The Great Depression, 1929-1933: Cricket’s Sexy Slideshow

Is this the end of capitalism? Of democracy?

Take notes, or you will regret it

• Partner, glare at your partner

What should I take notes on?

• Great question!• Names of people, major events,

dates of events, key concepts, specific legislation (laws), vocabulary, statistics, slogans you see, other key quotes

Before the crash…

HOW BAD WAS THE CRASH?

Bad.

Funny cartoon from the New Yorker, 1929

Primary source: Witness account• “Everybody is shouting. They are all trying to reach the

glass booth where the clerks are. The boy at the quotation board is running scared. He can’t keep up with the speed of the way the stocks are dropping…A cigar stock at the time was selling for $115 a share. The market collapsed. I got a call from the company president. Could I loan him $200 million? I refused, because at the time I had to protect my own fences, including those of my closest friends. His $115 stock dropped to $2 and he jumped out the window of his Wall Street office. On Wall Street the people walked around like zombies. You saw people who yesterday rode around in Cadillacs lucky now to have car fare (for taxis). One of my friends said to me, If things keep on as they are, we’ll have to go begging. I asked, “Who from?’”

WALL STREET CRASH, OCTOBER 1929

Bank run, from It’s A Wonderful Life (1946)

Highest unemployment: 25%. In some other countries, it was 33%.

HOW DID IT AFFECT THE PEOPLE MOST?

• DAVID KENNEDY, economist: To grasp the degree of takes a great leap of the historical imagination. I mean, we can recite the usual numbers - that 75 percent of all stock market values evaporated, national income cut in half. Those are numbers that don't really mean very much.

• Where the Great Depression, I think, takes on its most human face is unemployment. By 1933, by the time Franklin Roosevelt's was first elected, 25 percent of the workforce was unemployed. One in every four able-bodied people seeking work could not find employment. Now even that number, large as it is, underestimates or understates the impact of the Depression, because in that era, the typical household had only one wage earner in it. So when we talk about one in four people being unemployed, we're really talking about one in four households in the country with no visible means of support, no reliable income. Today the typical household has two wage earners in it. So even at a 25 percent unemployment rate - God forbid that we should ever see it - today would not mean the same thing in human terms as it did in 1933. 

HOW DID LOCAL GOVERNMENT HELP THE PEOPLE?

• DAVID KENNEDY: One of the traditional functions of state and local governments in the pre-Depression era was to undertake what was called "poor relief.” But the crisis of the Depression occurred on such a scale…They all tried, and some of them made quite heroic efforts. But they simply didn't have the resources and the tax bases and so on to be able to do this effectively.

 Breadline

Hooverville

Hooverville in Central Park!

Why is this a good example of irony?

Unemployment line

Why is this effective protest?

Desperation

WHO DID IT HIT THE HARDEST?• DAVID KENNEDY: The Depression fell hardest, you

might say, on the most vulnerable people in the society, people with little savings, people with precarious employment. That meant older people, African Americans. It meant farm workers, farm laborers of all kinds. It meant these vast immigrant communities that had arrived in the country essentially just about a generation earlier, around the turn of the century, mostly from Central and Southern and Eastern Europe. Many of those communities were tremendously affected, because their economic status was already so precarious. 

YOU think this is bad?

Sharecropper

Dust Bowl lasted from 1930-36

Causes of the Dust Bowl:BAD LUCK: • a long droughtNOT UNDERSTANDING THE LAND• Midwestern soil is prone to erosion because there are

few trees to keep the wind blowing the dirt away. The natural grassland kept the soil in place, but once the farmers ploughed it up, it started to blow away.

BAD FARMING PRACTICES: • Farmers not practicing crop rotation (different crops

can replenish the soil if there is variety)• Not letting their fields rest periodically (lie fallow)• Before, if the land dried up, they would just buy new,

cheap land and abandon the old land

Black Friday, 1935

In the middle of a dust storm

Write a caption

desert

Okies: By 1950, four million people, or 25% of all persons born in Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, or

Missouri, had fled.

Dorothea Lange was a famous photographer to captured famous images of the Okies and helped build

sympathy

QUESTION: What impact did the Depression have on family life? • DAVID KENNEDY: The impact of the Depression is

visible statistics that record the history of this era. The divorce rate went down because divorce, we think, is at least in part a function of women's economic opportunities, and there were fewer.

• The marriage rate went down. Family formation is less likely to happen in a depressed economic circumstance.

• The birth rate went down rather markedly in the early years of the Depression. And indeed it's the suppression of the birth rate in the 1930s that is partly responsible for the explosion in the birth rate after World War II, in the so-called "baby boom.

Dorothea Lange

What is a good caption?

Hostility to Okies (Cricket tell story)

Woody Guthrie was a famous singer who was an Okie himself and traveled the country for decades, singing songs and entertaining the people. He helped build sympathy too.

