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The Great Depression was a huge financial crisis in the US that affected other parts of the world. It was the worst economic downturn in the history of the industrialized world.

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Started on October 29, 1929, this is known as "Black Tuesday" and ended in 1939.

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"It was only great if you enjoyed being a hobo or selling pencils"
- John Green

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The Great Depression: Crash Course US History #33

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What is The Great Depression?

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The Great Depression Explained in One Minute

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1) The US stock market crashed in 1929, possibly one and the same as the GD.
2) Bank Failures, when the banks failed people would loose their money.
3)Reduction in purchasing across the board, people stopped purchasing items when they could no longer afford them which lead to no one needing anybody to work for them.
4)The American's economic policy with Europe, high taxes being charged for exports lead to less trade between America and foreign countries.
5)Drought Conditions, An area called the "Dust Bowl" in the Mississippi Valley couldn't grow any crops.

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The competitive market failed to produce the results that, in theory, it should have produced

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Where we received our information on what happened in, and caused the Great Depression.

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What impact did the Great Depression have on certain people?

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What impact did the Great Depression have on certain people?

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Although the Great Depression had an impact on everybody, it impacted the working class people more than it did the wealthy. Approximately 40% of the country felt little to no impact, these were the wealthy people although the people that had stock shares would have felt the impact more severely since the Great Depression was greatly influenced by the stock market crash.
Shop owners were greatly effected by the stock market crash because people were no longer buying items from them causing stores to close.

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The dust bowl started around 1930's. It was in the western region spreading from Texas to Nebraska. The Dust Bowl was a drought that had a lot of dust and a lot of wind. Because of the wind and so much dust many livestock died and many crops failed. This then impacted the Great Depression because of how they couldn't make money off of no crops or livestock. The Dust Bowl was also caused from different land policies, the weather changing (dust and wind), and how the farm economics changed.

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The Dust Bowl was the name given to the drought-stricken southern plains region of the United States, which suffered severe dust storms during a drought in the 1930s. As high winds and choking dust swept the region from Texas to Nebraska, people and livestock were killed and crops failed across the entire region. The Dust Bowl intensified the crushing economic impacts of the Great Depression and drove many farming families on a desperate migration in search of work and better living conditions.
WATCH: America: The Story of Us on HISTORY Vault
What Caused the Dust Bowl?

The Dust Bowl was caused by several economic and agricultural factors, including federal land policies, changes in regional weather, farm economics and other cultural factors. After the Civil War, a series of federal land acts coaxed pioneers westward by incentivizing farming in the Great Plains.

The Homestead Act of 1862, which provided settlers with 160 acres of public land, was followed by the Kinkaid Act of 1904 and the Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909. These acts led to a massive influx of new and inexperienced farmers across the Great Plains.

Many of these late nineteenth and early twentieth century settlers lived by the superstition "rain follows the plow." Emigrants, land speculators, politicians and even some scientists believed that homesteading and agriculture would permanently affect the climate of the semi-arid Great Plains region, making it more conducive to farming.

Manifest Destiny

This false belief was linked to Manifest Destiny -an attitude that Americans had a sacred duty to expand west. A series of wet years during the period created further misunderstanding of the region's ecology and led to the intensive cultivation of increasingly marginal lands that couldn't be reached by irrigation.

Rising wheat prices in the 1910s and 1920s and increased demand for wheat from Europe during World War I encouraged farmers to plow up millions of acres of native grassland to plant wheat, corn and other row crops. But as the United States entered the Great Depression, wheat prices plummeted. In desperation, farmers tore up even more grassland in an attempt to harvest a bumper crop and break even.

Crops began to fail with the onset of drought in 1931, exposing the bare, over-plowed farmland. Without deep-rooted prairie grasses to hold the soil in place, it began to blow away. Eroding soil led to massive dust storms and economic devastation-especially in the Southern Plains.

When Was the Dust Bowl?

The Dust Bowl, also known as "the Dirty Thirties," started in 1930 and lasted for about a decade, but its long-term economic impacts on the region lingered much longer.

Severe drought hit the Midwest and southern Great Plains in 1930. Massive dust storms began in 1931. A series of drought years followed, further exacerbating the environmental disaster.

