# data[].attributes.body
who: Americans what: the great depression when: 1929 to 1939 where: America why: Americans couldnt think of new ideas

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What Caused the Great Depression?

Throughout the 1920s, the U.S. economy expanded rapidly, and the nation's total wealth more than doubled between 1920 and 1929, a period dubbed " the Roaring Twenties."

The stock market, centered at the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street in New York City, was the scene of reckless speculation, where everyone from millionaire tycoons to cooks and janitors poured their savings into stocks. As a result, the stock market underwent rapid expansion, reaching its peak in August 1929.

By then, production had already declined and unemployment had risen, leaving stock prices much higher than their actual value. Additionally, wages at that time were low, consumer debt was proliferating, the agricultural sector of the economy was struggling due to drought and falling food prices and banks had an excess of large loans that could not be liquidated.

The American economy entered a mild recession during the summer of 1929, as consumer spending slowed and unsold goods began to pile up, which in turn slowed factory production. Nonetheless, stock prices continued to rise, and by the fall of that year had reached stratospheric levels that could not be justified by expected future earnings.

Stock Market Crash of 1929

On October 24, 1929, as nervous investors began selling overpriced shares en masse, the stock market crash that some had feared happened at last. A record 12.9 million shares were traded that day, known as "Black Thursday."

Five days later, on October 29, or "Black Tuesday," some 16 million shares were traded after another wave of panic swept Wall Street. Millions of shares ended up worthless, and those investors who had bought stocks "on margin" (with borrowed money) were wiped out completely.

As consumer confidence vanished in the wake of the stock market crash, the downturn in spending and investment led factories and other businesses to slow down production and begin firing their workers. For those who were lucky enough to remain employed, wages fell and buying power decreased.

Many Americans forced to buy on credit fell into debt, and the number of foreclosures and repossessions climbed steadily. The global adherence to the gold standard, which joined countries around the world in fixed currency exchange, helped spread economic woes from the United States throughout the world, especially in Europe.

Bank Runs and the Hoover Administration

Despite assurances from President Herbert Hoover and other leaders that the crisis would run its course, matters continued to get worse over the next three years. By 1930, 4 million Americans looking for work could not find it; that number had risen to 6 million in 1931.

Meanwhile, the country's industrial production had dropped by half. Bread lines, soup kitchens and rising numbers of homeless people became more and more common in America's towns and cities. Farmers couldn't afford to harvest their crops and were forced to leave them rotting in the fields while people elsewhere starved. In 1930, severe droughts in the Southern Plains brought high winds and dust from Texas to Nebraska, killing people, livestock and crops. The " Dust Bowl " inspired a mass migration of people from farmland to cities in search of work.

In the fall of 1930, the first of four waves of banking panics began, as large numbers of investors lost confidence in the solvency of their banks and demanded deposits in cash, forcing banks to liquidate loans in order to supplement their insufficient cash reserves on hand.

Bank runs swept the United States again in the spring and fall of 1931 and the fall of 1932, and by early 1933 thousands of banks had closed their doors.

In the face of this dire situation, Hoover's administration tried supporting failing banks and other institutions with government loans; the idea was that the banks in turn would loan to businesses, which would be able to hire back their employees.

FDR and the Great Depression

Hoover, a Republican who had formerly served as U.S. secretary of commerce, believed that government should not directly intervene in the economy and that it did not have the responsibility to create jobs or provide economic relief for its citizens.

In 1932, however, with the country mired in the depths of the Great Depression and some 15 million people unemployed, Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt won an overwhelming victory in the presidential election.

By Inauguration Day (March 4, 1933), every U.S. state had ordered all remaining banks to close at the end of the fourth wave of banking panics, and the U.S. Treasury didn't have enough cash to pay all government workers. Nonetheless, FDR (as he was known) projected a calm energy and optimism, famously declaring "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

Roosevelt took immediate action to address the country's economic woes, first announcing a four-day "bank holiday" during which all banks would close so that Congress could pass reform legislation and reopen those banks determined to be sound. He also began addressing the public directly over the radio in a series of talks, and these so-called " fireside chats " went a long way toward restoring public confidence.

During Roosevelt's first 100 days in office, his administration passed legislation that aimed to stabilize industrial and agricultural production, create jobs and stimulate recovery.

In addition, Roosevelt sought to reform the financial system, creating the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation ( FDIC) to protect depositors' accounts and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to regulate the stock market and prevent abuses of the kind that led to the 1929 crash.

The New Deal: A Road to Recovery

Among the programs and institutions of the New Deal that aided in recovery from the Great Depression was the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), which built dams and hydroelectric projects to control flooding and provide electric power to the impoverished Tennessee Valley region, and the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a permanent jobs program that employed 8.5 million people from 1935 to 1943.

When the Great Depression began, the United States was the only industrialized country in the world without some form of unemployment insurance or social security. In 1935, Congress passed the Social Security Act, which for the first time provided Americans with unemployment, disability and pensions for old age.

After showing early signs of recovery beginning in the spring of 1933, the economy continued to improve throughout the next three years, during which real GDP (adjusted for inflation) grew at an average rate of 9 percent per year.

A sharp recession hit in 1937, caused in part by the Federal Reserve's decision to increase its requirements for money in reserve. Though the economy began improving again in 1938, this second severe contraction reversed many of the gains in production and employment and prolonged the effects of the Great Depression through the end of the decade.

Depression-era hardships fueled the rise of extremist political movements in various European countries, most notably that of Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime in Germany. German aggression led war to break out in Europe in 1939, and the WPA turned its attention to strengthening the military infrastructure of the United States, even as the country maintained its neutrality.

African Americans in the Great Depression

One-fifth of all Americans receiving federal relief during the Great Depression were Black, most in the rural South. But farm and domestic work, two major sectors in which Black workers were employed, were not included in the 1935 Social Security Act, meaning there was no safety net in times of uncertainty. Rather than fire domestic help, private employers could simply pay them less without legal repercussions. And those relief programs for which African Americans were eligible on paper were rife with discrimination in practice since all relief programs were administered locally.

Despite these obstacles, Roosevelt's "Black Cabinet," led by Mary McLeod Bethune, ensured nearly every New Deal agency had a Black advisor. The number of African Americans working in government tripled.

Women in the Great Depression

There was one group of Americans who actually gained jobs during the Great Depression: Women. From 1930 to 1940, the number of employed women in the United States rose 24 percent from 10.5 million to 13 million Though they'd been steadily entering the workforce for decades, the financial pressures of the Great Depression drove women to seek employment in ever greater numbers as male breadwinners lost their jobs. The 22 percent decline in marriage rates between 1929 and 1939 also created an increase in single women in search of employment.

Women during the Great Depression had a strong advocate in First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who lobbied her husband for more women in office-like Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, the first woman to ever hold a cabinet position.

Jobs available to women paid less but were more stable during the banking crisis: nursing, teaching and domestic work. They were supplanted by an increase in secretarial roles in FDR's rapidly-expanding government. But there was a catch: over 25 percent of the National Recovery Administration's wage codes set lower wages for women, and jobs created under the WPA confined women to fields like sewing and nursing that paid less than roles reserved for men.

Married women faced an additional hurdle: By 1940, 26 states had placed restrictions known as marriage bars on their employment, as working wives were perceived as taking away jobs from able-bodied men-even if, in practice, they were occupying jobs men would not want and doing them for far less pay.

Great Depression Ends and World War II Begins

With Roosevelt's decision to support Britain and France in the struggle against Germany and the other Axis Powers, defense manufacturing geared up, producing more and more private-sector jobs.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 led to America's entry into World War II, and the nation's factories went back into full production mode.

This expanding industrial production, as well as widespread conscription beginning in 1942, reduced the unemployment rate to below its pre-Depression level. The Great Depression had ended at last, and the United States turned its attention to the global conflict of World War II.

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Great Depression: Black Thursday, Facts & Effects

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The Great Depression was the worst economic downturn in the history of the industrialized world, lasting from 1929 to 1939. At its peak, the U.S. unemployment rate topped 20 percent.

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who hoover dam

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Who- Americans
What- 
When-1929-1939
Where-United States
Why-

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Who- Americans
What- 
When-1929-1939
Where-United States
Why-

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
What Caused the Great Depression?

Throughout the 1920s, the U.S. economy expanded rapidly, and the nation's total wealth more than doubled between 1920 and 1929, a period dubbed " the Roaring Twenties."

The stock market, centered at the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street in New York City, was the scene of reckless speculation, where everyone from millionaire tycoons to cooks and janitors poured their savings into stocks. As a result, the stock market underwent rapid expansion, reaching its peak in August 1929.

By then, production had already declined and unemployment had risen, leaving stock prices much higher than their actual value. Additionally, wages at that time were low, consumer debt was proliferating, the agricultural sector of the economy was struggling due to drought and falling food prices and banks had an excess of large loans that could not be liquidated.

The American economy entered a mild recession during the summer of 1929, as consumer spending slowed and unsold goods began to pile up, which in turn slowed factory production. Nonetheless, stock prices continued to rise, and by the fall of that year had reached stratospheric levels that could not be justified by expected future earnings.

Stock Market Crash of 1929

On October 24, 1929, as nervous investors began selling overpriced shares en masse, the stock market crash that some had feared happened at last. A record 12.9 million shares were traded that day, known as "Black Thursday."

Five days later, on October 29, or "Black Tuesday," some 16 million shares were traded after another wave of panic swept Wall Street. Millions of shares ended up worthless, and those investors who had bought stocks "on margin" (with borrowed money) were wiped out completely.

As consumer confidence vanished in the wake of the stock market crash, the downturn in spending and investment led factories and other businesses to slow down production and begin firing their workers. For those who were lucky enough to remain employed, wages fell and buying power decreased.

Many Americans forced to buy on credit fell into debt, and the number of foreclosures and repossessions climbed steadily. The global adherence to the gold standard, which joined countries around the world in fixed currency exchange, helped spread economic woes from the United States throughout the world, especially in Europe.

Bank Runs and the Hoover Administration

Despite assurances from President Herbert Hoover and other leaders that the crisis would run its course, matters continued to get worse over the next three years. By 1930, 4 million Americans looking for work could not find it; that number had risen to 6 million in 1931.

Meanwhile, the country's industrial production had dropped by half. Bread lines, soup kitchens and rising numbers of homeless people became more and more common in America's towns and cities. Farmers couldn't afford to harvest their crops and were forced to leave them rotting in the fields while people elsewhere starved. In 1930, severe droughts in the Southern Plains brought high winds and dust from Texas to Nebraska, killing people, livestock and crops. The " Dust Bowl " inspired a mass migration of people from farmland to cities in search of work.

