The Great Depression
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" was a time of unprecedented misery. After the 1929 stock market
crash, America (and many other countries) endured long, trying years of economic downturn,
lost fortunes 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 percent of the American
work force was unemployed. Without means of transportation, people had to walk miles just to
see their families. Living in squatters’ 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 shantytowns. 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 on the Westside Parkway along the
Hudson, an artist (like Russian emigre Raphael Soyer) could walk to the water's edge, where he
could draw 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.
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 book 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.
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.
The Great Depression caused many suicides, massive unemployment, disrupted lives and
destroyed fortunes. What caused this calamity? 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 the 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.
Headlines from The New York Times in 1929 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, like 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.