Great Depression
January 18, 2012, Submitted by: Ken Tweet
I discovered this succinct brief summary/story of the Great Depression and thought you may be interested to read it, especially given today’s very uncertain times. Things were quite different then (attitudes, respect, lack of motor travel, infrastructure, gov’t handouts) and one wonders how a modern day depression would play out.
Preface
It was a time of utter despair, nearly unimaginable today. The memory of those years still lives in the minds of people who experienced unemployment, insufficient food, homelessness and lost family wealth.
For those born after World War II, it is inconceivable that such a time ever existed in America. In the days before Interstates connected the country, people were forced to travel west in search of a better life.
Destitute mothers had few, if any, options to provide for their children. Fathers throughout the country were forced to leave home to look for work elsewhere.
The Great Depression
The “Great Depression” was a time of unprecedented despair. After the 1929 stock market crash, America (and many other countries) endured long, trying years of economic downturn, lost fortunes (the link is a picture of the stock exchange floor just after the crash), and personal tragedies.
People were uprooted when out-of-work families packed up everything they owned and moved to California. By 1932, the worst year of the depression, nearly 25% of the American work force was unemployed. Without means of transportation, people had to walk miles just to see their families. Living in squatter’s camps (called “Hoovervilles”), dislocated families tried to stay together.
In other parts of the country, men left their families “at home” while they went to the industrial north to find work. Their “bachelor cabins” were nothing more than shanty towns. But there was also “No Work” for people in the north. The bustling docks of New York City were quiet.
Before the days of the FDR along the East River, and the Westside Parkway along the Hudson, an artist could walk to the water’s edge where he drew images of human hopelessness. Employment agencies in New York City were inundated with applications from well-dressed, out-of-work people. The “land of plenty” had become the land of hard times.
Starving People
As if the economic disaster were not enough, the American Midwest was hit with unprecedented drought. Food supplies were diminished as formerly fertile fields became dust bowls. And in the south, once-productive cotton fields were transformed into eroded wastelands.
People in America were starving. Oral histories, recorded by the Library of Congress, relate tales of despondent people. Some picked dandelion greens to use as food. Others had to relocate, like 76-year-old Perry Rupert and Alvin Sharpe of North Carolina.
By 1936, tenant farmers and their families had become homeless wanderers. Farmers that had worked their own land were also forced to “evacuate.” People moving west had little to go on but hope for a better future. John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath had its roots in real-life America. Sometimes the struggle to retain one’s dignity was almost more than a human being could manage.
Private parties offered cheap (or free) food. People stood in “bread lines” which stretched many blocks, only to be disappointed by the time it was “their turn.” Food, in increasingly short supplies, was already gone. These were desperate times.
Before he became President, Herbert Hoover was the “United States Food Administrator.” Although he tried to distribute food throughout the country, as he had provided wheat to America’s allies during World War I, Hoover could not do his job the way he wanted to do it. There simply wasn’t enough to go around.
Color Photos of the Great Depression
Although most photos depicting the Great Depression are black-and-white, America’s Library of Congress has a series of color transparencies which have been digitized. Photographers employed by the Farm Security Administration (also known as the FSA, which later merged with the Office of War Information) took the pictures between 1939 and 1943.
Providing a glimpse into the lives of people enduring hardship, while sharing family love, these amazing FSA pictures are part of an exhibit which the Library calls “Bound for Glory: America in Color.” Take a look at some of the exhibit’s 70 featured photos (and learn the stories behind the pictures):
Bound for Glory: America in Color 1939-43
Causes of the Great Depression
The Great Depression caused many suicides, massive unemployment, disrupted lives, and destroyed fortunes. But what caused the Great Depression? Why were so many people out of work? Why were thousands of families forced to uproot and migrate to places like California? Did the stock market crash – of October 24, 1929 – itself cause the ” run on banks” a few years later? And – significantly – why did the Great Depression last so long?
Knowledgeable people have debated these issues ever since the Great Depression. Some economists conclude that wild stock market speculation contributed to the nightmare. (1929 headlines, from The New York Times, show economists were seriously debating the strength of the market in the days before the crash.)