In the fall of 1930, the first of four waves of banking panics began, as large numbers of investors lost confidence in the solvency of their banks and demanded deposits in cash, forcing banks to liquidate loans in order to supplement their insufficient cash reserves on hand.

Bank runs swept the United States again in the spring and fall of 1931 and the fall of 1932, and by early 1933 thousands of banks had closed their doors.

In the face of this dire situation, Hoover's administration tried supporting failing banks and other institutions with government loans; the idea was that the banks in turn would loan to businesses, which would be able to hire back their employees.

FDR and the Great Depression

Hoover, a Republican who had formerly served as U.S. secretary of commerce, believed that government should not directly intervene in the economy and that it did not have the responsibility to create jobs or provide economic relief for its citizens.

In 1932, however, with the country mired in the depths of the Great Depression and some 15 million people unemployed, Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt won an overwhelming victory in the presidential election.

By Inauguration Day (March 4, 1933), every U.S. state had ordered all remaining banks to close at the end of the fourth wave of banking panics, and the U.S. Treasury didn't have enough cash to pay all government workers. Nonetheless, FDR (as he was known) projected a calm energy and optimism, famously declaring "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

Roosevelt took immediate action to address the country's economic woes, first announcing a four-day "bank holiday" during which all banks would close so that Congress could pass reform legislation and reopen those banks determined to be sound. He also began addressing the public directly over the radio in a series of talks, and these so-called " fireside chats " went a long way toward restoring public confidence.

During Roosevelt's first 100 days in office, his administration passed legislation that aimed to stabilize industrial and agricultural production, create jobs and stimulate recovery.

In addition, Roosevelt sought to reform the financial system, creating the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation ( FDIC) to protect depositors' accounts and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to regulate the stock market and prevent abuses of the kind that led to the 1929 crash.

The New Deal: A Road to Recovery

Among the programs and institutions of the New Deal that aided in recovery from the Great Depression was the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), which built dams and hydroelectric projects to control flooding and provide electric power to the impoverished Tennessee Valley region, and the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a permanent jobs program that employed 8.5 million people from 1935 to 1943.

When the Great Depression began, the United States was the only industrialized country in the world without some form of unemployment insurance or social security. In 1935, Congress passed the Social Security Act, which for the first time provided Americans with unemployment, disability and pensions for old age.

After showing early signs of recovery beginning in the spring of 1933, the economy continued to improve throughout the next three years, during which real GDP (adjusted for inflation) grew at an average rate of 9 percent per year.

A sharp recession hit in 1937, caused in part by the Federal Reserve's decision to increase its requirements for money in reserve. Though the economy began improving again in 1938, this second severe contraction reversed many of the gains in production and employment and prolonged the effects of the Great Depression through the end of the decade.

Depression-era hardships fueled the rise of extremist political movements in various European countries, most notably that of Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime in Germany. German aggression led war to break out in Europe in 1939, and the WPA turned its attention to strengthening the military infrastructure of the United States, even as the country maintained its neutrality.

African Americans in the Great Depression

One-fifth of all Americans receiving federal relief during the Great Depression were Black, most in the rural South. But farm and domestic work, two major sectors in which Black workers were employed, were not included in the 1935 Social Security Act, meaning there was no safety net in times of uncertainty. Rather than fire domestic help, private employers could simply pay them less without legal repercussions. And those relief programs for which African Americans were eligible on paper were rife with discrimination in practice since all relief programs were administered locally.

Despite these obstacles, Roosevelt's "Black Cabinet," led by Mary McLeod Bethune, ensured nearly every New Deal agency had a Black advisor. The number of African Americans working in government tripled.

Women in the Great Depression

There was one group of Americans who actually gained jobs during the Great Depression: Women. From 1930 to 1940, the number of employed women in the United States rose 24 percent from 10.5 million to 13 million Though they'd been steadily entering the workforce for decades, the financial pressures of the Great Depression drove women to seek employment in ever greater numbers as male breadwinners lost their jobs. The 22 percent decline in marriage rates between 1929 and 1939 also created an increase in single women in search of employment.

Women during the Great Depression had a strong advocate in First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who lobbied her husband for more women in office-like Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, the first woman to ever hold a cabinet position.

Jobs available to women paid less but were more stable during the banking crisis: nursing, teaching and domestic work. They were supplanted by an increase in secretarial roles in FDR's rapidly-expanding government. But there was a catch: over 25 percent of the National Recovery Administration's wage codes set lower wages for women, and jobs created under the WPA confined women to fields like sewing and nursing that paid less than roles reserved for men.

Married women faced an additional hurdle: By 1940, 26 states had placed restrictions known as marriage bars on their employment, as working wives were perceived as taking away jobs from able-bodied men-even if, in practice, they were occupying jobs men would not want and doing them for far less pay.

Great Depression Ends and World War II Begins

With Roosevelt's decision to support Britain and France in the struggle against Germany and the other Axis Powers, defense manufacturing geared up, producing more and more private-sector jobs.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 led to America's entry into World War II, and the nation's factories went back into full production mode.

This expanding industrial production, as well as widespread conscription beginning in 1942, reduced the unemployment rate to below its pre-Depression level. The Great Depression had ended at last, and the United States turned its attention to the global conflict of World War II.

Photo Galleries

HISTORY Vault

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Great Depression: Black Thursday, Facts & Effects

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The Great Depression was the worst economic downturn in the history of the industrialized world, lasting from 1929 to 1939. At its peak, the U.S. unemployment rate topped 20 percent.

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Who: Amelia Earhart
What: She disapeared
When: July 2, 1937
Where: Lockheed aircraft
Why: No one knows

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On July 2, 1937, the Lockheed aircraft carrying American aviator Amelia Earhart and navigator Frederick Noonan is reported missing near Howland Island in the Pacific. The pair were attempting to fly around the world when they lost their bearings during the most challenging leg of the global journey: Lae, New Guinea, to Howland Island, a tiny island 2,227 nautical miles away, in the center of the Pacific Ocean. The U.S. Coast Guard cutter Itasca was in sporadic radio contact with Earhart as she approached Howland Island and received messages that she was lost and running low on fuel. Soon after, she probably tried to ditch the Lockheed in the ocean. No trace of Earhart or Noonan was ever found.

Amelia Earhart was born in Atchison, Kansas, in 1897. She took up aviation at the age of 24 and later gained publicity as one of the earliest female aviators. In 1928, the publisher George P. Putnam suggested Earhart become the first woman to fly across the Atlantic Ocean. The previous year, Charles A. Lindbergh had flown solo nonstop across the Atlantic, and Putnam had made a fortune off Lindbergh's autobiographical book We.

In June 1928, Earhart and two men flew from Newfoundland, Canada, to Wales, Great Britain. Although Earhart's only function during the crossing was to keep the plane's log, the flight won her great fame, and Americans were enamored of the daring young pilot. The three were honored with a ticker-tape parade in New York, and "Lady Lindy," as Earhart was dubbed, was given a White House reception by President Calvin Coolidge.

Earhart wrote a book about the flight for Putnam, whom she married in 1931, and gave lectures and continued her flying career under her maiden name. On May 20, 1932, she took off alone from Newfoundland in a Lockheed Vega on the first solo nonstop transatlantic flight by a woman. She was bound for Paris but was blown off course and landed in Ireland on May 21 after flying more than 2,000 miles in just under 15 hours. It was the fifth anniversary of Lindbergh's historic flight, and before Earhart no one had attempted to repeat his solo transatlantic flight. For her achievement, she was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross by Congress. Three months later, Earhart became the first woman to fly solo nonstop across the continental United States.

In 1935, in the first flight of its kind, she flew solo from Wheeler Field in Honolulu to Oakland, California, winning a $10,000 award posted by Hawaiian commercial interests. Later that year, she was appointed a consultant in careers for women at Purdue University, and the school bought her a modern Lockheed Electra aircraft to be used as a "flying laboratory."

On March 17, 1937, she took off from Oakland and flew west on an around-the-world attempt. It would not be the first global flight, but it would be the longest-29,000 miles, following an equatorial route. Accompanying Earhart in the Lockheed was Frederick Noonan, her navigator and a former Pan American pilot. After resting and refueling in Honolulu, the pair prepared to resume the flight. However, while taking off for Howland Island, Earhart ground-looped the plane on the runway, perhaps because of a blown tire, and the Lockheed was seriously damaged. The flight was called off, and the aircraft was shipped back to California for repairs.

In May, Earhart flew the newly rebuilt plane to Miami, from where Noonan and she would make a new around-the-world attempt, this time from west to east. They left Miami on June 1, and after stops in South America, Africa, India, and Southeast Asia, they arrived at Lae, New Guinea, on June 29. About 22,000 miles of the journey had been completed, and the last 7,000 miles would all be over the Pacific Ocean. The next destination was Howland Island, a tiny U.S.-owned island that was just a few miles long. The U.S. Department of Commerce had a weather observation station and a landing strip on the island, and the staff was ready with fuel and supplies. Several U.S. ships, including the Coast Guard cutter Itasca, were deployed to aid Earhart and Noonan in this difficult leg of their journey.

As the Lockheed approached Howland Island, Earhart radioed the Itasca and explained that she was low on fuel. However, after several hours of frustrating attempts, two-way communication was only briefly established, and the Itasca was unable to pinpoint the Lockheed's location or offer navigational information. Earhart circled the Itasca 's position but was unable to sight the ship, which was sending out miles of black smoke. She radioed "one-half hour fuel and no landfall" and later tried to give information on her position. Soon after, contact was lost, and Earhart presumably tried to land the Lockheed on the water.

If her landing on the water was perfect, Earhart and Noonan might have had time to escape the aircraft with a life raft and survival equipment before it sank. An intensive search of the vicinity by the Coast Guard and U.S. Navy found no physical evidence of the fliers or their plane.

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We strive for accuracy and fairness. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! HISTORY reviews and updates its content regularly to ensure it is complete and accurate.

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Amelia Earhart disappears | July 2, 1937 | HISTORY

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
On July 2, 1937, the Lockheed aircraft carrying American aviator Amelia Earhart and navigator Frederick Noonan is reported missing near Howland Island in the Pacific. The pair were attempting to fly around the world when they lost their bearings during the most challenging leg of the global journey: Lae, New Guinea, to Howland Island, a [...]

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Who: 🤬 Germany, Henri Giffard, 36 passengers and crew of 6.
What: the airship suddenly burst into
Where: The lakehurst
Why:Because of the Germany
When: May 6, 1937

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The airship Hindenburg, the largest dirigible ever built and the pride of Nazi Germany, bursts into flames upon touching its mooring mast in Lakehurst, New Jersey, killing 36 passengers and crew-members, on May 6, 1937.

