THE GREAT DEPRESSION

I.                    The Great Depression:

A. Origins:

1.                  U.S. Business Fundamentally Flawed

a.       Overproduction/underconsumption

b.      Stock market speculation               

                                    c. Run on the Banks     

                        2. Farm Depression/The Dust Bowl

                       3. Worldwide depression

                       4. Bad Policy:

a. Hawley-Smoot Tariff

b. Agricultural Marketing Act:

            c. National Credit Corporation:

d. Reconstruction Finance Corporation:

e. Presidential Organization for

Unemployment Relief (POUR)

f. Bonus March

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:

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

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) African-Americans:

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?