Growing Up Russell Baker The Great Depression

Imagine this. You wake up one morning in the year 1929, in your luxurious, pricey mansion. You then make your way downstairs to eat that nice big breakfast. Then you kiss your family good bye and head off to your fancy job. You come home that evening and suddenly you’re flat broke. Meaning all your money and life’s savings vanished. Unreal right? Well it was real for hundreds of families on October 29, 1929. The day the stock market crashed and when America’s confidence was challenged greatly.

Badger, Anthony J. .The New Deal: The Depression Years, 1933- 1940. 1989. Reprint. Chicago : Ivan R. Dee, 2002. Print.

When World War I ended on November 11, 1918, President Warren G. Harding proposed “a return to normalcy”. This promised a return of the United States prewar mentality, without the thought of war contaminating the minds of the American people. With this in mind, the 1920s began- but Americans in the 1930s witnessed dramatic changes in their lives from the 1920s. The 1920s was a period of prosperity and economic success, while the 1930s was a time of economic downfall. The economy fluctuated between times of great prosperity and times of undoubtable depression. Following these economic downturns was a period of rigorous attempts to recover from severe economic loss. It did not take long for this economic hardship to lead to some more

The Great Depression was a very influential era in American history, affecting many future generations. One of the most prevalent impacts it had on society was the extreme poverty that swept across the nation, affecting both people in cities and in the country. The main cause for this poverty was the mass loss of jobs among the middle class. Millions lost their jobs and consequently their homes. Families lived out of tents and cars in shanty towns or Hoovervilles. In these camps, many people didn’t have their basic human needs met, children and adults alike starved. They lived in clothes that were caked in dirt and tattered, too small for growing children and too cold for the frail elderly. Government relief programs attempted to help but offered little support to the now impoverished families of the millions that lost everything.

“Growing up in a time when all you worry about is if your family will be able to make it through to the next day is definitely a very scary and difficult time to live in” (Vonder Haar). My great-grandpa had this to say to my grandpa about growing up during the great depression. For many people in America from the 1930s to 1940s, life was a constant struggle. The people living in the Midwest, especially St. Louis, knew much too well how difficult it was to live through the great depression. When great-great grandpa first came to St. Louis from Germany he purchased a farm. From that point on, my family struggled to maintain the farm that would still exist today. Many people were affected by the great depression. Throughout the time period before

During the 1920’s, America was a prosperous nation going through the “Big Boom” and loving every second of it. However, this fortune didn’t last long, because with the 1930’s came a period of serious economic recession, a period called the Great Depression. By 1933, a quarter of the nation’s workers (about 40 million) were without jobs. The weekly income rate dropped from $24.76 per week in 1929 to $16.65 per week in 1933 (McElvaine, 8). After President Hoover failed to rectify the recession situation, Franklin D. Roosevelt began his term with the hopeful New Deal. In two installments, Roosevelt hoped to relieve short term suffering with the first, and redistribution of money amongst the poor with the second. Throughout these years of the

The 1920’s and 1930’s represented a time of change for our country. Just as times began to pick up after the Great War, through technological advances, the nation collapsed. People began spending out of control, investing in stocks, and moving to the city. The stock market crashed in 1929, the effect was that many people lost their savings, businesses closed, and jobs were lost. This horrendous period is known as the Great Depression. Once again things began to look up as Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected for president and created the New Deal. This era reflects how human nature reacts to such change.

In the 1930s, several economic, political, and environmental factors caused Americans to lose hope of a future beyond the extreme circumstances in which they had to survive. America prospered during the roaring ‘20s, but the stock market crash of October 1929 set off a devastating chain of events; banks and factories closed and one out of every four Americans found himself unemployed. The sudden economic collapse began the era of the Great Depression, in which millions were jobless by 1933 and countless others wandered the country in search of work, food and shelter. “The core of the problem was the immense disparity between the country’s productive capacity and the ability of the people to consume” (Nelson). The economic downturn coupled