Frenchman Henri Giffard constructed the first successful airship in 1852. His hydrogen-filled blimp carried a three-horsepower steam engine that turned a large propeller and flew at a speed of six miles per hour. The rigid airship, often known as the "zeppelin" after the last name of its innovator, Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, was developed by the Germans in the late 19th century. Unlike French airships, the German ships had a light framework of metal girders that protected a gas-filled interior. However, like Giffard's airship, they were lifted by highly flammable hydrogen gas and vulnerable to explosion. Large enough to carry substantial numbers of passengers, one of the most famous rigid airships was the Graf Zeppelin, a dirigible that traveled around the world in 1929. In the 1930s, the Graf Zeppelin pioneered the first transatlantic air service, leading to the construction of the Hindenburg, a larger passenger airship.

On May 3, 1937, the Hindenburg left Frankfurt, Germany, for a journey across the Atlantic to Lakehurst's Navy Air Base. Stretching 804 feet from stern to bow, it carried 36 passengers and crew of 61. While attempting to moor at Lakehurst, the airship suddenly burst into flames, probably after a spark ignited its hydrogen core. Rapidly falling 200 feet to the ground, the hull of the airship incinerated within seconds. Thirteen passengers, 21 crewmen, and 1 civilian member of the ground crew lost their lives, and most of the survivors suffered substantial injuries.

Radio announcer Herb Morrison, who came to Lakehurst to record a routine voice-over for an NBC newsreel, immortalized the Hindenberg disaster in a famous on-the-scene description in which he emotionally declared, "Oh, the humanity!" The recording of Morrison's commentary was immediately flown to New York, where it was aired as part of America's first coast-to-coast radio news broadcast. Lighter-than-air passenger travel rapidly fell out of favor after the Hindenberg disaster, and no rigid airships survived World War II.

Fact Check

We strive for accuracy and fairness. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! HISTORY reviews and updates its content regularly to ensure it is complete and accurate.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The airship Hindenburg, the largest dirigible ever built and the pride of Nazi Germany, bursts into flames upon touching its mooring mast in Lakehurst, New Jersey, killing 36 passengers and crew-members, on May 6, 1937. Frenchman Henri Giffard constructed the first successful airship in 1852.

# data[].attributes.body
Who- America
What-
When-  1929-1939
where- United State8
why-

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
What Caused the Great Depression?

Throughout the 1920s, the U.S. economy expanded rapidly, and the nation's total wealth more than doubled between 1920 and 1929, a period dubbed " the Roaring Twenties."

The stock market, centered at the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street in New York City, was the scene of reckless speculation, where everyone from millionaire tycoons to cooks and janitors poured their savings into stocks. As a result, the stock market underwent rapid expansion, reaching its peak in August 1929.

By then, production had already declined and unemployment had risen, leaving stock prices much higher than their actual value. Additionally, wages at that time were low, consumer debt was proliferating, the agricultural sector of the economy was struggling due to drought and falling food prices and banks had an excess of large loans that could not be liquidated.

The American economy entered a mild recession during the summer of 1929, as consumer spending slowed and unsold goods began to pile up, which in turn slowed factory production. Nonetheless, stock prices continued to rise, and by the fall of that year had reached stratospheric levels that could not be justified by expected future earnings.

Stock Market Crash of 1929

On October 24, 1929, as nervous investors began selling overpriced shares en masse, the stock market crash that some had feared happened at last. A record 12.9 million shares were traded that day, known as "Black Thursday."

Five days later, on October 29, or "Black Tuesday," some 16 million shares were traded after another wave of panic swept Wall Street. Millions of shares ended up worthless, and those investors who had bought stocks "on margin" (with borrowed money) were wiped out completely.

As consumer confidence vanished in the wake of the stock market crash, the downturn in spending and investment led factories and other businesses to slow down production and begin firing their workers. For those who were lucky enough to remain employed, wages fell and buying power decreased.

Many Americans forced to buy on credit fell into debt, and the number of foreclosures and repossessions climbed steadily. The global adherence to the gold standard, which joined countries around the world in fixed currency exchange, helped spread economic woes from the United States throughout the world, especially in Europe.

Bank Runs and the Hoover Administration

Despite assurances from President Herbert Hoover and other leaders that the crisis would run its course, matters continued to get worse over the next three years. By 1930, 4 million Americans looking for work could not find it; that number had risen to 6 million in 1931.

Meanwhile, the country's industrial production had dropped by half. Bread lines, soup kitchens and rising numbers of homeless people became more and more common in America's towns and cities. Farmers couldn't afford to harvest their crops and were forced to leave them rotting in the fields while people elsewhere starved. In 1930, severe droughts in the Southern Plains brought high winds and dust from Texas to Nebraska, killing people, livestock and crops. The " Dust Bowl " inspired a mass migration of people from farmland to cities in search of work.

In the fall of 1930, the first of four waves of banking panics began, as large numbers of investors lost confidence in the solvency of their banks and demanded deposits in cash, forcing banks to liquidate loans in order to supplement their insufficient cash reserves on hand.

Bank runs swept the United States again in the spring and fall of 1931 and the fall of 1932, and by early 1933 thousands of banks had closed their doors.

In the face of this dire situation, Hoover's administration tried supporting failing banks and other institutions with government loans; the idea was that the banks in turn would loan to businesses, which would be able to hire back their employees.

FDR and the Great Depression

Hoover, a Republican who had formerly served as U.S. secretary of commerce, believed that government should not directly intervene in the economy and that it did not have the responsibility to create jobs or provide economic relief for its citizens.

In 1932, however, with the country mired in the depths of the Great Depression and some 15 million people unemployed, Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt won an overwhelming victory in the presidential election.

By Inauguration Day (March 4, 1933), every U.S. state had ordered all remaining banks to close at the end of the fourth wave of banking panics, and the U.S. Treasury didn't have enough cash to pay all government workers. Nonetheless, FDR (as he was known) projected a calm energy and optimism, famously declaring "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

Roosevelt took immediate action to address the country's economic woes, first announcing a four-day "bank holiday" during which all banks would close so that Congress could pass reform legislation and reopen those banks determined to be sound. He also began addressing the public directly over the radio in a series of talks, and these so-called " fireside chats " went a long way toward restoring public confidence.

During Roosevelt's first 100 days in office, his administration passed legislation that aimed to stabilize industrial and agricultural production, create jobs and stimulate recovery.

In addition, Roosevelt sought to reform the financial system, creating the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation ( FDIC) to protect depositors' accounts and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to regulate the stock market and prevent abuses of the kind that led to the 1929 crash.

The New Deal: A Road to Recovery

Among the programs and institutions of the New Deal that aided in recovery from the Great Depression was the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), which built dams and hydroelectric projects to control flooding and provide electric power to the impoverished Tennessee Valley region, and the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a permanent jobs program that employed 8.5 million people from 1935 to 1943.

When the Great Depression began, the United States was the only industrialized country in the world without some form of unemployment insurance or social security. In 1935, Congress passed the Social Security Act, which for the first time provided Americans with unemployment, disability and pensions for old age.

After showing early signs of recovery beginning in the spring of 1933, the economy continued to improve throughout the next three years, during which real GDP (adjusted for inflation) grew at an average rate of 9 percent per year.

A sharp recession hit in 1937, caused in part by the Federal Reserve's decision to increase its requirements for money in reserve. Though the economy began improving again in 1938, this second severe contraction reversed many of the gains in production and employment and prolonged the effects of the Great Depression through the end of the decade.

Depression-era hardships fueled the rise of extremist political movements in various European countries, most notably that of Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime in Germany. German aggression led war to break out in Europe in 1939, and the WPA turned its attention to strengthening the military infrastructure of the United States, even as the country maintained its neutrality.

African Americans in the Great Depression

One-fifth of all Americans receiving federal relief during the Great Depression were Black, most in the rural South. But farm and domestic work, two major sectors in which Black workers were employed, were not included in the 1935 Social Security Act, meaning there was no safety net in times of uncertainty. Rather than fire domestic help, private employers could simply pay them less without legal repercussions. And those relief programs for which African Americans were eligible on paper were rife with discrimination in practice since all relief programs were administered locally.

Despite these obstacles, Roosevelt's "Black Cabinet," led by Mary McLeod Bethune, ensured nearly every New Deal agency had a Black advisor. The number of African Americans working in government tripled.

Women in the Great Depression

There was one group of Americans who actually gained jobs during the Great Depression: Women. From 1930 to 1940, the number of employed women in the United States rose 24 percent from 10.5 million to 13 million Though they'd been steadily entering the workforce for decades, the financial pressures of the Great Depression drove women to seek employment in ever greater numbers as male breadwinners lost their jobs. The 22 percent decline in marriage rates between 1929 and 1939 also created an increase in single women in search of employment.

Women during the Great Depression had a strong advocate in First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who lobbied her husband for more women in office-like Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, the first woman to ever hold a cabinet position.

Jobs available to women paid less but were more stable during the banking crisis: nursing, teaching and domestic work. They were supplanted by an increase in secretarial roles in FDR's rapidly-expanding government. But there was a catch: over 25 percent of the National Recovery Administration's wage codes set lower wages for women, and jobs created under the WPA confined women to fields like sewing and nursing that paid less than roles reserved for men.

Married women faced an additional hurdle: By 1940, 26 states had placed restrictions known as marriage bars on their employment, as working wives were perceived as taking away jobs from able-bodied men-even if, in practice, they were occupying jobs men would not want and doing them for far less pay.

Great Depression Ends and World War II Begins

With Roosevelt's decision to support Britain and France in the struggle against Germany and the other Axis Powers, defense manufacturing geared up, producing more and more private-sector jobs.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 led to America's entry into World War II, and the nation's factories went back into full production mode.

This expanding industrial production, as well as widespread conscription beginning in 1942, reduced the unemployment rate to below its pre-Depression level. The Great Depression had ended at last, and the United States turned its attention to the global conflict of World War II.

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Great Depression: Black Thursday, Facts & Effects

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The Great Depression was the worst economic downturn in the history of the industrialized world, lasting from 1929 to 1939. At its peak, the U.S. unemployment rate topped 20 percent.

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Who: Southern Plains region of the U.S. (Kansas)
What: Period which suffered severe dust storms, livestock was killed and crops failed across the whole region.
When: Started in 1930 and lasted about a decade. (1930-1940)
Where: Great Plains and far east through Washington and New York City.
Why: Storms caused by economic and agricultural factors and federal land policies. Changes in weather also caused severe dust storms.