By 1934, an estimated 35 million acres of formerly cultivated land had been rendered useless for farming, while another 125 million acres-an area roughly three-quarters the size of Texas-was rapidly losing its topsoil.

Regular rainfall returned to the region by the end of 1939, bringing the Dust Bowl years to a close. The economic effects, however, persisted. Population declines in the worst-hit counties-where the agricultural value of the land failed to recover-continued well into the 1950s.

'Black Blizzards' Strike America

During the Dust Bowl period, severe dust storms, often called "black blizzards," swept the Great Plains. Some of these carried topsoil from Texas and Oklahoma as far east as Washington, D.C. and New York City, and coated ships in the Atlantic Ocean with dust.

Billowing clouds of dust would darken the sky, sometimes for days at a time. In many places, the dust drifted like snow and residents had to clear it with shovels. Dust worked its way through the cracks of even well-sealed homes, leaving a coating on food, skin and furniture.

Some people developed "dust pneumonia" and experienced chest pain and difficulty breathing. It's unclear exactly how many people may have died from the condition. Estimates range from hundreds to several thousand people.

On May 11, 1934, a massive dust storm two miles high traveled 2,000 miles to the East Coast, blotting out monuments such as the Statue of Liberty and the U.S. Capitol.

The worst dust storm occurred on April 14, 1935. News reports called the event Black Sunday. A wall of blowing sand and dust started in the Oklahoma Panhandle and spread east. As many as three million tons of topsoil are estimated to have blown off the Great Plains during Black Sunday.

An Associated Press news report coined the term "Dust Bowl" after the Black Sunday dust storm.

New Deal Programs

President Franklin D. Roosevelt established a number of measures to help alleviate the plight of poor and displaced farmers. He also addressed the environmental degradation that had led to the Dust Bowl in the first place.
WATCH: How Artists Helped End the Great Depression
As part of Roosevelt's New Deal, Congress established the Soil Erosion Service and the Prairie States Forestry Project in 1935. These programs put local farmers to work planting trees as windbreaks on farms across the Great Plains. The Soil Erosion Service, now called the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) developed and promoted new farming techniques to combat the problem of soil erosion.

Okie Migration

Roughly 2.5 million people left the Dust Bowl states- Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma-during the 1930s. It was one of the largest migrations in American history.

Oklahoma alone lost 440,000 people to migration. Many of them, poverty-stricken, traveled west looking for work. From 1935 to 1940, roughly 250,000 Oklahoma migrants moved to California. A third settled in the state's agriculturally rich San Joaquin Valley.

These Dust Bowl refugees were called "Okies." Okies faced discrimination, menial labor and pitiable wages upon reaching California. Many of them lived in shantytowns and tents along irrigation ditches. "Okie" soon became a term of disdain used to refer to any poor Dust Bowl migrant, regardless of their state of origin.
READ MORE: How the Dust Bowl Made Americans Refugees in Their Own Country

Dust Bowl in Arts and Culture

The Dust Bowl, and the suffering endured by those who survived it, captured the hearts and imaginations of the nation's artists, musicians and writers.

John Steinbeck memorialized the plight of the Okies in his 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath. Photographer Dorothea Lange documented rural poverty with a series of photographs for FDR's Farm Securities Administration, and artist Alexandre Hogue achieved renown with his Dust Bowl landscapes.

Folk musician Woody Guthrie, and his semi-autobiographical first album Dust Bowl Ballads of 1940, told stories of economic hardship faced by Okies in California. Guthrie, an Oklahoma native, left his home state with thousands of others looking for work during the Dust Bowl.

Sources

FDR and the New Deal Response to an Environmental Catastrophe. Roosevelt Institute.
About The Dust Bowl. English Department; University of Illinois.
Dust Bowl Migration. University of California at Davis.
The Great Okie Migration. Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Okie Migrations. Oklahoma Historical Society.
What we learned from the Dust Bowl: lessons in science, policy, and adaptation. Population and Environment.
The Dust Bowl. Library of Congress.
Dust Bowl Ballads: Woody Guthrie. Smithsonian Folkways Recordings.
The Dust Bowl. Ken Burns; PBS.

