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The Great Depression

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Title: The Great Depression


1
The Great Depression
  • Chapter 25

2
I. The Coming of the Great Depression
  • The Great Crash
  • Between May 1928 and September of 1929 the
    average price of stocks increased over 40 percent
  • October 21 and October 23 alarming declines in
    stock prices

3
The Great Crash Continued
  • October 29, 1929 Black Tuesday
  • In the months that followed, the market would
    continue to decline

4
Causes of the Depression
  • Most historically attributes of the Great
    Depression is that it was so severe and lasted so
    long question then remains, why was it such a
    bad one?
  • Lack of diversification in the American economy

5
Causes of the Depression Continued
  • Maldistribution of purchasing power and the
    weakness in consumer demand
  • as industrial and agricultural production
    increased, the proportion of profits going to
    farmers, workers and other potential consumers
    was too small to create and adequate market for
    the goods the economy was producing this lead to
    demand not being able to keep up with supply aka
    a surplus!
  • During the 1920s, as long as corporations had
    continued to expand their capital facilities, the
    economy had flourished

6
Causes of the Depression Continued
  • Poor Credit Structure of the Economy
  • farmers deeply in debt
  • small banks in trouble
  • big banks in trouble, too

7
Causes of the Depression Continued
  • Decrease in International Trade
  • International debt structure

8
Thus Black Tuesday was not the cause of the
Great Depression, but
9
The Progress of the Great Depression
  • Crisis would steadily worsen over the next three
    years
  • Collapse of much of banking system would follow
    the stock market crash
  • Role of the Federal Reserve if they acted more
    responsibly, a severe depression might have been
    avoided

10
II. The American People in Hard Times
  • Unemployment and Relief
  • Midwest and Northeast rocked with unemployment
  • Most Americans had been trained to believe that
    every individual was responsible for his or her
    own fate
  • men wandered the streets

11
Unemployment and Relief Continued
  • Limited govt and private assistance most govt
    officials felt that any welfare system would
    undermine the moral fiber of the country
  • Strange city scenery
  • Farm income down 60 between 1929 1932

12
African Americans and the Depression
  • 1930 Atlanta Black Shirts organization adopts the
    slogan No Jobs for Ns Until Every White
    Man Has a Job!
  • Traditional patters of Segregation and
    disfranchisement survived the Depression largely
    unchallenged
  • NAACP began to work diligently to win a position
    for blacks within the emerging labor movement

13
Mexican Americans in Depression America
  • 1930s there were approximately 2 million Latinos
    in the United States
  • similar to blacks in that whites soon demanded
    menial jobs previously held by Latinos

14
Asian Americans in Hard Times
  • even in California, where the largest Japanese /
    Chinese American populations resided even well
    educated Asians had trouble moving into
    mainstream professions
  • like Blacks and Hispanics
  • Influx of whites from the Great Plains meant
    general bad news for all minorities in California

15
Women and the Workplace in the Great Depression
  • Depression served to strengthen the widespread
    belief that a womans place was in the home

16
Women and the Workplace in the Great Depression
Cont
  • ½ of all black working women lost their jobs in
    the 1930s
  • But, at the end of the 1930s 38 of all black
    women were employed compared with 24 of all
    white women

17
Depression Families
  • middle class families accustomed to steady growth
    during the 1920s saw that replaced with
    unemployment and uncertainty
  • consumer patterns developed during the 1920s
    retreated
  • Average household population grows
  • although divorce rate decreased (because of
    cost)-

18
III. The Depression and American Culture
  • Depression Values
  • BUT in the end, the Depression did very little to
    erode the success ethic

19
Artists and Intellectuals in the Great Depression
  • focus of a collective social response to social
    circumstances
  • Photographers hired by Federal Farm Security
    Administration to take documentary photos
  • Writers and playwrights attempted to capture
    social injustice taking place

20
Radio
  • Most popular forms of mass entertainment were
    those that served as a distraction to the harsh
    reality taking place
  • Soap Operas (sponsored by soap)

21
Radio Continued
  • Radio programs broadcast live before audiences
    in theatres and studios
  • Some of the most dramatic moments of the 1930s
    were a result of radio coverage of celebrated
    events
  • Encouraged families and individuals to center
    their lives around the more around the home than
    they had in the past

22
The Movies
  • one would think individuals would forgo spending
    money on movie tickets in the middle of a
    Depression, but by the mid 1930s Americans were
    still watching movies in large numbers
  • Movies getting better

23
The Popular Front and Left
  • Popular Front coalition of antifascist groups
    the most important of which was The American
    Communist Party
  • claimed that the government was controlled by
    business interests
  • Communism is twentieth-century Americanism
  • helped mobilize writers, artists and
    intellectuals behind a pattern of social
    criticism (great majority of writers had no
    connection to Communist party)
  • The Lincoln Brigade, consisting of 3,000
    volunteer soldiers goes to Spain to fight against
    Franco (Ernest Hemmingway, For Whom the Bell
    Tolls)
  • Social Issues

24
The Popular Front and Left
  • ACP was not the open, patriotic organization it
    tried to appear as took its orders from
    Comintern in Russia
  • New Deal would embrace policies that would
    challenge capitalist norms

25
IV. The Ordeal of Herbert Hoover
  • The Hoover Program
  • When crisis first hit, Hoovers response was to
    attempt to restore confidence in the economy
  • But mid 1931 economic conditions had deteriorated
    so much that the structure of voluntary
    cooperation had collapsed and Hoover could not
    stop them

26
The Hoover Program Continued
  • Hoover made weak attempts to use government
    spending as a tool for fighting the Depression
  • Before the crash, Hoover had begun to construct a
    program to assist the troubled agricultural
    economy.
  • 1929 Agricultural Marketing Act first time a
    govt bureaucracy would be established to help
    farmers maintain prices
  • Hawley-Smoot Tariff of 1930
  • Neither helped farmers sufficiently

27
A Deepening Crisis
  • 1930 Democrats win control of the House
  • Many Americans feel the President is personally
    responsible for crisis
  • Shantytowns
  • May 1931 largest bank in Austria collapses and
    panic spreads throughout Europe and into the US
    when
  • Hoover comes up with a sound proposal to allow
    countries having to pay reparations one year
    moratorium on payments

28
A Deepening Crisis Continued
  • January 1932 Reconstruction Finance Corporation
    (RFC)
  • government agency whose purpose was to provide
    federal loans to troubled banks, railroads, and
    other businesses
  • made funds available to local governments to
    support public works projects and assist in
    relief efforts

29
Popular Protest
  • During the early years of the Depression, most
    Americans were too stunned or too confused to
    raise many effective protests but by mid 1932,
    radical and dissident voices were becoming loud
    and pervasive
  • Farmers unrest

30
Popular Protest Continued
  • Most celebrated protest came from American
    Veterans
  • Clearing the Bonus Marchers
  • Hoover now confirmed as aloof and out of touch
    with American public

31
The Election of 1932
  • Republicans dutifully renominate Hoover to head
    of Republican Party
  • Democrats nominate the governor of New York,
    Franklin Delano Roosevelt
  • Winning the election
  • Differences in candidates
  • Roosevelt wins in a Landslide receives 57 of
    the popular vote and won every state but five
  • Democrats also take control

32
The Interregnum
  • In February, just a month before the
    inauguration a new crisis developed when the
    American banking system began to collapse
  • Harding continued to try to extract a promise
    from Hoover to maintain current budget system
  • March 4, 1933 the Day Roosevelt took office
    Hoover was convinced the country was heading to
    ruin, Roosevelt was beaming and buoyant
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