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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 19th and early 20th-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 a 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.

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.

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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Dust Bowl: Causes, Definition & Years - HISTORY

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The Dust Bowl refers to the drought-stricken southern plains of the United States, which suffered severe dust storms during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

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Who-Amelia Earhart
What-While she was exploring the world with her friend she disappear

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Who-Amelia Earhart
What-While she was exploring the world with her friend she disappear

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Who: Henri Giffard built it
What: bursts into flames
when: May 3, 1937
where: Lakehurst’s Navy Air Base
why: after a spark ignited its hydrogen core

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The airship Hindenburg, the largest dirigible ever built and the pride of Nazi Germany, bursts into flames upon touching its mooring mast in Lakehurst, New Jersey, killing 36 passengers and crew-members, on May 6, 1937.

Frenchman Henri Giffard constructed the first successful airship in 1852. His hydrogen-filled blimp carried a three-horsepower steam engine that turned a large propeller and flew at a speed of six miles per hour. The rigid airship, often known as the "zeppelin" after the last name of its innovator, Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, was developed by the Germans in the late 19th century. Unlike French airships, the German ships had a light framework of metal girders that protected a gas-filled interior. However, like Giffard's airship, they were lifted by highly flammable hydrogen gas and vulnerable to explosion. Large enough to carry substantial numbers of passengers, one of the most famous rigid airships was the Graf Zeppelin, a dirigible that traveled around the world in 1929. In the 1930s, the Graf Zeppelin pioneered the first transatlantic air service, leading to the construction of the Hindenburg, a larger passenger airship.

On May 3, 1937, the Hindenburg left Frankfurt, Germany, for a journey across the Atlantic to Lakehurst's Navy Air Base. Stretching 804 feet from stern to bow, it carried 36 passengers and crew of 61. While attempting to moor at Lakehurst, the airship suddenly burst into flames, probably after a spark ignited its hydrogen core. Rapidly falling 200 feet to the ground, the hull of the airship incinerated within seconds. Thirteen passengers, 21 crewmen, and 1 civilian member of the ground crew lost their lives, and most of the survivors suffered substantial injuries.

Radio announcer Herb Morrison, who came to Lakehurst to record a routine voice-over for an NBC newsreel, immortalized the Hindenberg disaster in a famous on-the-scene description in which he emotionally declared, "Oh, the humanity!" The recording of Morrison's commentary was immediately flown to New York, where it was aired as part of America's first coast-to-coast radio news broadcast. Lighter-than-air passenger travel rapidly fell out of favor after the Hindenberg disaster, and no rigid airships survived World War II.

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The airship Hindenburg, the largest dirigible ever built and the pride of Nazi Germany, bursts into flames upon touching its mooring mast in Lakehurst, New Jersey, killing 36 passengers and crew-members, on May 6, 1937. Frenchman Henri Giffard constructed the first successful airship in 1852.

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Who- Amelia Earhart
What-She Vanishes over the pacific
When
Where-
Why-

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On July 2, 1937, the Lockheed aircraft carrying American aviator Amelia Earhart and navigator Frederick Noonan is reported missing near Howland Island in the Pacific. The pair were attempting to fly around the world when they lost their bearings during the most challenging leg of the global journey: Lae, New Guinea, to Howland Island, a tiny island 2,227 nautical miles away, in the center of the Pacific Ocean. The U.S. Coast Guard cutter Itasca was in sporadic radio contact with Earhart as she approached Howland Island and received messages that she was lost and running low on fuel. Soon after, she probably tried to ditch the Lockheed in the ocean. No trace of Earhart or Noonan was ever found.

Amelia Earhart was born in Atchison, Kansas, in 1897. She took up aviation at the age of 24 and later gained publicity as one of the earliest female aviators. In 1928, the publisher George P. Putnam suggested Earhart become the first woman to fly across the Atlantic Ocean. The previous year, Charles A. Lindbergh had flown solo nonstop across the Atlantic, and Putnam had made a fortune off Lindbergh's autobiographical book We.

In June 1928, Earhart and two men flew from Newfoundland, Canada, to Wales, Great Britain. Although Earhart's only function during the crossing was to keep the plane's log, the flight won her great fame, and Americans were enamored of the daring young pilot. The three were honored with a ticker-tape parade in New York, and "Lady Lindy," as Earhart was dubbed, was given a White House reception by President Calvin Coolidge.

Earhart wrote a book about the flight for Putnam, whom she married in 1931, and gave lectures and continued her flying career under her maiden name. On May 20, 1932, she took off alone from Newfoundland in a Lockheed Vega on the first solo nonstop transatlantic flight by a woman. She was bound for Paris but was blown off course and landed in Ireland on May 21 after flying more than 2,000 miles in just under 15 hours. It was the fifth anniversary of Lindbergh's historic flight, and before Earhart no one had attempted to repeat his solo transatlantic flight. For her achievement, she was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross by Congress. Three months later, Earhart became the first woman to fly solo nonstop across the continental United States.

In 1935, in the first flight of its kind, she flew solo from Wheeler Field in Honolulu to Oakland, California, winning a $10,000 award posted by Hawaiian commercial interests. Later that year, she was appointed a consultant in careers for women at Purdue University, and the school bought her a modern Lockheed Electra aircraft to be used as a "flying laboratory."

On March 17, 1937, she took off from Oakland and flew west on an around-the-world attempt. It would not be the first global flight, but it would be the longest-29,000 miles, following an equatorial route. Accompanying Earhart in the Lockheed was Frederick Noonan, her navigator and a former Pan American pilot. After resting and refueling in Honolulu, the pair prepared to resume the flight. However, while taking off for Howland Island, Earhart ground-looped the plane on the runway, perhaps because of a blown tire, and the Lockheed was seriously damaged. The flight was called off, and the aircraft was shipped back to California for repairs.

In May, Earhart flew the newly rebuilt plane to Miami, from where Noonan and she would make a new around-the-world attempt, this time from west to east. They left Miami on June 1, and after stops in South America, Africa, India, and Southeast Asia, they arrived at Lae, New Guinea, on June 29. About 22,000 miles of the journey had been completed, and the last 7,000 miles would all be over the Pacific Ocean. The next destination was Howland Island, a tiny U.S.-owned island that was just a few miles long. The U.S. Department of Commerce had a weather observation station and a landing strip on the island, and the staff was ready with fuel and supplies. Several U.S. ships, including the Coast Guard cutter Itasca, were deployed to aid Earhart and Noonan in this difficult leg of their journey.

As the Lockheed approached Howland Island, Earhart radioed the Itasca and explained that she was low on fuel. However, after several hours of frustrating attempts, two-way communication was only briefly established, and the Itasca was unable to pinpoint the Lockheed's location or offer navigational information. Earhart circled the Itasca 's position but was unable to sight the ship, which was sending out miles of black smoke. She radioed "one-half hour fuel and no landfall" and later tried to give information on her position. Soon after, contact was lost, and Earhart presumably tried to land the Lockheed on the water.

If her landing on the water was perfect, Earhart and Noonan might have had time to escape the aircraft with a life raft and survival equipment before it sank. An intensive search of the vicinity by the Coast Guard and U.S. Navy found no physical evidence of the fliers or their plane.

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Amelia Earhart disappears | July 2, 1937 | HISTORY

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On July 2, 1937, the Lockheed aircraft carrying American aviator Amelia Earhart and navigator Frederick Noonan is reported missing near Howland Island in the Pacific. The pair were attempting to fly around the world when they lost their bearings during the most challenging leg of the global journey: Lae, New Guinea, to Howland Island, a [...]

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who- United States
what-stock market crash
when- October 29, 1929
where- America
why- banks were unregulated and uninsured

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The Great Depression

The stock market crash of October 29, 1929 (also known as Black Tuesday) provided a dramatic end to an era of unprecedented, and unprecedentedly lopsided, prosperity.

The disaster had been brewing for years, though different historians and economists offer different explanations for the crisis: Some blame the increasingly uneven distribution of wealth and purchasing power in the 1920s, while others blame the decade's agricultural slump or the international instability caused by World War I.

In any case, the nation was woefully unprepared for the crash. For the most part, banks were unregulated and uninsured. The government offered no insurance or compensation for the unemployed, so when people stopped earning, they stopped spending. The consumer economy ground to a halt and an ordinary recession became the Great Depression, the defining event of the 1930s.

Dust Bowl

The 1930s saw natural disasters as well as manmade ones: For most of the decade, people in the Plains states suffered through the worst drought in American history, as well as hundreds of severe dust storms, or "black blizzards," that carried away the soil and made it all but impossible to plant crops.

By 1940, 2.5 million people had abandoned their farms in this Dust Bowl and headed west to California. The crisis gave the decade an unfortunate nickname: the "Dirty Thirties."

Other natural disasters struck more quickly: The 1935 Labor Day Hurricane hit the Florida Keys as the most violent hurricane to ever make landfall in the Atlantic basin. The New England Hurricane of 1938, also a Category 5 storm, caused property losses roughly equal to $5 billion in today's money.

Herbert Hoover

President Herbert Hoover was slow to respond to these events. Though he believed that the "crazy and dangerous" behavior of Wall Street speculators had contributed in a significant way to the crisis, he also believed that solving such problems was not really the federal government's job.

As a result, most of the solutions he suggested were voluntary: He asked state governments to undertake public works projects; he asked big companies to keep workers' pay steady and he asked labor unions to stop demanding raises. The shantytowns that were popping up as more and more people lost their homes were nicknamed " Hoovervilles " as an insult to the president's hands-off policies.

The crisis worsened, and life for the average American during the Great Depression was challenging. Between 1930 and 1933, more than 9,000 banks closed in the U.S., taking with them more than $2.5 billion in deposits. Meanwhile, unemployed people did whatever they could, like standing in charity breadlines and selling apples on street corners, to feed their families.

Roosevelt's New Deal

By 1932, many Americans were fed up with Hoover and what his political opponent Franklin D. Roosevelt called his "hear nothing, see nothing, do nothing government. The New York governor and Democratic presidential challenger, Roosevelt promised a change: "I pledge myself," he said, "to a New Deal for the American people."

This New Deal would use the power of the federal government to try and stop the economy's downward spiral. Roosevelt won the 1932 presidential election handily.

The new president acted swiftly during his first hundred days in office to "wage a war against the emergency" just as though "we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe." First, he shored up the nation's banks.

Then he began to propose more comprehensive reforms. By June, Roosevelt and Congress had passed 15 major laws-including the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the Glass-Steagall Act, the Home Owners' Loan Act, the Tennessee Valley Authority Act and the National Industrial Recovery Act-that fundamentally reshaped many aspects of the American economy.