The document begins with a recount of how life was during the Great Depression by Morey Skaret. By the time he began high school, the whole town was well into the Great Depression. (America Firsthand 187) He graduated with his diploma and later became a bum to help relieve the load on the home place. (America Firsthand 187) Morey and his good friend, Charlie Shellfisher, left Seattle in the spring and returned before the winter. Charlie and Morey usually rode freight trains and when a gondola car was empty of grain or coal, they would get shelter from the wind inside. If they couldn’t get inside a freight car, they would then catch a passenger train and “ride the blinds”. (America Firsthand 187) On one occasion they had been scrambling out from under a car to face a railway ss23security officer in Cheyenne, Wyoming. He promptly had asked them how much money they had on them and when they answered that they did not have any he took them under arrest. They later had figured out that when someone in town needed workers, the railway security officers would provide the. They spent four days carrying books from one side of the street to the other. They spent three nights in jail, where their meals would arrive in a bucket. (America Firsthand 188) They then skipped to the next town over where Charlie became sick. Morey had left him inside a box filled with newspaper to try and keep him warm while he went to look for work. He ended up cleaning the trashcans of a baker who in return

Americans felt desperation during the time of great economic shortage. If they were to survive this era, they needed to condition themselves mentally and psychologically for the tougher times that might stretch on for years on end. Millions of families lost their savings as numerous banks collapsed in the early 1930’s. Incapable of making mortgage or rent payments, many were deprived of their homes or were evicted from their apartments. Working and middle class families were immensely affected by the Depression. The cultural change that happened in America during the Great Depression can be divided into two types: one was type of culture that accepting and embracing the extreme poverty and by finding logical ways to stay alive. The other

On Thursday, October 24, 1929, United States witnessed it’s first national crisis when the stock market crashed. It was eight months after former President Herbert Hoover was elected. The Great Depression caused a myriad of changes in American economic policies and society, many of which linger to this day. In the onset of the Great Depression many American were shocked into poverty. The Great Depression challenged American families in major ways, placing great social, economic and psychological strains. Many ethnic minorities like Mexican Indians, American Indians, and the African Americans fared rather poorly.

The Great Depression was one of the biggest events in the 1920s since it had huge effects both socially and economically. Starting with the stock market crash, millions of investors were bankrupted and thousands of workers were unemployed. Over the next several years, not only did the consumer spending drop, the number of investment lowered as well. Until 1939, when the President Franklin D. Roosevelt established the "Relief and reform measures" which finally help the economy to restart. Through two different disciplines, two different authors analyze how the Great Depression affect the Americans both economically and anthropologically. Christina D. Romer and Glen H. Elder, Jr, the two authors of two separate articles analyzes the

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, the Great Depression changed the lives of everyone on a global scale, but the economic and social change in America was incomparable. In 1929, the unemployment rate was at a mere 3.2%, but by 1933 however, a massive 25% of citizens were without jobs. To truly understand the enormity of this decline in the working population, one must first understand the causes of the depression itself. On October 29th, 1929 a crash in the stock market, known today as Black Tuesday, contributed to a drastic decline in the value of stocks and assets of banks. The massive hit that many of these banks took to their assets forced many of them into failure, and they took the savings and fall-back plans of millions of Americans with them. Without the banks, ordinary people had no access to their own savings and many people’s homes were foreclosed upon. Following the loss of the banks, unemployment also skyrocketed since people weren’t able to buy goods without access to what they had thought was their money. If there is no demand for products in a market like the United States’, then there is no demand for the production of those goods, and that very production of consumer goods was the trade that many of those hurt the worst by the Great Depression relied upon.2 This vicious cycle was one that would continue to plague the country until a new problem, the

"Great Depression: People and Perspectives" by editor Hamilton Cravens, is a book on the people of the Great Depression era. It shows how minorities dealt with the traumatic turmoil of the times, including rural Americans, women, children, African Americans, and immigrants. Furthermore, it offers different viewpoints on the conflict between the social scientists and the policymakers responding to the crisis, the impact that the Great Depression had on the health of U.S. citizens, and the roles of American technology and Hollywood movies that played in helping the nation survive and later prosper. The author’s thesis is that even though the there was a 25 percent unemployment rate, 5,500 banks declared bankruptcy, and 32,000 business declared bankruptcy as well, the Great Depression’s impact was extensive and catastrophic, however, the impact it had on the day-by-day lives of ordinary American citizens was the strongest indicator of the Depression's devastation.

During this video Jim Richards begins stating that he believes that this nation will soon undergo a huge economic downfall. He predicts that the United States could be victim to a 25 year long depression. Jim Richards states that there are signs of of a coming depression that you just can't ignore such as: GDP is flatlining exponentially, the velocity of money is in lower than it was when the nation was leading up to the Great Depression, the misery index which is calculated by taking the unemployment rate and inflation rate and add them together. The misery index during the Great Depression was at 27, but today it is now at 32.89. Having a high misery index leads to social instability. He also says that bank debt is now growing 30 times