did the depression make victims of the men and women who lost jobs, it also was an economic and emotional crisis that profoundly affected U.S. society.

14. Hard Times Hit Most Americans
Wealthy individuals often had to accept menial (low=paying) jobs to make a living.
After losing his wealth in the stock market crash, former millionaire Fred Bell sold apples on a street corner.

15. Cause and Effect: The impact of poverty on Americans
Savings lost due to bank failures
Homelessness, Hoovervilles, migration, health problems, social problems, discrimination
unemployment
Farms lost because of economic problems and natural disasters

16. “last to be hired and first to be fired” 3. Mexican Americans
Hard Times Hit Most Americans
1. Family Life
Constant fear of losing your job, children quit school, many took odd jobs
2. African Americans
“last to be hired and first to be fired”
3. Mexican Americans
Increased competition for job plus discrimination
Many white Americans wanted immigrants and their children to be returned to their home countries

17. Poverty Strains Society
“No one has starved” –President Hoover
Some did starve and thousands were going hungry
Children suffered most
Poor diet & inadequate healthcare
Stresses on Families
Crowded living conditions
Unemployed men ashamed
Women feared how they would feed their families if husbands lost jobs
Common to fire married women so men could have jobs
Factory workers, teachers, etc.
Women found jobs in service industries (cleaning, typing, nursing all considered ‘women’s work’.)

18. Poverty Strains Society
Discrimination Increases
Americans in competition with each other for jobs
African-Americans, Hispanics and Asian- Americans suffered and were only offered low paying jobs
Black unemployment = 56% in 1932

19. 19. What does it mean to say that factory workers sometimes went “from unemployed to unemployable”?
1. They started off wanting to work but changed their minds.
2. They took on a ragged appearance that kept employers from hiring them.
3. They physically broke down and were no longer able to handle difficult work.
4. They rejected the reduced hours and shortened workweeks offered by their employers.
2. They took on a ragged appearance that kept
employers from hiring them.

20. 18. Which region experienced the most severe effects of the Dust Bowl?
1. the Midwest
2. the Pacific Coast
3. the southern Great Plains
4. the Appalachian Highlands
3. the southern Great Plains

21. Why did some Americans push for Mexican American and Asian American repatriation?
1. Housing in the Southwest was extremely limited.
2. Some white people wanted to eliminate minority competition for jobs.
3. Mexican Americans and Asian Americans mostly came from Oklahoma, so they were outsiders in the Southwest.
4. Mexican Americans and Asian Americans were mostly sharecroppers who were thrown off the land they had been farming
2. Some white people wanted to eliminate
minority competition for jobs.