Additionally, the Civilian Conservation Corps gave millions of young men employment on environmental and public works projects. These decisive actions also did much to restore Americans' confidence that, as Roosevelt had declared in his inaugural address, "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

American Culture During the 1930s

During the Depression, most people did not have much money to spare. However, by 1938 about 80 percent of American households had radios-and listening to the radio was free.

The most popular broadcasts were those that distracted listeners from their everyday struggles: comedy programs like "Amos 'n' Andy," soap operas and sporting events. Swing music encouraged people to cast aside their troubles and dance.

Jazz Age bandleaders like Benny Goodman, Fletcher Henderson, Count Basie and Duke Ellington drew crowds of people to Art Deco ballrooms and dance halls around the country. And when Prohibition ended in 1933-freeing up legal sales of liquor-cocktail lounges and barrooms were happy to quench the national thirst for alcohol.

Even though money was tight, people kept going to see Hollywood movies-now being made in color. Musicals, screwball comedies and hard-boiled gangster pictures from the Golden Age of Hollywood-films like "The Wizard of Oz," "It's a Wonderful Life," "Casablanca," "King Kong," "Gone With the Wind" and the animated "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" from Walt Disney -offered audiences an escape from some of the grim realities of life in the 1930s.

The Second New Deal

President Roosevelt's early efforts had begun to restore Americans' confidence, but they had not ended the Depression. In the spring of 1935, he launched a second, more aggressive set of federal programs, sometimes called the Second New Deal.

The Works Progress Administration provided jobs for unemployed people and built new public works like bridges, post offices, schools, highways and parks. The National Labor Relations Act of 1935, also known as the Wagner Act, gave workers the right to form unions and bargain collectively for higher wages and fairer treatment.

The Social Security Act of 1935 guaranteed pensions to some older Americans, set up a system of unemployment insurance and stipulated that the federal government would help care for dependent children and the disabled.

Roosevelt's Second Term

In 1936, while campaigning for a second term, President Roosevelt 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."

Roosevelt won the 1936 election by a landslide. Still, the Depression dragged on. Workers grew more militant: In December 1936, for example, the United Auto Workers started a sit-down strike at a GM plant in Flint, Michigan that 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 Depression Ends

By the end of the 1930s, the New Deal had come to an end. Growing Congressional opposition made it difficult for President Roosevelt to introduce new programs. At the same time, as the threat of war in Europe loomed on the horizon- Adolf Hitler was named Chancellor of Germany in 1933, and invaded Poland in 1939 -the president turned his attention away from domestic politics.

In December 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and the U.S. entered World War II. The war effort stimulated American industry and the Great Depression was over.

Sources

Timeline: 1930s. Securities and Exchange Commission Historical Society.
Breaking News of the 1930s. PBS: American Experience.
List of 1930's Major News Events in History. The People History.

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1930s: Music, Movies & Great Depression - HISTORY

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The 1930s were the decade of the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl and other problems, but also the Franklin D. Roosevelt presidency and Hollywood's Golden Age.

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Who- Franklin D. Roosevelt, Arthur Powell Davis, Patrick Tierney,
What- They built the hoover dam to seperate to states
When- 1931- 1936
Where- Los Angeles, southern California
Why- provide a dependable supply of water for Los Angeles and other southern California communities

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On this day in 1930, construction of the Hoover Dam begins. Over the next five years, a total of 21,000 men would work ceaselessly to produce what would be the largest dam of its time, as well as one of the largest manmade structures in the world.

Although the dam would take only five years to build, its construction was nearly 30 years in the making. Arthur Powell Davis, an engineer from the Bureau of Reclamation, originally had his vision for the Hoover Dam back in 1902, and his engineering report on the topic became the guiding document when plans were finally made to begin the dam in 1922.

Herbert Hoover, the 31st president of the United States and a committed conservationist, played a crucial role in making Davis' vision a reality. As secretary of commerce in 1921, Hoover devoted himself to the erection of a high dam in Boulder Canyon, Colorado. The dam would provide essential flood control, which would prevent damage to downstream farming communities that suffered each year when snow from the Rocky Mountains melted and joined the Colorado River. Further, the dam would allow the expansion of irrigated farming in the desert, and would provide a dependable supply of water for Los Angeles and other southern California communities.

Even with Hoover's exuberant backing and a regional consensus around the need to build the dam, Congressional approval and individual state cooperation were slow in coming. For many years, water rights had been a source of contention among the western states that had claims on the Colorado River. To address this issue, Hoover negotiated the Colorado River Compact, which broke the river basin into two regions with the water divided between them. Hoover then had to introduce and re-introduce the bill to build the dam several times over the next few years before the House and Senate finally approved the bill in 1928.

In 1929, Hoover, now president, signed the Colorado River Compact into law, claiming it was "the most extensive action ever taken by a group of states under the provisions of the Constitution permitting compacts between states."

Once preparations were made, the Hoover Dam's construction sprinted forward: The contractors finished their work two years ahead of schedule and millions of dollars under budget. Today, the Hoover Dam is the second highest dam in the country and the 18th highest in the world. It generates enough energy each year to serve over a million people, and stands, in Hoover Dam artist Oskar Hansen's words, as "a monument to collective genius exerting itself in community efforts around a common need or ideal."

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On this day in 1930, construction of the Hoover Dam begins. Over the next five years, a total of 21,000 men would work ceaselessly to produce what would be the largest dam of its time, as well as one of the largest manmade structures in the world.

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Who: Americans
What: Arizona scientist reveal their newest discovery  a ninth planet named Pluto, after the Greek god. So then Walt Disney Introduced a new animated character Pluto from mickey mouse
When: February 18, 1930
where: Arizona
Why: The discovery sparked peoples interest in space and Walt Disney

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War of the Worlds | Timeline

By the 1930s the radio was becoming a staple in many American homes. For the first time, citizens did not have to wait until the evening paper to get the latest news -- radios brought breaking news right into people's living rooms. The airwaves carried talk about jobs and the economy during the Great Depression, but Americans also heard news about incredible advances in science and technology, celebrities of aviation exploration, and political changes afoot in Europe. Read more about some of the breaking news events of the 1930s.

1930
More than four million people are unemployed as a result of the Wall Street Crash of 1929.

February 18, 1930
Arizona scientists reveal their newest discovery -- a ninth planet they name Pluto, after the Greek God of the underworld. The discovery sparks public interest in space and inspires Walt Disney to introduce a new animated character, Pluto -- Mickey Mouse's canine companion.

April 1, 1930
For the first time, the 30th U.S. Census asks whether the respondents owned a radio, reflecting an increased interest in communication technology and consumer goods.

September 14, 1930
The Nazi party becomes the second largest political party in Germany, overtaking the Communists.

September 17, 1930
Ray Lyman Wilbur, Secretary of the Interior under President Hoover, drives a silver railroad spike to mark the official start of the construction of the Hoover Dam. The Hoover Dam was part of a larger public works relief program to create jobs for those struggling during the first years of the Great Depression.

October 5, 1930
CBS broadcasts the New York Philharmonic live over the radio for the first time. Since the historic broadcast, the Philharmonic has continued to be a consistent presence on national radio.

January 1930
The President's Emergency Committee for Unemployment Relief reports that 5 million Americans are unemployed. Hoover's promise that the Depression would end quickly begins to seem hollow to the many Americans struggling to support their families.

March 3, 1931
Congress and President Hoover approve The Star Spangled Banner, by Francis Scott Key, as the U.S. national anthem.

May 7, 1931
Ernest Goodpasture helps advance scientific understandings of infectious disease when he publishes "The Susceptibility of the Chorio-Allantoic Membrane of Chick Embryos to Infection with Fowl-Pox Virus." By growing viruses in chicken eggs, he facilitates the production of crucial vaccines. Goodpasture's findings would earn him public praise and awards from the professional scientific community.

September 19, 1931
Britain leaves the gold standard, leading many in the U.S. to believe another stock market disaster is imminent. Over the next two months, hundreds of banks will close as Americans hastily close out their accounts.

March 1, 1932
Sometime between eight and 10pm Charles Augustus Lindbergh, Jr., infant son of famous aviato Charles Lindbergh, is kidnapped from him home. By 10:30, radio broadcasts are announcing the story to the nation.

May 21, 1932
Amelia Earhart is the first woman to fly alone across the Atlantic. News of her landing in Ireland brings Earhart instant international fame. She will later receive awards from the U.S. Congress, the French Government and from President Hoover.

July 7, 1932
Franklin Roosevelt accepts the Democratic nomination for President of the United States. In his speech at the Democratic National Convention, he states: "I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people." His "new deal" would become the name of his strategy to bring America out of the Great Depression.

January 30, 1933
Adolf Hitler becomes Chancellor of Germany. Hitler's rise to power is a critical turning point for Germany and for the world. He proposes eliminating traditional party politics, creating a unified one-party state and eradicating all opposition to the Nazi party. News of the power shift worries American leadership and political pundits, who believe Hitler's extremism could lead to a dark future.

March 3, 1933
New U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt gives his first radio "fireside chat," directly connecting to the American public. Radio allows Roosevelt to calmly and collectively explain his methods for social change, and gives a boost to his public standing. The radio also allows him to reach the American people while concealing his polio symptoms.

April 7, 1933
Beer containing up to 3.2 percent alcohol becomes legal after over 15 years of Prohibition. With news of the legalization, Anheuser-Busch sends their iconic Clydesdale horses to the White House to deliver a case of Budweiser, a media stunt that gets the public laughing. Most Americans enthusiastically greet the news of the repeal.

May 27, 1933
The World's Fair opens in Chicago. Commemorating an era of technological advancement, it celebrates "A Century of Progress," and includes items such as the German airship Graf Zeppelin, Cadillac's newest limousine, and futuristic model homes.

October 1933
Oklahoma engineer Karl Jansky publishes Electrical Disturbances Apparently of Extraterrestrial Origins after discovering radio waves emanating from the Milky Way that are causing mysterious radio interference and static. The article is highly publicized. Jansky would eventually be known as the "Father of Radio Astronomy."

February 16, 1934
In New York City's Madison Square Garden, thousands of Communists and Socialists battle in a violent rally. The incident generates news stories that feed into many people's growing uneasiness of Socialism and Communism.

May 11-13, 1934
A dust storm ravages several Midwestern and Western states including Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kansas, and Colorado, forcing hundreds of families to leave their farms. These storms will plague the nation for the next nine years, causing devastating agricultural damage to America's prairie lands and leaving thousands homeless.

