The Impact of the Great Depression 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. The spread of poverty began with the loss of jobs. Companies could no longer afford to keep their employees and many Americans were laid off as businesses went under. Once someone lost their job, it was near impossible to find a new one. Some government programs attempted to provide jobs for people, but they only had a limited number of spots and they …show more content…
People lost the ability to pay for things they once owned. People bought many things on margin in the years before the depression, they soon found this to be a rather unwise practice as they could no longer afford these purchases once the depression hit. Millions were out a job, and soon their homes followed; foreclosed on by the banks, the items they once purchased sold back. This left many families with little possessions and even fewer places to turn to and many ended up in shanty towns and Hoovervilles. There they lived out of cars and in makeshift tents like the family in picture 5. These places were overrun with undernourished people that rarely had their basic human needs
The Great depression was known as the greatest economic disaster in modern history. The world during this time was crashing just like the stock market. People were starving; In Give Me Liberty, Eric Foner explains, “In Detroit, 4,000 children stood in bread lines each day seeking food.” If starving was not bad enough, most people were evicted from their homes. They were forced to live in ramshackle shantytowns, also called Hoovervilles (after President Hoover), which arose in abandoned parks and
During the Great Depression most people were without a home. Homeless living became life in a lot of areas. People left and struggle to survive as said “,Homeless living soon became a way of life for many Americans as they struggled just to stay alive. Across the
America (U.S) has economically hit its highs and lows over its 2 ½ centuries of its existence, but none have been more surprising than the Great Depression period from 1929-1933. During first major low in society the stock market crashed due to citizen’s overuse of credit. This wasn’t the only problem there was also a great drought in America’s agricultural plains. Many farmers lost their crops and most of their land, creating a small scale famine in the U.S. People were laid off and people couldn’t provide for their family. One citizen during this time still had a vivid memory of these times,”In New York neighborhoods adults stood in so called 'bread lines,' children begged in the streets.”
The Great depression began in 1929 with a dramatic event called that Wall Street Crash. This led to the failure of banks and businesses all over the United States. Millions of people lost all their savings and their jobs, and thousands became homeless because they could not afford to pay their rent. Some homeless families lived in shacks made of cardboard. Others took the road to look for work. (Bingham J.) As it could be imagined it was very disheartening to many as losing everything that was worked hard for. Many events took place during this time, like the Stock Market Crash, The Dust Bowl, The New Deal and also Prohibition that changed the outcome of what people could and couldn’t do.
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
During the Great Depression roughly 25% of the workers were 15 years old or younger, 20% of the children were starving and didn’t have access to new clothes and other necessities and about 40% of the young adults 16-24 were either unemployed or not in school. This shows that a great majority of the youth living during this time were not able to experience a normal childhood where they went to school and came home to play with their friends, because they had to work and were not able to attend school and get a proper education. Most of the kids also went to bed starving because their families could not afford to pay for food. Living as a child during the Great Depression was incredibly challenging
The great depression kept going on. Millions of Americans were homeless and jobless. Soup kitchens were popping up everywhere there were people. The people started to turn to the government for help. But America's 31st president, Herbert Hoover, didn't think so. While many people believed that relying on the government was the answer, Hoover thought that self-reliance and relying on each other would relieve them of this economic crisis, not government intervention. And as the people kept prying, Hoover kept refusing. Desperate for a place to call home, and knowing that the government wasn't going to do anything to help, Americans and their families started building shantytowns in cities and in different places around them. They soon became
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
To debate on how the United States changed during the great depression and the postwar era is a obvious discussion.First to start off with some simple topics is, how the the economy changed is the roles changed.And the men were mostly in war moreover some older teenagers.It also changed the roles from women from being home moms to factory workers furthermore African Americans from north to south.The warfare diversely differed from the great depression because of the atom bombs and nuclear bombs.
The first way lives were affected during the Great Depression was how families survived. William Loren Katz, in his book An Album of The Great Depression, writes, “In Chicago a government committee discovered this scene at the city dump: when a garbage truck pulled up to unload, thirty-five men, women, and children began digging through the garbage with sticks and hands to find food... Finding jobs was next to impossible, gathering on street corners was easy, and stealing was tempting. Threatening young people with jail was useless because it’s what they wanted” (Katz 50). These families were so desperate to get food that they were willing to do anything for even the smallest scrap.
Unemployment was one of the biggest impacts on the depression. Millions of people lost jobs. Forty percent of factory workers, and sixty-seven percent of construction workers were unemployed in Ohio alone (Stock Market Crash of 1929). In the country, unemployment went up twenty-five percent, wages went down forty-two percent, economic growth went down fifty percent, and world trade went down sixty-five percent. In the cities, factories and businesses got rid of a large number of employees or closed down altogether. Cities were not the only ones who felt the impact of the depression. Farmers faced low prices for their products, and many people still could not afford the farmer’s products, resulting in farm foreclosures across the United States.
The Roaring Twenties, a decade full of flappers, speakeasies, and technology, was a time in which the American nation believed that they had reached the peak of prosperity and did not foresee the immense crash that was about to occur. The crash caused a domino effect of awful events to take place like the banks failing, millions being unemployed, and thousands of companies going out of business. Herbert Hoover, the president at the time, was doing an insignificant amount of work to help the country get out of the economic crisis that they were in.
During the Great Depression, thirteen million americans lost their jobs, one million families lost their farms, 273,000 families were evicted from their homes, and four thousand banks closed (“The Great Depression Facts”). Families went through many hardships. On October 29, 1929, the stock market crashed, sending a panic through Wall Street. Investors were starting to withdraw their shares, sending more shock through the public, ultimately sending a wave of people to rush to nearby banks. With the abundant amount of withdrawals, banks now started to lose the money that they had (“The Great Depression”). Families lost their life savings, leaving them devastated and searching for help (Bryson). The Great Depression brought a downfall to the
“The familiar faces: pitted, seamed, lined, desperate, beaten, often shamed to be photographed with their poor possessions and their misery.” This was just one account of the daily life during the Great Depression. During the Great Depression, the terrors of that decade impacted everyone differently based on their age, wealth, and social position. 40 million people had no jobs. Almost the entirety of the United States, even the world, couldn’t provide for their family (1). The terrors that walked the streets, slept in homes, and enacted violence on citizens is something no one likes to speak about.
What was the world’s greatest economic disaster and left millions of citizens unemployed for years? The Great Depression was a major economic disaster which left the people of the world shocked. Many countries were already left in a bad position due to the effect of World War I. Countries that bought and sold on the international market were affected. The United Kingdom, France, and Germany were just a few of the affected countries that had a difficult time getting their country back to great economic shape.