President Hoover thought the depression was caused by the disruptions of World War I, the poor structure of American banks, and the failure of Congress to act on many of his proposals. Still others blamed Hoover himself, and the policies of his administration.
At the time, people throughout the world cared more about finding ways to survive than they cared about finding reasons for the cause of the economic decline. Songs of the day, (like 1932′s Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?) reflect anguish but other tunes (All of Me and On the Sunny Side of the Street) demonstrate human resiliency.
Government intervention (introduced by Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal”) helped, but America remained in the grip of the Great Depression until 1941. Not until World War II, when millions of men were drafted and millions of women went to work in factories to support the war effort, did the United States emerge from its darkest economic downturn.
Credit author: Carole D. Bos, J.D.
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Corporations figured out long ago the value of making money in war. So instead of having a really big war once in a while, lets have a lot of small ones to perpetuate their good fortune…sick puppy’s. Back then, 60% of the benefits realized from the country’s growth ended up back in the people’s hands with 10% going to corporations. Today, 60% goes to corporations and only 10% to the people. So if anyone at any time in the future wants to figure out what went wrong this time around, look no further.
If one follows the timeline of the ’30′s depression you will find that the same situation the mirrors the situation today.
The ’29 wall street crash precipitated the eventual default of the United Kingdom.
Over leveraging and sovereign debt………Sound familiar?
The world’s population in 1930 was 2 billion. 2012 population is 7 billion+
It’s easy to imagine an impact of a full blown world depression will have on the world’s population.
I see a corollary in the wrecking of that cruise ship in Italy. When the S.H.T.F. it will be every man for himself.
The whopping differences now in comparison to the 1930′s is the speed at which a second great depression would come on. Trading today is done within an electronic instance, while in the 1930′s there was much delay before something took hold. These stock breakers were put in because of what happened back in the 1980′s and is even more so in need today. Try to imagine an all out war in the Middle East or in which the Saudi oil fields are hit and will be unable to pump out oil for months or years. The stocks would lose about 30% of their value in the first day and the stock breakers would kick in. Possibly the next day or the next week the stock market would not even open. If it did it would lose another 30% and then close again. Without these breakers the stock market with its flash reactions could lose 90% or more in one day.
How would the next great depression play out in regards to people? Badly, real badly. As Beano above says there are 3 and 1/2 times more people now than back then. Already people have troubles feeding the world, then it gets a lot worse. People are not the same either. Back in the 1930′s there was still horse driven ice wagons, not everyone had motor vechicles to get around, many didn’t have telephones or radios, in short the 30′s were not too far removed from the primitive level of the 19th. century.
Now people are use to the modern era, and the modern food delivery system. People back in the 30′s could still rely on farming in areas that had not been struck by drought. “Grapes of Wrath” movie with Henry Fonda in 1940 was about those fleeing the dust bowl to California in which even confronted with prejudice and other problems still had a viable place to flee to. Now California is worse off than most other states and fleeing is not really an option anymore, maybe Texas at first. The great depression of 2012, or 2014, or whenever would be awful. People cannot go back to almost a 19th century level of living from 21st century stage of life without dire consequences.
People completely depend on their life now to live. Most people have no concept of cooking, their idea of home cooking is putting together a meal with some boxed up food that has the word KIT on it and they are now chefs. God, the food industry has ways of manipulating the truly stupid into the false perception that they are actually HOME COOKING. Most people would not have a clue how to grow a garden if the water did not come out of the faucet. Most people are not even driven enough to put away a week’s worth of food, just in case. “After all”, the supermarkets will always be there and open for business, and they can always use their credit cards to get anything they ever need.
People are so far removed from the basic necessary skills of non-modern era survival that they would panic and become so horrorified if what they are so dependant on disappeared that many would fall into a sub-civilized person state. You absolutely don’t want to see what happens to someone that regresses back to pre-civilized level. The higher and more removed someone is from the basic survival levels and more dependent someone is on remaining that much removed fars a lot harder and farther when they are thrust back into a primitive state of living.