August 16, 1934
The first prisoners are delivered to Alcatraz Prison in San Francisco Bay, which houses mostly notorious bank robbers and murderers. The prison will become an iconic symbol of mystery, thrilling Americans with its stories of ghosts, murders and escapes.

April 25, 1935
The first around-the-world telephone conversation spans from New York to San Francisco, Indonesia, Holland, England and back to New York. The call marks a new era in technological advancement.

April 27, 1935
Flash Gordon, the popular science fiction radio show debuts, starring the fictional character Gale Gordon. The American public is immediately enthralled with the exciting story of the hero's adventures on the planet "Mongo." Similar adventure shows attract families to gather around the radio each night.

November 15, 1935
The Nazis revoke German citizenship for all Jews. With the 1936 Olympic games scheduled in Berlin, the German government tones down public anti-Jewish rhetoric over worries that international criticism of Hitler's government could lead organizers to transfer the games to another country.

April 16, 1936
As part of the job stimulus program of the Works Project Administration, Orson Welles directs an all-black cast of Macbeth for the Negro People's Theatre. Both the New York Times and the New York Daily News praise the production.

August 3-9, 1936
African American athlete Jesse Owens wins four gold medals at the Berlin Olympics in front of Adolf Hitler, who has recently begun his campaign for the "dominance" of the Aryan race. News of Owens' accomplishment sparks public interest, however, Owens continues to face racial inequality at home.

January 18, 1937
Record rainfall overflows the banks of the Ohio River, leaving 1 million Americans homeless, and $250 million in property damage. Radio stations around the nation broadcast news about the flood for weeks without commercial breaks. Most broadcasts are filled with messages for rescue crews, as many government agencies have no other means of communication.

January 20, 1937
Roosevelt is inaugurated for the second time as a result of one of the greatest landslide victories in American history. As Americans tune in to their radios from all over the country, FDR focuses his inaugural address on the poor "forgotten" American.

May 1937
Another dust storm hits the West and Midwest. Economic recovery comes to a halt, sending the economy of the region into a second depression and local morale to a new low.

May 6, 1937
The Hindenburg, a German airship carrying passengers planning to attend the coronation festivities of Queen Elizabeth in London, explodes in Lakehurst, N.J., killing 36 people. The media there to cover the flight ends up recording the disaster live with newsreel, radio coverage, and photographs. CBS reporter Herbert Morrison's eyewitness "live" radio report is broadcast the next day. Orson Welles replayed the report for his cast as an example of the tone he wanted for War of the Worlds.

July 2, 1937
Amelia Earhart crashes off the coast of Howland Island in the Pacific Ocean in her attempt to become the first woman to fly around the world. The news media round-the-clock coverage of the event fascinates the American public and helps generate conspiracy theories about the cause of the mysterious crash.

September 26, 1937
Orson Welles voices protagonist Lamont Cranston on the radio show, The Shadow. Fans adore the show and identify Welles' voice with the wealthy, young crime fighter who has psychic powers.

1938
By 1938, nearly 80% of American households own a radio.

October 30, 1938
Orson Welles airs his famous War of the Worlds broadcast on CBS radio, shocking the nation with his realistic sounding broadcast of a fictional alien invasion in Grovers Mill, New Jersey.

April 20, 1939
New York City holds the World's Fair, drawing on the theme "The World of Tomorrow." The fair includes the first exhibition of television, ushering in a new era of media and entertainment. Americans visiting the exhibit are also awed by the General Motors Pavilion, a large glass exhibit and ride that serves as a model of the world in 20 years. Automated highways, suburbs, farms of artificially produced crops, and rooftop platforms for flying machines are included in this Utopic World. The theme is meant to provide an escape from the realities of the Great Depression and looming World War.

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Breaking News of the 1930s | American Experience | PBS

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War of the Worlds | Timeline By the 1930s the radio was becoming a staple in many American homes.

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Who: United States Other Countries and Nations
What: Severe Worldwide economic depression
When: October 29, 1929 – 1939
Where:
Why:

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Who: United States Other Countries and Nations
What: Severe Worldwide economic depression
When: October 29, 1929 – 1939
Where:
Why:

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The Great Depression was the worst economic downturn in the history of the industrialized world, lasting from 1929 to 1939. It began after the stock market crash of October 1929, which sent Wall Street into a panic and wiped out millions of investors.

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what: The Dust Bowl was the name given to the drought-stricken.

where: Southern Plains in the United State.

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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 19th and early 20th-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 a 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.

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.

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.

Fact Check

We strive for accuracy and fairness. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! HISTORY reviews and updates its content regularly to ensure it is complete and accurate.

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Dust Bowl: Causes, Definition & Years - HISTORY

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The Dust Bowl refers to the drought-stricken southern plains of the United States, which suffered severe dust storms during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

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who -Hindenburg
what - the hydrogen-filled, lighter-than-air behemoths also known as dirigibles or zeppelins
when -in March 1936.
where -at Friedrichshafen, Germany
why-spent one glorious season ferrying passengers across the Atlantic in its luxurious belly.

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In 1936, the future looked bright for rigid airships, the hydrogen-filled, lighter-than-air behemoths also known as dirigibles or zeppelins. The Hindenburg, Nazi Germany's pride and joy, spent one glorious season ferrying passengers across the Atlantic in its luxurious belly. The following year, the airship era screeched to a spectacular halt when the Hindenburg burst into flames while landing in Lakehurst, New Jersey. The disaster claimed the lives of 36 people and received an unprecedented amount of media coverage.

The Hindenburg was a 245-metre- (804-foot-) long airship of conventional zeppelin design that was launched at Friedrichshafen, Germany, in March 1936. It had a maximum speed of 135 km (84 miles) per hour and a cruising speed of 126 km (78 miles) per hour. Though it was designed to be filled with helium gas, the airship was filled with highly flammable hydrogen owing to export restrictions by the United States against Nazi Germany. In 1936 the Hindenburg inaugurated commercial air service across the North Atlantic by carrying 1,002 passengers on 10 scheduled round trips between Germany and the United States.

On May 6, 1937, while landing at Lakehurst, N.J., on the first of its scheduled 1937 trans-Atlantic crossings, the Hindenburg burst into flames and was completely destroyed. Thirty-six of the 97 persons aboard were killed. The fire was officially attributed to a discharge of atmospheric electricity in the vicinity of a hydrogen gas leak from the airship, though it was speculated that the dirigible was the victim of an anti-Nazi act of sabotage. The Hindenburg disaster marked the end of the use of rigid airships in commercial air transportation.

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In 1936, the future looked bright for rigid airships, the hydrogen-filled, lighter-than-air behemoths also known as dirigibles or zeppelins. The Hindenburg, Nazi Germany's pride and joy, spent one glorious season ferrying passengers across the Atlantic in its luxurious belly.

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In September 1983, the future seemed bright for Tami Oldham Ashcraft. She and her fiancé, Richard Sharp, had been sailing for the past six months.

They had decided to take a break from pleasure sailing in Sharp's 36-foot sailboat and instead take a job delivering a 44-foot yacht from Tahiti to San Diego.

What at first seemed like a good business decision for a couple as much in love with sailing as they were with each other soon became a nightmare.

23-year-old Tami, played by Shailene Woodley in the film, was left alone after one of the worst hurricanes in history hit three weeks into their trip and took her fiancé from her.

Ambushed by the weather, a late-season storm, the yacht "pitchpoled" and "flipped end over end."

Along with her fiancé Sharp, played by Sam Claflin, Ashcraft fought to keep the yacht from sinking. They battled 40 foot waves and 140 knot winds as they tried to run north of Hurricane Raymond.

While they desperately battled against the category four hurricane, it showed no signs of abating.

Then Hurricane Raymond changed direction, stalking them like prey.

The key difference between the movie and real life

The trailer for the movie, the aptly re-named Adrift, shows all of this.

It shows the yacht capsizing after Hurricane Raymond hits, it shows Sharp injured, and it shows Ashcraft in charge of getting them home.

The movie is based on the true story - taken from the book Oldham wrote years afterwards called Red Sky in Mourning: A True Story of Love, Loss and Survival at Sea. But real life, as it often is, was much more harrowing.

When the hurricane hit, Sharp insisted Ashcraft get down below deck as he secured himself with the safety harness.

There were screams, Ashcraft heard Sharp shout "Oh my God!" - and then there was darkness.

Ashcraft was knocked out when the boat capsized, throwing her against the cabin wall.

When she woke up 27 hours later, she ventured above deck to find the storm was over but that wasn't the end of her suffering.

Scrambling onto the deck, she saw Sharp's safety line dangling off the boat - her husband-to-be was gone.

Ashcraft believes the wind and waves were too powerful for her fiancé, yanking him from the tether and sweeping him overboard.

She was left alone, scared and grappling with her heartbreak and loss.

"Definitely the hardest part was dealing with Richard being gone," she said years later to the Chicago Tribune . "There were times I didn't even want to live anymore because I didn't know how I was going to go on. I was never going to fall in love again."

This isn't the same as the Adrift trailer. When Ashcraft wakes up in the movie she finds Sharp injured but still alive and in the water.

While he's unable to help his fiancé navigate their way home, he does remain by her side.

As the movie isn't out yet it's unclear whether Sharp is actually there or a figment of Ashcraft's imagination.

In real life everything was broken, smashed and scattered, the cabin was half-full of water, the masts were broken clear off and the sails were waterlogged and floated useless nearby.

Ashcraft investigated further and found the navigation system, and the emergency position-indicating radio device, were broken.

Alone, scared and injured, she didn't have time to grieve. What happened in the next 41 days was equally inspirational and heartbreaking.

Mental breakdown and the "inner voice"

Ashcraft rigged a makeshift sail from a broken pole and fashioned a pump to keep the cabin from flooding.

Left with only a sextant, a navigational instrument, and a watch to help her navigate the 1,500 miles to Hilo, Hawaii she suffered not just from hunger but also a head injury and a severely damaged boat.

To this day, she wears a triangular-shaped sextant, encrusted with a diamond, as a pendant as "it reminds [her] of how [she] got home."

"It saved my life," she said.

In a 2003 interview with Chicago Tribune, Ashcraft explained how she survived on peanut butter and canned food - from fruit cocktail to sardines - for 41 days after the hurricane hit.

She had no time to grieve, intent and focused on her survival and getting home.

Ashcraft sailed the wreck to land using the sextant, her hair matted with salt water and only her own thoughts to keep her going.

She was on a verge of a mental breakdown - the body can endure far more than the mind.

Mourning her fiance and weak from her own blood loss, she was catatonic for two days. She didn't eat, she didn't move.