So Long, It’s Been Good To Know You (Woody Guthrie)

Woody’s story (Crick talks)

Dough Re Mi (Woody Guthrie)

This Land Is Your Land, by Woody Guthrie

Hostility to government

Herbert Hoover: President 1929-1933

Why you shouldn’t hate Hoover

• Orphaned as a young child; became a a very successful engineer. Grit!• During World War I (1914-18) became an important wartime adviser to

President Wilson. Was also put in charge of the US government’s food production and distribution, and helped millions of starving people in Europe and in Soviet Russia.

• Contrary to public knowledge, he had repeatedly spoken out against stock market speculation, and expressed concern the market would crash in his 1928 presidential campaign.

• Did not think government should give welfare, because it would make the people dependent. (Does he have a point?) He did change his mind toward the end of his term. He cut $160 million in taxes to poor and middle class people, gave welfare money to states to distribute, and doubled the amount of government projects, which provided jobs.

• But most historians can agree he did not understand the severity of the Depression and was not the right man for the job of inspiring hope and recreating American government.

CONSERVATIVE PLAN FOR RECOVERY:The Trickle Down Theory of pulling a country out of

recession or depression:

• If government lent money to businesses and cut taxes on the rich, they would spend their money.

• Buy spending money, it would mean more demand for goods.

• More demand for goods means more people getting jobs to make and sell the goods.

• These newly employed people will spend their new cash, creating even more demand for goods, and more jobs.

Criticisms of the Trickle-Down Theory:

Another view:

HOW DID THE GOVERNMENT CHANGE DURING THIS TIME?

•  DAVID KENNEDY: • Calvin Coolidge once said that if the federal government went out of

business tomorrow, the average American wouldn't notice the fact for at least six months, which was a pretty true statement, actually, because in the 1920s and before, the federal government's role was essentially to deliver the mail and service the national debt, such as it was, and make a few payments to veterans. And that was about it. The historic role of the federal government, in the face of the kind of economic was to do little or nothing.

•  That all changed with the Depression, both in the Hoover and in the Roosevelt administrations. One can get a sense of it if you look at federal spending. The federal budget in the 1920s was not quite $3 billion a year. Once FDR was elected, the New Deal budgets were typically $6 billion a year. So by that crude, crude measure, the role of government more than doubled in its incidence in American life.

• The government started to take on all kinds of functions that it had never dreamt of performing before, not least of all public works projects on a huge scale and employment projects of various kinds. 

Franklin Delano Roosevelt

FDR: (SORT OF) MY MAN• Cousin to Teddy Roosevelt• Married to cousin Eleanor (Roosevelt) Roosevelt• Born into very wealthy upstate New York family• Former governor of New York• Known to be very warm, fairly unprejudiced for his time

(Japanese internment aside), witty, ladies’ man• Ran campaign based on hope and the idea that government

could pull us out of the depression by a whole lot of spending (but said practically nothing on how he would do this).

• Was elected because desperate people thought he had the energy, ideas, and optimism to pull us out of the Depression.

• Conservatives HAAAAATED him and thought he would destroy our economy and form of democracy, and would make the country a socialist (or even communist!) country.

Write a caption for this New Yorker cover

FDR in charge! President 1933-1945Why might he be seen as the right man for the

time?

“The Only Thing We Have to Fear Is Fear Itself”

LIBERAL VIEW TO ENDING DEPRESSIONS: The government borrows and spends to create jobs

New Deal!In the first 30 days of Congress, FDR pushed an

insane amount of laws through Congress for • Relief Money to help the poor with food and jobs • Recovery To repair the economy and the

country’s infrastructure (bridges, roads, rivers, forests, electricity, etc.)

• Reform To regulate the economy and provide permanent protections, so that there would never be another Depression.

Cricket’s conservative grandfather would not let his name be mentioned in the house

Conservative criticisms:• Um… how are we going to pay for all this? Deficits not

good.• You mean through taxing ME higher?• By taxing the rich and businesses higher, won’t it hurt

the economy?• FDR is permanently changing the size and

scope of government: will we turn socialist? Communist? Where does it end?

• Will we make people permanently dependent on government? They will not learn to help themselves.

• FDR: isn’t it a tad unconstitutional to just hire 6 more justices? (Yes).

YOUR TURN• YOU AND YOUR NOTETAKING

PARTNER• Will produce a brief, 2-3 minute

presentation of one of the New Deal laws passed.

• Presentations will be Thursday in class.

REQUIREMENTS:EXPLAIN: • What the law is, and when passed• How it worked• Whether it was intended as Relief,

Recovery or Reform, and why• Include relevant pictures or primary

source quotes• Explain if it still exists today

Process:• Start with WPJ chapter 24• Review text (Big Red 734-38)• Use computers for research• Make power point presentation• Edit power point presentation• Present power point, take notes!

Signups:

• AAA (Agricultural Adjustment Act): • TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority): • NIRA (National Industrial Recovery Act): • PWA (Public Works Administration): • WPA (Works Progress Administration): • Banking Act (Glass Steagall Act): • FERA (Federal Housing Administration):• CWA (Civil Works Administration): • CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps):• SSA (Social Security Act):• NLRA (National Labor Relations Act):• FLSA (Fair Labor Standards Act):