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The Dust Bowl was the name given to the drought-stricken southern plains region of the United States, which suffered severe dust storms during a drought in the 1930s. As high winds and choking dust swept the region from Texas to Nebraska, people and livestock were killed and crops failed across the entire region.

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How we got out of the Great Depression

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How Did We Get Out of the Great Depression? | Hillsdale College Econ 101

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Learn how the Keynesian theory of economics fails to explain how we got out of the Great Depression. You can register for Hillsdale College's free Econ 101 course here: https://online.hillsdale.edu/sslpage.aspx?pid=3500 Hillsdale College offers free, not-for-credit online courses by its faculty.

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This shows how people had to move out of their homes to find new places to live because they couldn't afford their homes anymore

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A collection of projects and programs instituted by the government to try and stabilize the economy over Roosevelt's 8 year presidency.  During Roosevelt's speech to announce the New Deal he stated the famous line "Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing to fear is fear itself."

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1)Civil Work Administration (CWA)
The CWA worked to create jobs in high paying construction markets, however it ended in 1934 due to it's extensive costs.
2)Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC)
The HOLC was created to try and stop the amount of forclosures happening on homes, and actually helped one million american's between 1933, when it was created, and 1935, when it was abolished.
3)Federal Housing Administration (FHA)
The FHA's purpose was to help provide mortgage loans in order to combat the loss in houses in the Great Depression.

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The New Deal was a sweeping package of public works projects, federal regulations, and financial system reforms enacted by the United States federal government in an effort to help the nation survive and recover from the Great Depression of the 1930s. The New Deal programs created jobs and provided financial support for the unemployed, the young, and the elderly, and added safeguards and constraints to the banking industry and monetary system.

Purposes of the New Deal Programs

Mostly enacted during the first term of President Franklin D. Roosevelt between 1933 and 1938, the New Deal was implemented through legislation enacted by Congress and presidential executive orders. The programs addressed what historians call the "3 Rs" of dealing with the depression, Relief, Recovery, and Reform- relief for the poor and jobless, recovery of the economy, and reform of the nation's financial system to safeguard against future depressions.

The Great Depression, which lasted from 1929 to 1939, was the largest and most significant economic depression to affect both the United States and all Western countries. The stock market crash on Oct. 29, 1929, is infamously known as Black Tuesday, when stocks fell 13.5%. The next day's drop of 11.7% and a total decline of 55% between 1929 and 1933 made it the worst stock market decline in the history of the United States. Heavy speculation during the rising economy of the 1920s combined with widespread buying on margin (borrowing a large percentage of the cost of investment) were factors in the crash. It marked the beginning of the Great Depression.

To Act or Not to Act

Herbert Hoover was the sitting U.S. president when the stock market crash occurred in 1929, but he felt that the government should not take stringent action to deal with heavy losses by investors and the subsequent effects that rippled throughout the economy.

Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected in 1932, and he had other ideas. He worked to create numerous federal programs through his New Deal to help those who were suffering the most from the Depression. Besides programs built to directly help those affected by the Great Depression, the New Deal included legislation intended to correct the situations that led to the stock market crash of 1929. Two prominent actions were the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), and the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in 1934 to be a watchdog over the stock market and police dishonest practices. The following are the top 10 programs of the New Deal.

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Top 10 New Deal Programs of the Great Depression

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The New Deal was a sweeping package of public works projects, federal regulations, and financial system reforms enacted by the United States federal government in an effort to help the nation survive and recover from the Great Depression of the 1930s.

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After a few years and the American economy having yet to fix itself, Roosevelt created a second, more aggressive, New Deal. So that way people could have money by doing jobs

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Where the information for the New Deal came from.

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New Deal for the American People

On March 4, 1933, during the bleakest days of the Great Depression, newly elected President Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered his first inaugural address before 100,000 people on Washington's Capitol Plaza.

"First of all," he said, "let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

He promised that he would act swiftly to face the "dark realities of the moment" and assured Americans that he would "wage a war against the emergency" just as though "we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe." His speech gave many people confidence that they'd elected a man who was not afraid to take bold steps to solve the nation's problems.