Then the "inner voice" in her head demanded she get up, that she get to work.

"Being on that boat was like solitary confinement," she recalled. "The voice kept me on track. I just followed it."

For the next few days she got her bearings and rigged her sail to get herself in position so she could use currents she hoped would take her to Hawaii.

"While I was in the survival mode, the grief was fairly low," she told the Tribune later. "It wasn't as intense as when I got to shore and the survival was over, and I could see people together and everything kept reminding me of him. I just really had a hard time. But that survival instinct [while at sea] just kicked in. It helped me to focus, to keep myself on track."

Every day at midday, she look through the sextant's telescope and adjusted it to measure the sun's angle above the horizon. She worked out her ship's latitude using nautical maps - she became her own captain. She had a plan.

That's not to say her journey was without trial.

Ashcraft wrote: "On the horizon I saw an isolated cloudlike shape . . . the mass became a granite-colored smudge in front of me. Could it be Hawaii? . . . I was afraid to see people again, get back into society. What was going on?"

The next day it seemed her mind had played tricks on her. There was no island. The plane she thought she saw above her didn't see her.

She heard a voice.

"I was mentally fried. I needed guidance and the voice was a real phenomenon. Three times it was audible externally. I've asked the voice to come back, but I never heard from it again."

Drained and unsure if she'd ever see land, Ashcraft began to consider doing the unthinkable.

She took a rifle that was on board, loaded it and put it in her mouth but the voice she had been hearing convinced her to stop. While some have questioned whether it was God, Ashcraft believes it was her inner strength, her own "inner voice".

Days later, a 300-foot Japanese research ship saw her boat near the entrance of the harbour.

More than 40 days later from when the hurricane had struck, she finally pulled into the Big Island's Hilo Harbour.

She cried tears of joy.

Her mother's premonition

Back home something strange was happening. After the hurricane had hit Ashcraft's mother Zonna Pennell, home in San Diego, thousands of miles away, began having weird dreams.

She told the San Diego Union Tribune she saw "a guy outside on a boat looking through a porthole...It was blurry. I saw Tami and she had something red on her head - a gash."

Whether it was mother's intuition or something else, Pennell immediately felt something was wrong with her daughter.

She began visiting the Coast Guard office every day, asking about where her daughter was. She heard nothing about the hurricane, she only heard from Ashcraft two months after she had set sail.

Life after the hurricane

Amazingly, Ashcraft still loves to sail and "is a 100-ton licensed captain with more than 50,000 offshore miles" under her belt.

Part of her ability to 'move on' was thanks to writing her story down. She never underwent counselling saying "no one ever suggested it" though she was left wishing someone had. "I definitely had some severe post-traumatic stress syndrome," she said. "I really wish I had taken the time to do that".

For six years afterwards, she couldn't read a book thanks to the head trauma. She couldn't focus on the words, they leapt off the page at her.

She suffered from nightmares too, and she developed a fear of flying.

"I had nightmares about being back out at sea, lost," she told the San Diego Union Tribune years later. She dreamt about Richard so she kept moving, trying to forget.

Eight years after the accident she began to heal.

It's clear Ashcraft has never forgotten Sharp but he doesn't haunt her and instead reminds her that life is worth living. Years after her accident, she took the ring he had given her in Tahiti, attached it to a rose and put it out to sea.

She began to read again and then, encouraged by her mother, began to write down what happened. Ashcraft jotted it all down, on napkins, legal tablets, anything she could get her hands on. She went on to pen the book that inspired Adrift the movie.

Ten years on, she met another man with 'captivating blue eyes' at a dance. She went on to marry him and have two children. The family live on San Juan Island, where Ashcraft can be at peace with what she went through.

Her children didn't read the book when it was released, they were too young, but they knew "Mommy was in a hurricane." It's in the past.

After the hurricane hit, after Oldham tries to drag herself from the pit of despair, plagued with thoughts of suicide, there's a point where she steels herself for what's to come.

"If I was going to live, let's get to living" that inner voice told her. It's an adage she continues to live by.

Adrift is out in cinemas in June.

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True story behind Adrift the movie - and it's far more harrowing than the film

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In September 1983, the future seemed bright for Tami Oldham Ashcraft. She and her fiancé, Richard Sharp, had been sailing for the past six months. They had decided to take a break from pleasure sailing in Sharp's 36-foot sailboat and instead take a job delivering a 44-foot yacht from Tahiti to San Diego.

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The culmination of WWI in 1939 caused the country to go into the Great Depression. The entire government failed to provide the country with compensation for the unemployed which consequently stopped spending. The lack of money from jobs caused the cycle of no spending and no income for anyone. No work equals no money and no money means no demand and no demand means no supply. This cycle caused the Great Depression.

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At the beginning of the 1930s, more than 15 million Americans-fully one-quarter of all wage-earning workers-were unemployed. President Herbert Hoover did not do much to alleviate the crisis: Patience and self-reliance, he argued, were all Americans needed to get them through this "passing incident in our national lives." But in 1932, Americans elected a new president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who pledged to use the power of the federal government to make Americans' lives better. Over the next nine years, Roosevelt's New Deal created a new role for government in American life. Though the New Deal alone did not end the Depression, it did provide an unprecedented safety net to millions of suffering Americans.

The Great Depression

The stock market crash of October 29, 1929, provided a dramatic end to an era of unprecedented, and unprecedentedly lopsided, prosperity.

The disaster had been brewing for years. Different historians and economists offer different explanations for the crisis-some blame the increasingly uneven distribution of wealth and purchasing power in the 1920s, while others blame the decade's agricultural slump or the international instability caused by World War I.

In any case, the nation was woefully unprepared for the crash. For the most part, banks were unregulated and uninsured. The government offered no insurance or compensation for the unemployed, so when people stopped earning, they stopped spending. The consumer economy ground to a halt, and an ordinary recession became the Great Depression, the defining event of the 1930s.

Did you know? The 1930s saw natural disasters as well as manmade ones: For most of the decade, people in the Plains states suffered through the worst drought in American history, as well as hundreds of severe dust storms, or "black blizzards," that carried away the soil and made it all but impossible to plant crops. By 1940, 2.5 million people had abandoned their farms in this "Dust Bowl" and headed West to California.

President Herbert Hoover was slow to respond to these events. Though he believed that the "crazy and dangerous" behavior of Wall Street speculators had contributed in a significant way to the crisis, he also believed that solving such problems was not really the federal government's job. As a result, most of the solutions he suggested were voluntary: He asked state governments to undertake public-works projects; he asked big companies to keep workers' pay steady; and he asked labor unions to stop demanding raises.

Still, the crisis worsened. Between 1930 and 1933, more than 9,000 banks closed in the U.S., taking with them more than $2.5 billion in deposits. Meanwhile, unemployed people did whatever they could, like standing in charity breadlines and selling apples on street corners, to feed their families.

"A New Deal for the American People"

By 1932, many Americans were fed up with Hoover and what Franklin Roosevelt later called his "hear nothing, see nothing, do nothing government." The Democratic presidential candidate, New York governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt, promised a change: "I pledge myself," he said, "to a New Deal for the American people." This New Deal would use the power of the federal government to try and stop the economy's downward spiral. Roosevelt won that year's election handily.

The First Hundred Days

The new president acted swiftly to, he said, "wage a war against the emergency" just as though "we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe." First, he shored up the nation's banks. Then he began to propose more comprehensive reforms. By June, Roosevelt and Congress had passed 15 major laws-including the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the Glass-Steagall Banking Bill, the Home Owners' Loan Act, the Tennessee Valley Authority Act and the National Industrial Recovery Act-that fundamentally reshaped many aspects of the American economy. This decisive action also did much to restore Americans' confidence that, as Roosevelt had declared in his inaugural address, "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

American Culture During the 1930s

During the Depression, most people did not have much money to spare. However, most people did have radios-and listening to the radio was free. The most popular broadcasts were those that distracted listeners from their everyday struggles: comedy programs like Amos 'n' Andy, soap operas and sporting events. Swing music encouraged people to cast aside their troubles and dance. Bandleaders like Benny Goodman and Fletcher Henderson drew crowds of young people to ballrooms and dance halls around the country. And even though money was tight, people kept on going to the movies. Musicals, "screwball" comedies and hard-boiled gangster pictures likewise offered audiences an escape from the grim realities of life in the 1930s.

The Second New Deal

President Roosevelt's early efforts had begun to restore Americans' confidence, but they had not ended the Depression. In the spring of 1935, he launched a second, more aggressive set of federal programs, sometimes called the Second New Deal. The Works Progress Administration provided jobs for unemployed people and built new public works like bridges, post offices, schools, highways and parks. The National Labor Relations Act (1935), also known as the Wagner Act, gave workers the right to form unions and bargain collectively for higher wages and fairer treatment. The Social Security Act (also 1935) guaranteed pensions to some older 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, President Roosevelt 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." He won the election by a landslide. Still, the Depression dragged on. Workers grew more militant: In December 1936, for example, the United Auto Workers started a sit-down strike at a GM plant in Flint, Michigan that 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 Depression

By the end of the 1930s, the New Deal had come to an end. Growing Congressional opposition made it difficult for President Roosevelt to introduce new programs. At the same time, as the threat of war loomed on the horizon, the president turned his attention away from domestic politics. In December 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and the U.S. entered World War II. The war effort stimulated American industry and the Great Depression was over.

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At the beginning of the 1930s, more than 15 million Americans-fully one-quarter of all wage-earning workers-were unemployed. President Herbert Hoover did not do much to alleviate the crisis: Patience and self-reliance, he argued, were all Americans needed to get them through this "passing incident in our national lives."

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The airship Hindenburg, the largest dirigible ever built and the pride of Nazi Germany, bursts into flames upon touching its mooring mast in Lakehurst, New Jersey, killing 36 passengers and crew-members, on May 6, 1937.

Frenchman Henri Giffard constructed the first successful airship in 1852. His hydrogen-filled blimp carried a three-horsepower steam engine that turned a large propeller and flew at a speed of six miles per hour. The rigid airship, often known as the "zeppelin" after the last name of its innovator, Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, was developed by the Germans in the late 19th century. Unlike French airships, the German ships had a light framework of metal girders that protected a gas-filled interior. However, like Giffard's airship, they were lifted by highly flammable hydrogen gas and vulnerable to explosion. Large enough to carry substantial numbers of passengers, one of the most famous rigid airships was the Graf Zeppelin, a dirigible that traveled around the world in 1929. In the 1930s, the Graf Zeppelin pioneered the first transatlantic air service, leading to the construction of the Hindenburg, a larger passenger airship.

