The Great Depression by Roshell Battle

The Great Depression of the 1930’s is one of the most notable depressions of American History and it lasted through much of the 1930’s. The unemployment rate reached 25% of all workers and 37% of all nonfarm workers during the peak of the depression.  (Smiley) The unemployment rate during the depression never fell below 14.3% until 1941. (EyeWitness to History) The depression impacted every country whose economy was built on a capitalist system. The Soviet Union was one of the only major world powers during this time that did not feel the effects of the failing capitalist system, because they were a communist society. (Jones 514) The Great Depression changed the political environment of America, the culture of Americans, and the extent to which the government controlled and participated in social works policies. The federal government increased its role in the economy as an effort to speed up the recovery of a stable and upwardly mobile American economy.  Two historical and lasting contributions of The Great Depression are the Social Security benefits for the elderly and the Unemployment Compensations for Americans who are involuntarily unemployed.  These two contributions were an attempt by the government to add money to the household income of Americans, which as a result would lead to an increase in consumer spending and an increase in business profits.  At the beginning of The Great Depression Herbert Clark Hoover was president, and he served as president from 1929 to 1933.  However, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected president in the 1932 presidential election and served as president during the remainder of The Great Depression.

Works Cited

EyeWitness to History. 2000. 16 02 2011 <http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/snprelief1.htm>.

Smiley, Gene. Library of Economics and Liberty. 2008. 16 02 2011 <http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/GreatDepression.html>.

Jones, Wood, Borstelmann, Tyler May, Ruiz. Created Equal A History of The United States . Upper Saddle River : Prentice Hall , 2011.

Connection Paragraph: Cause of the Great Depression by Callie Caylor

The cause of the Great Depression can be blamed on many things but it was mainly the uneven distribution of wealth and also the crashing of the stock market as we know it. The two main industries of this time were industry and agriculture. Whenever the two main sources of income stop, there is going to be a large hole in the surplus. This is what caused the great Depression. It started in 1929 and lasted for ten years. It was a huge setback for America, but as always, we bounced back.

Cause of the Great Depression by Jason Tomlinson

In September, 1931 a bank panic spreads across the United States. Over 800 banks were closed between September and October of 1929 to 1931. Unemployment reaches 13,000,000 in 1932. Two and a half years after the 1929 stock market crash the U.S. economy was operating at less than half its pre-crash volume. With many banks having their clients’ finances invested in the Stock Market, throughout the 1930’s over 9,000 banks failed led to an extreme decline in the exchange of money. As a result, many Americans lost their life’s saving with the fail of these banks. The surviving banks feared lending money which hampered businesses from being able to operate. With the loss of many American’s savings and the decline in business operations, spending dropped greatly. I believe these are the most paramount factors that precipitated the era known as the Great Depression.

Connection Paragraph: People of the Great Depression by Callie Caylor

Life during the Depression broke many families but some may say it was the best thing to ever happen. In the case of poor families, it put them on the same level as others and was kind of a fresh start. Certain people of this time period has a big effect on what was going on and their stories should be shared with the world. 

People of the Great Depression by Elizabeth Ford

The 1930’s were very tough to survive through Businessmen and city workers lost jobs, so badly to the point that there were families that went starving. Men would have to wait in lines for hours to get a piece of bread.  Soon the Jobless became the homeless. Children left home because their parents could not afford to feed another mouth. Schools went bankrupt and eventually closed. The children would have nowhere to go, so they would jump the railroads. By the early 1930's, riding the rails became an epidemic, even though it was dangerous and illegal. In 1932, the Southern Pacific Railroad threw half a million transients off their boxcars, many of them teenagers.

Uys, Errol Lincoln, "Riding the Rails: Teenagers on the Move During the Great Depression." Routledge, New York, 2003

Connection Paragraph: The New Deal by Roshell Battle

In the 1932 presidential election Franklin D. Roosevelt became president by defeating President Herbert Hoover. Roosevelt became president during a time when Americans needed to be reassured that the country would survive the turbulent times of The Great Depression. The New Deal consisted of several legislations and policies created by Roosevelt and his cabinet members to solve the social and economical problems of the depression. This group of legislation helped to usher America out of the Great Depression along with the help of the resilience and hard work of the American people.

The New Deal and its Impact by Amini Biringanine

After the stock market crash of 1929, the economy of the United States was hit very hard. This period is referred to as the Great Depression that last twelve years (1929-1941). During this time, the standard of life of the American people dropped considerably with over fifty percent of children living without adequate medical care, food or even shelter. Unemployment rate hit almost twenty-five percent and close to three quarter of a million farmers declared bankruptcy.

In 1933, Franklin Delano Roosevelt replaced Herbert Hoover as President of the United States and among the first steps he took was to get Congress to pass a number of measures to  launch a series of economic programs as a response to the Great Depression. They have come to be known as the New Deal with a focus on what some historians have referred to as the “3 Rs” (Relief, Recovery and Reform).

This 1933 cartoon depicts Roosevelt exhausting
Congress with his many reform policies.

The New Deal consisted of measures aiming at bringing some form of relief to the millions of Americans who had lost their jobs to the crisis and the poor by providing programs such as the Social Security Act of 1935 to assist the handicapped and the elderly or the Works Progress Administration (1935) to provide work to unskilled men, women and artists. Another goal of the New Deal was to launch programs to create jobs and try to bring the economy back to its feet at least to the level prior to the Great Depression. For this purpose, many projects were launched such as the Tennessee Valley Authority which was a project to build a dam in order to produce electricity and prevent floods in the Tennessee Valley, or the Civil Work Administration of 1933 that provided temporary jobs to millions of unemployed.

Unemployed workers sit on a street in a 1936
workers sit on a street in a 1936 photograph by Dorothea Lange.

Finally, the New Deal also aimed at reforming the economic system to prevent another depression to ever happen again. For that, the US Government established different agencies for that purpose among others the Federal Deposit Insurance Company which insured bank deposits and therefore helped restore the confidence in banks that people had lost after the stock market crash of 1929. Another agency was the National Labor Relations Board which goal was to act as the mediator between the management and the workers in resolving matters that arose between them.

All these programs and many others had an impact on the American people depending on the category to which each person belonged to. A farmer was affected by the Farm Security Administration which was created to help farmers with economic and educational programs or by the Federal Crop Insurance Corporation which helped compensate loss of revenue or production for the farmers.

For those in the finance field, the US Government created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to lend large amounts of money to big companies, and the Security Exchange Commission to ensure that the companies fully disclosed financial information to allow investors to make advised decisions when they want to purchase stocks.

For the unskilled men, many projects were launched to allow them to get a job, such as the construction of the Empire State building in New York or the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, California.

One particular category, the African-American, suffered terribly of the Great Depression. Because of the segregation and racism that was rampant in the country, and especially in the South, many of them did not have access to the programs the New Deal had just created such as the Social Security.

In definitive, the New Deal had a very considerable impact on the American people because it changed the relationship between the people and their government. As the Federal Government’s power increased with the different reforms and regulations passed so did the American people’s expectation toward that same government. At one level or another, everyone was affected in some way, and so were businesses which had to face regulations and restrictions in the way of conducting business. The New Deal also brought some negative impact such as pollution.