Did you know? Unemployment levels in some cities reached staggering levels during the Great Depression: By 1933, Toledo, Ohio's had reached 80 percent, and nearly 90 percent of Lowell, Massachusetts, was unemployed.

The next day, Roosevelt declared a four-day bank holiday to stop people from withdrawing their money from shaky banks. On March 9, Congress passed Roosevelt's Emergency Banking Act, which reorganized the banks and closed the ones that were insolvent.

In his first " fireside chat " three days later, the president urged Americans to put their savings back in the banks, and by the end of the month almost three quarters of them had reopened.

The First Hundred Days

Roosevelt's quest to end the Great Depression was just beginning, and would ramp up in what came to be known as " The First 100 Days." Roosevelt kicked things off by asking Congress to take the first step toward ending Prohibition-one of the more divisive issues of the 1920s-by making it legal once again for Americans to buy beer. (At the end of the year, Congress ratified the 21st Amendment and ended Prohibition for good.)

In May, he signed the Tennessee Valley Authority Act into law, creating the TVA and enabling the federal government to build dams along the Tennessee River that controlled flooding and generated inexpensive hydroelectric power for the people in the region.

That same month, Congress passed a bill that paid commodity farmers (farmers who produced things like wheat, dairy products, tobacco and corn) to leave their fields fallow in order to end agricultural surpluses and boost prices.

June's National Industrial Recovery Act guaranteed that workers would have the right to unionize and bargain collectively for higher wages and better working conditions; it also suspended some antitrust laws and established a federally funded Public Works Administration.

In addition to the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the Tennessee Valley Authority Act and the National Industrial Recovery Act, Roosevelt had won passage of 12 other major laws, including the Glass-Steagall Act (an important banking bill) and the Home Owners' Loan Act, in his first 100 days in office.

Almost every American found something to be pleased about and something to complain about in this motley collection of bills, but it was clear to all that FDR was taking the "direct, vigorous" action that he'd promised in his inaugural address.

Second New Deal

Despite the best efforts of President Roosevelt and his cabinet, however, the Great Depression continued. Unemployment persisted, the economy remained unstable, farmers continued to struggle in the Dust Bowl and people grew angrier and more desperate.

So, in the spring of 1935, Roosevelt launched a second, more aggressive series of federal programs, sometimes called the Second New Deal.

In April, he created the Works Progress Administration (WPA) to provide jobs for unemployed people. WPA projects weren't allowed to compete with private industry, so they focused on building things like post offices, bridges, schools, highways and parks. The WPA also gave work to artists, writers, theater directors and musicians.

In July 1935, the National Labor Relations Act, also known as the Wagner Act, created the National Labor Relations Board to supervise union elections and prevent businesses from treating their workers unfairly. In August, FDR signed the Social Security Act of 1935, which guaranteed pensions to millions of Americans, set up a system of unemployment insurance and stipulated that the federal government would help care for dependent children and the disabled.

In 1936, while campaigning for a second term, FDR told a roaring crowd at Madison Square Garden that "The forces of 'organized money' are unanimous in their hate for me-and I welcome their hatred."

He went on: "I should like to have it said of my first Administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match, [and] I should like to have it said of my second Administration that in it these forces have met their master."

This FDR had come a long way from his earlier repudiation of class-based politics and was promising a much more aggressive fight against the people who were profiting from the Depression-era troubles of ordinary Americans. He won the election by a landslide.

Still, the Great Depression dragged on. Workers grew more militant: In December 1936, for example, the United Auto Workers strike at a GM plant in Flint, Michigan lasted for 44 days and spread to some 150,000 autoworkers in 35 cities.

By 1937, to the dismay of most corporate leaders, some 8 million workers had joined unions and were loudly demanding their rights.

The End of the New Deal?

Meanwhile, the New Deal itself confronted one political setback after another. Arguing that they represented an unconstitutional extension of federal authority, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court had already invalidated reform initiatives like the National Recovery Administration and the Agricultural Adjustment Administration.

In order to protect his programs from further meddling, in 1937 President Roosevelt announced a plan to add enough liberal justices to the Court to neutralize the "obstructionist" conservatives.

