1. 1930’s: The Bad Times

2. The Good Times End The 1920s had been a boom time for many Americans.
Americans had better jobs with good pay.
However, the good times of the 1920s hid some weaknesses in the United States economy.

3. Farms struggled
To help feed soldiers during WWI, farmers had borrowed money from banks to buy additional land and tools to produce more food.
After the war, farmers had a surplus (an increased amount) of crops.
As crop production increased, crop prices decreased and farmers had trouble paying their loans.

4. Industries struggled
Factory workers faced problems too. Just like the farmers, factories were producing more goods than they could sell.
With not enough buyers for their products, many factories began to lay off workers by the late 1920s.
Unemployment (the condition of being out of work) began to grow. Rising unemployment meant that many people could not afford to buy new products.
The mining industry struggled because oil replaced coal for fuel.
The lumber industry lost customers who switched to new building materials such as concrete.

5. Line Graph of the Unemployed

6. The Stock Market
During the 1920’s many Americans believed they could get rich by investing money in the stock market.
The stock market is a place where people buy and sell shares of businesses called stocks.
If more people want to buy than sell a certain stock, the price of the shares goes up. If more people want to sell than buy, the price of shares goes down.
The center of the stock market is the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street in New York, New York.

7. Stock Market Crash
The economic good times of the 1920s ended for many people with the stock market crash in 1929.
In September of 1929, some people decided to take their money out of the stock market. Share prices started to fall.
Many investors got nervous and decided to sell too -- causing prices to fall further.
On October 29, 1929, prices fell sharply or “crashed”. Nearly everyone lost money.
Some people lost everything they owned.
The crash of the stock market was the end of the Roaring Twenties and the beginning of a hard period called The Great Depression.

8. Line Graph of the Crash

9. Credit
One reason why the stock market crash had caused panic among investors was that many of them had bought their stocks on credit or borrowed money. They planned to pay back their loans to the banks after the price of stocks rose, but when the stock prices fell sharply, many people owed more money than their stocks were worth.
The credit problem hurt many banks. When investors and consumers could not pay back their loans, banks went broke and had to close.
People became frightened and rushed to take all of their money out before their bank closed. The banks did not have enough cash for every customer, so even more banks closed. Many people lost all their savings. Few people even had savings but almost everyone had debt.

10. The Great Depression
Recession is a downturn in the economy. Depression is a long and very bad recession.
The Great Depression last almost 10 years. The financial recovery of the Great Depression did not happen until 1954.
During a depression, industries do not grow, and many people are out of work.
Many people were unemployed and many people had lost all of their money after the stock market crash and bank closings.
People cut back on their spending and factories and businesses closed.
Poverty and hardship affected many Americans. By 1932, one in every four Americans (25%) had lost their jobs.
Many people could not afford house payments or rent, so many people were homeless. They faced poverty and hunger.
Fewer working people meant less tax money for local governments, so some schools had to cut teachers’ pay or close schools.

11. Unemployment Lines

12. Herbert Hoover
President Hoover tried to improve the economy by asking business leaders not to lay off workers or cut wages. He asked government leaders to create jobs by building roads and public buildings. He supported the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) in 1932 to lend money to banks and industries. However, the depression continued.
Many people blamed President Hoover. Shantytowns became known as “Hoovervilles.” Empty pockets turned inside out were called “Hoover flags.” Newspapers used by homeless people to keep warm were called “Hoover blankets.”

13. Surviving the Depression
Many people put off getting married or having children.
Charity groups struggled to help. Hungry people stood in breadlines for hours waiting for free soup and a piece of bread.

16. Porch of a sharecropper's cabin, Hale County, Alabama, Summer 1936
Porch of a sharecropper's cabin, Hale County, Alabama, Summer Photographer: Walker Evans. The marginal and oppresive economy of sharecropping largely collapsed during the great Depression.

17. Sharecropper house on dirt
Sharecropper house on dirt. Dirt log cabin on right is much older than attached frame cabin on left. Both have halfstones. Note dog run and flowering plants in tin can and tubs. This is typical of Negro dwellings. Log build visible. Through the back door is the corncrib. Near Olive Hill, North Carolina.

18. Squatter's Camp, Route 70, Arkansas, October, 1935
Squatter's Camp, Route 70, Arkansas, October, Photographer: Ben Shahn

19. Squatters in Mexican section in San Antonio, Texas
Squatters in Mexican section in San Antonio, Texas. House was built of scrap material in vacant lot in Mexican section of San Antonio, Texas. March Photographer: Russell Lee.

20. Unemployed workers in front of a shack with Christmas tree, East 12th Street, New York City. December Photographer: Russell Lee. Tattered communities of the homeless coalesced in and around every major city in the country.

21. Selling apples, Jacksonville, Texas. October, 1939
Selling apples, Jacksonville, Texas. October, Photographer: Russell Lee. Many tried apple-selling to avoid the shame of panhandling. In New York City, there were over 5,000 apple sellers on the street.
Young boys waiting in kitchen of city mission for soup which is given out nightly. Dubuque, Iowa. April Photographer: John Vachon. For millions, soup kitchens offered the only food they would eat.