This is why those that are already living in poverty and lack of the modern era will fare better if there is a great depression. Not to say that they won’t too feel horrible effects, but they can at least mentally handle it better. Those that never had the modern conveniences cannot truly feel the loss of them when they are taken away from the world. Take away everything from the “Jetsons” cartoon type needs of the common person that is dependent and totally use to and totally expects it to live, and you have some extremely critical situations developing, much worse than the first depression.
24 hours to Meltdown
Seen this?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pD8viQ_DhS4
funny, is this advocating massive government spending (war funding, g.i. bill) as way to get out of depression?
Hopefully not. It is what ultimately got us out of the Great Depression though. Go figure. In modern times, it seems ‘they’ prefer the ongoing ‘war on terror’ to maintain their war budgets. Except it’s bankrupting us even further.
We are currently in the worst recession since Oct. 1929. This is not news to anybody reading this post. In writing this I feel I am preaching to the choir. I am not saying something that has not been said before or…You thought of that already.
The U.S. has averaged one recession to varying degrees on average once every 10 years since the Great Depression of 1929. Many were due to subtle things like the bursting of the Tech bubble in the late 1990s. The Flash Crash just a few years ago where some wildly inaccurate data caused a run on the markets.
Other recessions were predictable and one could see them coming a long time ago like the recession of 2008. In the U.S. there were very lax rules about qualifying people for loans on big ticket items. If a buyer with bad credit was turned down, they would go to another bank and probably repeat this cycle until a bank said yes. A person’s home is the ultimate Big ticket item.
The Great Depression was caused by over speculation on people’s farms in the Midwest. Farming practices of the day combined with an extended drought and a much larger percentage of the U.S. population being involved in agriculture created the perfect storm for economic collapse. The U.S. Central Bank contracted and tightened money lending standards and this recession lasted until WW 2 when we actually contributed much war material to Great Britain for several years prior to the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
Many people who study Economics will end up studying the Great Depression of 1929. Our current Chairman of the Fed happened to do his Masters Thesis on it. (Ben Bernanke) Could it happen again? Apparently, it already has. What are we going to do about it? Look around you and learn: (There was a new branch of government created in the aftermath of the Dust Bowl called the U.S. Soil Service. They exist to teach soil conservation practices to farmers as a resource. Soil Science is known derisively as “Dirt 101″)
Frugality is once again a virtue. Life becomes simpler because it is cheaper that way. As many leave public school, many are choosing to go into fields which will make money or are practical as opposed to fine arts or aesthetic majors. (Engineering, Medicine, Economics or Business, software engineering etc.)
For most of us, It is too late to return to school but there are several good reads on the causes of the latest Economic downturn: The Big Short and Boomerang by Michael Lewis ( A former Bond Trader and has a graduate degree in Economics he is the author of Moneyball. His writing style is a fun read and not too technical.)
One may also want to listen to News from the BBC as well. It is interesting that they will often report on trends that are ignored by our american press. (BBC was the news source that pointed out that the first people who lit themselves on fire in the streets of Cairo and Tunis were food vendors. They immolated themselves within a week of the doubling of the price of staple food items like rice, corn, beans and lentils)
Prior to this last recession, I made decision to relocate from California to another state where my wife and I could both work. I have an undergraduate degree in Economics but I have a Junior-college degree in Nursing. I did my career transition during an economic downturn in the early 1990s. I was jobless with minimal skills during the late 1970s (That economic condition was refered to as Stagflation: high inflation combined with stagnant economic growth…IT SUCKED!)
Once you have been jobless, you never want to go back there again. The current recession is marked by a high number of over-educated people looking for work. I hope people will consider doing whatever it takes to make money. Although I majored in Economics, I still empty trash and wipe patient’s backsides during my day at work. If you are too proud or educated to do that, then get off my unit. If you are willing to pitch in, I could sure use the help. The company I work for is hiring people WILLING TO WORK. Most hospitals are still hiring those types of people.
I’d say stagflation is what’s happening now, its just that they measure inflation and growth differently now than they did in the ’70s.