This " Court-packing " turned out to be unnecessary-soon after they caught wind of the plan, the conservative justices started voting to uphold New Deal projects-but the episode did a good deal of public-relations damage to the administration and gave ammunition to many of the president's Congressional opponents.

That same year, the economy slipped back into a recession when the government reduced its stimulus spending. Despite this seeming vindication of New Deal policies, increasing anti-Roosevelt sentiment made it difficult for him to enact any new programs.

On December 7, 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and the United States entered World War II. The war effort stimulated American industry and, as a result, effectively ended the Great Depression.

The New Deal and American Politics

From 1933 until 1941, President Roosevelt's New Deal programs and policies did more than just adjust interest rates, tinker with farm subsidies and create short-term make-work programs.

They created a brand-new, if tenuous, political coalition that included white working people, African Americans and left-wing intellectuals. More women entered the workforce as Roosevelt expanded the number of secretarial roles in government. These groups rarely shared the same interests-at least, they rarely thought they did- but they did share a powerful belief that an interventionist government was good for their families, the economy and the nation.

Their coalition has splintered over time, but many of the New Deal programs that bound them together-Social Security, unemployment insurance and federal agricultural subsidies, for instance-are still with us today.

Photo Galleries

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New Deal - Programs, Social Security & FDR

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The New Deal was a series of programs and projects instituted during the Great Depression by President Franklin D. Roosevelt that aimed to restore prosperity to Americans. A Second New Deal was put in place shortly thereafter as a way to continue the country's economic recovery.

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1)Works Progress Administration (WPA)3
The largest New Deal agency, the WPA provided jobs for millions of Americans, and helped the construction of numerous roads, and buildings. It officially ended in 1943.
2)Social Security Act (SSA)
This act was put in place in order to help the elderly by giving them an annual wage, this is one of the few parts of the New Deal still in existence.
3)Federal Security Agency (FSA)
The FSA was responsible for allowing people to bypass several government agencies administering social security, federal education funding, and the Food and Drug Administration. It was abolished in 1953.

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The New Deal was a sweeping package of public works projects, federal regulations, and financial system reforms enacted by the United States federal government in an effort to help the nation survive and recover from the Great Depression of the 1930s. The New Deal programs created jobs and provided financial support for the unemployed, the young, and the elderly, and added safeguards and constraints to the banking industry and monetary system.

Purposes of the New Deal Programs

Mostly enacted during the first term of President Franklin D. Roosevelt between 1933 and 1938, the New Deal was implemented through legislation enacted by Congress and presidential executive orders. The programs addressed what historians call the "3 Rs" of dealing with the depression, Relief, Recovery, and Reform- relief for the poor and jobless, recovery of the economy, and reform of the nation's financial system to safeguard against future depressions.

The Great Depression, which lasted from 1929 to 1939, was the largest and most significant economic depression to affect both the United States and all Western countries. The stock market crash on Oct. 29, 1929, is infamously known as Black Tuesday, when stocks fell 13.5%. The next day's drop of 11.7% and a total decline of 55% between 1929 and 1933 made it the worst stock market decline in the history of the United States. Heavy speculation during the rising economy of the 1920s combined with widespread buying on margin (borrowing a large percentage of the cost of investment) were factors in the crash. It marked the beginning of the Great Depression.

To Act or Not to Act

Herbert Hoover was the sitting U.S. president when the stock market crash occurred in 1929, but he felt that the government should not take stringent action to deal with heavy losses by investors and the subsequent effects that rippled throughout the economy.

Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected in 1932, and he had other ideas. He worked to create numerous federal programs through his New Deal to help those who were suffering the most from the Depression. Besides programs built to directly help those affected by the Great Depression, the New Deal included legislation intended to correct the situations that led to the stock market crash of 1929. Two prominent actions were the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), and the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in 1934 to be a watchdog over the stock market and police dishonest practices. The following are the top 10 programs of the New Deal.

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Top 10 New Deal Programs of the Great Depression

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The New Deal was a sweeping package of public works projects, federal regulations, and financial system reforms enacted by the United States federal government in an effort to help the nation survive and recover from the Great Depression of the 1930s.