22. Franklin Roosevelt
By the time of the Presidential Election of 1932, many people wanted a change in government.
In November 1932, Americans voted Hoover out of office. Franklin Roosevelt became President of the United States.
Roosevelt believed that to end the Great Depression, the federal government needed to take bold new action.

23. Roosevelt
Roosevelt was re-elected three more times, becoming the only U.S. president to serve 4 terms.
Many Americans did not know that Roosevelt suffered from polio and used a wheelchair or crutches.

24. Fireside Chats
President Roosevelt used the radio to win the confidence of Americans.
He spoke to the nation regularly by radio, explaining his goals and the actions he had taken to try to end the Great Depression.
These radio broadcasts came to be known as “fireside chats” because families across America gathered in their living rooms (near their fireplace) to listen to the President Roosevelt on the radio.

25. Fireside Chats

26. The New Deal
During the early days of Roosevelt’s presidency, Congress approved many of Roosevelt’s plans.
This time became known as The 100 Days.
Roosevelt’s plan to end the Great Depression became known as The New Deal.

27. The New Deal Programs The goal of the New Deal was to get
people back to work.
To provide jobs, the government created programs (which came to be known as “Alphabet Soup”:
AAA – Agricultural Adjustment Administration
CCC – Civilian Conservation Corps
WPA – Works Progress Administration
TVA – Tennessee Valley Authority
SSB – Social Security Board
FDIC – Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation

30. CCC
Civilian Conservation Corps hired single, unemployed men between the ages of The men were paid $30 a month, lived in camps, and worked in parks and forests.
The CCC employed about 3 million people.

31. TVA
The Tennessee Valley Authority was established by the federal government to supply electricity in the Tennessee River basin and nearby areas. It also oversaw control of floods. It still operates today.

32. WPA
The Works Progress Administration built buildings, bridges, and roads.
It also created theater, art, and writing for the time period.
It employed over 8 million people.

33. Social Security Act
The Social Security Act was one of the most important programs of the New Deal. Social Security provides monthly payments to the elderly, the disabled, and unemployed.
Social Security is still in effect today.
Every citizen of the United States is issued a social security card with his or her own identification number.

34. The Dust Bowl
Just as the New Deal Programs were beginning to help some farmers, a severe drought came to the farmlands of the Great Plains.
A drought is a long time period of no rain.
Dust storms blew across the plains; the sun was blocked out, the crops were torn out of the ground, and many animals and people died.
Many families left Oklahoma to start new lives in California, but life was hard there too. Many lived in squatter camps made up of tents and shacks. Some became migrant workers, moving from place to place to harvest crops.

37. The photograph that has become known as "Migrant Mother" is one of a series of photographs that Dorothea Lange made in February or March of 1936 in Nipomo, California. Lange was concluding a month's trip photographing migratory farm labor around the state for what was then the Resettlement Administration. In 1960, Lange gave this account of the experience:  I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean- to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it. (From: Popular Photography, Feb. 1960).
Dorothea Lange's "Migrant Mother," destitute in a pea picker's camp, because of the failure of the early pea crop. These people had just sold their tent in order to buy food. Most of the 2,500 people in this camp were destitute. By the end of the decade there were still 4 million migrants on the road.

39. Migrant pea pickers camp in the rain. California, February, 1936
Migrant pea pickers camp in the rain. California, February, Photographer: Dorothea Lange.

41. Making a Difference
During the Great Depression, many people helped those in need.
Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of President Roosevelt, traveled across the country to see if New Deal programs were improving conditions.
Dorothea Lange took photographs. The FSA used her photos to bring the public’s attention to the conditions of those people affected by the Depression.
Author John Steinbeck wrote about he hardships faced by migrant workers. (A migrant worker is a person who moves from place to place to harvest crops.) Steinbeck’s novel, The Grapes of Wrath, published in 1939, tells the story of a family that leaves the Dust Bowl of Oklahoma to find work in California.

42. Artists of the Great Depression Era

43. New Entertainment
Although New Deal programs helped many people, they did not end the Great Depression.
People looked for ways to forget their troubles and have fun without spending a lot of money.
The comic book with characters that included Superman and Batman were a new form of entertainment in the 1930s.
People played board games at home such as Monopoly.
People also went to the movies, and a new kind of movie theater appeared – the drive-in.
At the World’s Fair in 1939, people got a look at a new invention called television.

45. Success During the Great Depression
Margaret Mitchell won the Pulitzer Prize in 1937 for her novel Gone With the Wind.
Jesse Owens was an African American Olympic runner who won 4 gold medals in the 1936 Summer Games held in Berlin, Germany.

46. Global Depression
The Great Depression started in the United States, but it quickly spread to other parts of the world.
Millions of people around the world were unemployed.
Germany had not experienced the good times of the Roaring Twenties. It had huge debts to repay to other countries after losing WWI.
Inflation – a rapid rise in prices – was out of control in Germany, and German money became worthless.
In the next unit you will learn that these hardships led to another conflict in Europe – WWII.