The Great Depression, 1929-1942: Cricket’s Sexy Slideshow

Is this the end of capitalism? Of democracy?

Take notes, or you will regret it

• Partner, glare at your partner

What should I take notes on?

• Great question!• Names of people, major events,

dates of events, key concepts, specific legislation (laws), vocabulary, statistics, slogans you see, other key quotes

Before the crash…

HOW BAD WAS THE CRASH?

Bad.

Funny cartoon from the New Yorker, 1929

Primary source: Witness account

• “Everybody is shouting. They are all trying to reach the glass booth where the clerks are. The boy at the quotation board is running scared. He can’t keep up with the speed of the way the stocks are dropping…A cigar stock at the time was selling for $115 a share. The market collapsed. I got a call from the company president. Could I loan him $200 million? I refused, because at the time I had to protect my own fences, including those of my closest friends. His $115 stock dropped to $2 and he jumped out the window of his Wall Street office. On Wall Street the people walked around like zombies. You saw people who yesterday rode around in Cadillacs lucky now to have car fare (for taxis). One of my friends said to me, If things keep on as they are, we’ll have to go begging. I asked, “Who from?’”

WALL STREET CRASH, OCTOBER 1929

Bank run, from It’s A Wonderful Life (1946)

Highest unemployment: 25%. In some other countries, it was 33%.

HOW DID IT AFFECT THE PEOPLE MOST?

• DAVID KENNEDY, economist: To grasp the degree of takes a great leap of the historical imagination. I mean, we can recite the usual numbers - that 75 percent of all stock market values evaporated, national income cut in half. Those are numbers that don't really mean very much.

• Where the Great Depression, I think, takes on its most human face is unemployment. By 1933, by the time Franklin Roosevelt's was first elected, 25 percent of the workforce was unemployed. One in every four able-bodied people seeking work could not find employment. Now even that number, large as it is, underestimates or understates the impact of the Depression, because in that era, the typical household had only one wage earner in it. So when we talk about one in four people being unemployed, we're really talking about one in four households in the country with no visible means of support, no reliable income. Today the typical household has two wage earners in it. So even at a 25 percent unemployment rate - God forbid that we should ever see it - today would not mean the same thing in human terms as it did in 1933. 

HOW DID LOCAL GOVERNMENT HELP THE PEOPLE?

• DAVID KENNEDY: One of the traditional functions of state and local governments in the pre-Depression era was to undertake what was called "poor relief.” But the crisis of the Depression occurred on such a scale…They all tried, and some of them made quite heroic efforts. But they simply didn't have the resources and the tax bases and so on to be able to do this effectively.

 Breadline

Hooverville

Hooverville in Central Park!

Irony

Unemployment line

Protest

Desperation

WHO DID IT HIT THE HARDEST?

• DAVID KENNEDY: The Depression fell hardest, you might say, on the most vulnerable people in the society, people with little savings, people with precarious employment. That meant African Americans. It meant farm workers, farm laborers of all kinds. It meant these vast immigrant communities that had arrived in the country essentially just about a generation earlier, around the turn of the century, mostly from Central and Southern and Eastern Europe. Many of those communities were tremendously affected, because their economic status was already so precarious. 

YOU think this is bad?

Sharecropper

Dust Bowl lasted from 1930-36

Causes of the Dust Bowl:

BAD LUCK: • a long droughtNOT UNDERSTANDING THE LAND• Midwestern soil is prone to erosion because there are few

trees to keep the wind blowing the dirt away. The natural grassland kept the soil in place, but once the farmers ploughed it up, it started to blow away.

BAD FARMING PRACTICES: • Farmers not practicing crop rotation (different crops can

replenish the soil if there is variety)• Not letting their fields rest periodically (lie fallow)• Before, if the land dried up, they would just buy new,

cheap land and abandon the old land

Dust storm

In the middle of a dust storm

desert

Okies: By 1950, four million people, or 25% of all persons born in Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, or

Missouri, had fled.

Dorothea Lange was a famous photographer to captured famous images of the Okies and helped

build sympathy

QUESTION: What impact did the Depression have on family life? 

• DAVID KENNEDY: The impact of the Depression is visible statistics that record the history of this era. The divorce rate went down because divorce, we think, is at least in part a function of women's economic opportunities, and there were fewer. 

• The marriage rate went down. Family formation is less likely to happen in a depressed economic circumstance. 

• The birth rate went down rather markedly in the early years of the Depression. And indeed it's the suppression of the birth rate in the 1930s that is partly responsible for the explosion in the birth rate after World War II, in the so-called "baby boom.

Hostility to Okies (Cricket tell story)

Woody Guthrie was a famous singer who was an Okie himself and traveled the country for decades, singing songs and entertaining the people. He helped build sympathy too.

So Long, It’s Been Good To Know You (Woody Guthrie)

Woody’s story (Crick talks)

Dough Re Mi (Woody Guthrie)

This Land Is Your Land, by Woody Guthrie

Hostility to government

HOW DID THE GOVERNMENT CHANGE DURING THIS TIME?

•  DAVID KENNEDY: • Calvin Coolidge once said that if the federal government went out of

business tomorrow, the average American wouldn't notice the fact for at least six months, which was a pretty true statement, actually, because in the 1920s and before, the federal government's role was essentially to deliver the mail and service the national debt, such as it was, and make a few payments to veterans. And that was about it. The historic role of the federal government, in the face of the kind of economic downturn that began to be visible in 1930 or so, was to do little or nothing.

•  That all changed with the Depression, both in the Hoover and in the Roosevelt administrations. One can get a sense of it if you look at federal spending. The federal budget in the 1920s was not quite $3 billion a year. Once FDR was elected, the New Deal budgets were typically $6 billion a year. So by that crude, crude measure, the role of government more than doubled in its incidence in American life.

• And the government started to take on all kinds of functions that it had never dreamt of performing before, not least of all public works projects on a huge scale and employment projects of various kinds. 

FDR in charge! Elected 1933

Hoover not pleased