DEPRESSION

The Great Depression: 

I. Intro

A.        Origins:

1. Stock market speculation/The Great Crash

                                    Black Tuesday: October 29, 1929

                                                Stock value: 87 to 55 billion

                        2. Farm Depression

                        3. Worldwide depression

                        4. Bad Policy: Hawley-Smoot Tariff

           

And then the dispossessed were drawn west — from Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico; from Nevada and Arkansas, families, tribes, dusted out, tractored out. Car-loads, caravans, homeless and hungry; twenty thousand and fifty thousand and a hundred thousand and two hundred thousand. They streamed over the mountains, hungry and restless — restless as ants, scurrying to find work to do — to lift, to push, to pull, to pick, to cut — anything, any burden to bear, for food. The kids are hungry. We got no place to live. Like ants scurrying for work, for food, and most of all for land.

John Steinbeck. The Grapes of Wrath, 1939

B. Impact of the Depression:

            1) Morally

                        2) Economically         

3) Emotionally

II. What Did it do to people?

A)   Work:

            B)   Savings:

            C)   Housing:

            D)   Eating:

III. How did people deal with it?

A. BY MAKING FEWER PEOPLE:

B. BY HELPING OUT:

C. BY MOVING:

1. Okies

2. African-American migration

                        3. Mexican-American

D. PSYCHOLOGICALLY:

                        1. Suicide:

                        2. Nervous breakdowns:

                        3. Blaming themselves           

                        4.  Blaming others:

                                    a) Hoover and other politicians:

                                    b) business interests:

                                    c) women:

                                    d) Mexican-Americans:

                                    e) blacks:

HERE’S A DEEP QUESTION TO PONDER:

Does poverty cause discrimination, discrimination cause poverty, or is there no relationship between the two?

IV. No Single Great Depression Experience:

            1. very wealthy

            2. Pre-Depression Poor:        

            3. Middle-class/young middle class:

V. Why Important?