On May 3, 1937, the Hindenburg left Frankfurt, Germany, for a journey across the Atlantic to Lakehurst's Navy Air Base. Stretching 804 feet from stern to bow, it carried 36 passengers and crew of 61. While attempting to moor at Lakehurst, the airship suddenly burst into flames, probably after a spark ignited its hydrogen core. Rapidly falling 200 feet to the ground, the hull of the airship incinerated within seconds. Thirteen passengers, 21 crewmen, and 1 civilian member of the ground crew lost their lives, and most of the survivors suffered substantial injuries.

Radio announcer Herb Morrison, who came to Lakehurst to record a routine voice-over for an NBC newsreel, immortalized the Hindenberg disaster in a famous on-the-scene description in which he emotionally declared, "Oh, the humanity!" The recording of Morrison's commentary was immediately flown to New York, where it was aired as part of America's first coast-to-coast radio news broadcast. Lighter-than-air passenger travel rapidly fell out of favor after the Hindenberg disaster, and no rigid airships survived World War II.

Fact Check

We strive for accuracy and fairness. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! HISTORY reviews and updates its content regularly to ensure it is complete and accurate.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The airship Hindenburg, the largest dirigible ever built and the pride of Nazi Germany, bursts into flames upon touching its mooring mast in Lakehurst, New Jersey, killing 36 passengers and crew-members, on May 6, 1937. Frenchman Henri Giffard constructed the first successful airship in 1852.

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Who-United states
What- Market Stocks went down
Where-United States
When-1930s
why-Market Stocks

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The Great Depression

The stock market crash of October 29, 1929 (also known as Black Tuesday) provided a dramatic end to an era of unprecedented, and unprecedentedly lopsided, prosperity.

The disaster had been brewing for years, though different historians and economists offer different explanations for the crisis: Some blame the increasingly uneven distribution of wealth and purchasing power in the 1920s, while others blame the decade's agricultural slump or the international instability caused by World War I.

In any case, the nation was woefully unprepared for the crash. For the most part, banks were unregulated and uninsured. The government offered no insurance or compensation for the unemployed, so when people stopped earning, they stopped spending. The consumer economy ground to a halt and an ordinary recession became the Great Depression, the defining event of the 1930s.

Dust Bowl

The 1930s saw natural disasters as well as manmade ones: For most of the decade, people in the Plains states suffered through the worst drought in American history, as well as hundreds of severe dust storms, or "black blizzards," that carried away the soil and made it all but impossible to plant crops.

By 1940, 2.5 million people had abandoned their farms in this Dust Bowl and headed west to California. The crisis gave the decade an unfortunate nickname: the "Dirty Thirties."

Other natural disasters struck more quickly: The 1935 Labor Day Hurricane hit the Florida Keys as the most violent hurricane to ever make landfall in the Atlantic basin. The New England Hurricane of 1938, also a Category 5 storm, caused property losses roughly equal to $5 billion in today's money.

Herbert Hoover

President Herbert Hoover was slow to respond to these events. Though he believed that the "crazy and dangerous" behavior of Wall Street speculators had contributed in a significant way to the crisis, he also believed that solving such problems was not really the federal government's job.

As a result, most of the solutions he suggested were voluntary: He asked state governments to undertake public works projects; he asked big companies to keep workers' pay steady and he asked labor unions to stop demanding raises. The shantytowns that were popping up as more and more people lost their homes were nicknamed " Hoovervilles " as an insult to the president's hands-off policies.

The crisis worsened, and life for the average American during the Great Depression was challenging. Between 1930 and 1933, more than 9,000 banks closed in the U.S., taking with them more than $2.5 billion in deposits. Meanwhile, unemployed people did whatever they could, like standing in charity breadlines and selling apples on street corners, to feed their families.

Roosevelt's New Deal

By 1932, many Americans were fed up with Hoover and what his political opponent Franklin D. Roosevelt called his "hear nothing, see nothing, do nothing government. The New York governor and Democratic presidential challenger, Roosevelt promised a change: "I pledge myself," he said, "to a New Deal for the American people."

This New Deal would use the power of the federal government to try and stop the economy's downward spiral. Roosevelt won the 1932 presidential election handily.

The new president acted swiftly during his first hundred days in office to "wage a war against the emergency" just as though "we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe." First, he shored up the nation's banks.

Then he began to propose more comprehensive reforms. By June, Roosevelt and Congress had passed 15 major laws-including the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the Glass-Steagall Act, the Home Owners' Loan Act, the Tennessee Valley Authority Act and the National Industrial Recovery Act-that fundamentally reshaped many aspects of the American economy.

Additionally, the Civilian Conservation Corps gave millions of young men employment on environmental and public works projects. These decisive actions also did much to restore Americans' confidence that, as Roosevelt had declared in his inaugural address, "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

American Culture During the 1930s

During the Depression, most people did not have much money to spare. However, by 1938 about 80 percent of American households had radios-and listening to the radio was free.

The most popular broadcasts were those that distracted listeners from their everyday struggles: comedy programs like "Amos 'n' Andy," soap operas and sporting events. Swing music encouraged people to cast aside their troubles and dance.

Jazz Age bandleaders like Benny Goodman, Fletcher Henderson, Count Basie and Duke Ellington drew crowds of people to Art Deco ballrooms and dance halls around the country. And when Prohibition ended in 1933-freeing up legal sales of liquor-cocktail lounges and barrooms were happy to quench the national thirst for alcohol.

Even though money was tight, people kept going to see Hollywood movies-now being made in color. Musicals, screwball comedies and hard-boiled gangster pictures from the Golden Age of Hollywood-films like "The Wizard of Oz," "It's a Wonderful Life," "Casablanca," "King Kong," "Gone With the Wind" and the animated "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" from Walt Disney -offered audiences an escape from some of the grim realities of life in the 1930s.

The Second New Deal

President Roosevelt's early efforts had begun to restore Americans' confidence, but they had not ended the Depression. In the spring of 1935, he launched a second, more aggressive set of federal programs, sometimes called the Second New Deal.

The Works Progress Administration provided jobs for unemployed people and built new public works like bridges, post offices, schools, highways and parks. The National Labor Relations Act of 1935, also known as the Wagner Act, gave workers the right to form unions and bargain collectively for higher wages and fairer treatment.

The Social Security Act of 1935 guaranteed pensions to some older Americans, set up a system of unemployment insurance and stipulated that the federal government would help care for dependent children and the disabled.

Roosevelt's Second Term

In 1936, while campaigning for a second term, President Roosevelt 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."

Roosevelt won the 1936 election by a landslide. Still, the Depression dragged on. Workers grew more militant: In December 1936, for example, the United Auto Workers started a sit-down strike at a GM plant in Flint, Michigan that 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 Depression Ends

By the end of the 1930s, the New Deal had come to an end. Growing Congressional opposition made it difficult for President Roosevelt to introduce new programs. At the same time, as the threat of war in Europe loomed on the horizon- Adolf Hitler was named Chancellor of Germany in 1933, and invaded Poland in 1939 -the president turned his attention away from domestic politics.

In December 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and the U.S. entered World War II. The war effort stimulated American industry and the Great Depression was over.

Sources

Timeline: 1930s. Securities and Exchange Commission Historical Society.
Breaking News of the 1930s. PBS: American Experience.
List of 1930's Major News Events in History. The People History.

Fact Check

We strive for accuracy and fairness. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! HISTORY reviews and updates its content regularly to ensure it is complete and accurate.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
1930s: Music, Movies & Great Depression - HISTORY

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The 1930s were the decade of the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl and other problems, but also the Franklin D. Roosevelt presidency and Hollywood's Golden Age.

# data[].attributes.body
Who: Hebrert hoover and Francis Scott Key
What: became the star spaniel banner
when:In March 1931
where:

# data[].attributes.body
who-united states
what-market stocks turned down
where-united states
when-1930-
why-because of the market stocks went down

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
At the beginning of the 1930s, more than 15 million Americans-fully one-quarter of all wage-earning workers-were unemployed. President Herbert Hoover did not do much to alleviate the crisis: Patience and self-reliance, he argued, were all Americans needed to get them through this "passing incident in our national lives." But in 1932, Americans elected a new president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who pledged to use the power of the federal government to make Americans' lives better. Over the next nine years, Roosevelt's New Deal created a new role for government in American life. Though the New Deal alone did not end the Depression, it did provide an unprecedented safety net to millions of suffering Americans.

The Great Depression

The stock market crash of October 29, 1929, provided a dramatic end to an era of unprecedented, and unprecedentedly lopsided, prosperity.

The disaster had been brewing for years. Different historians and economists offer different explanations for the crisis-some blame the increasingly uneven distribution of wealth and purchasing power in the 1920s, while others blame the decade's agricultural slump or the international instability caused by World War I.

In any case, the nation was woefully unprepared for the crash. For the most part, banks were unregulated and uninsured. The government offered no insurance or compensation for the unemployed, so when people stopped earning, they stopped spending. The consumer economy ground to a halt, and an ordinary recession became the Great Depression, the defining event of the 1930s.

Did you know? The 1930s saw natural disasters as well as manmade ones: For most of the decade, people in the Plains states suffered through the worst drought in American history, as well as hundreds of severe dust storms, or "black blizzards," that carried away the soil and made it all but impossible to plant crops. By 1940, 2.5 million people had abandoned their farms in this "Dust Bowl" and headed West to California.

President Herbert Hoover was slow to respond to these events. Though he believed that the "crazy and dangerous" behavior of Wall Street speculators had contributed in a significant way to the crisis, he also believed that solving such problems was not really the federal government's job. As a result, most of the solutions he suggested were voluntary: He asked state governments to undertake public-works projects; he asked big companies to keep workers' pay steady; and he asked labor unions to stop demanding raises.

Still, the crisis worsened. Between 1930 and 1933, more than 9,000 banks closed in the U.S., taking with them more than $2.5 billion in deposits. Meanwhile, unemployed people did whatever they could, like standing in charity breadlines and selling apples on street corners, to feed their families.

"A New Deal for the American People"

By 1932, many Americans were fed up with Hoover and what Franklin Roosevelt later called his "hear nothing, see nothing, do nothing government." The Democratic presidential candidate, New York governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt, promised a change: "I pledge myself," he said, "to a New Deal for the American people." This New Deal would use the power of the federal government to try and stop the economy's downward spiral. Roosevelt won that year's election handily.

The First Hundred Days

The new president acted swiftly to, he said, "wage a war against the emergency" just as though "we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe." First, he shored up the nation's banks. Then he began to propose more comprehensive reforms. By June, Roosevelt and Congress had passed 15 major laws-including the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the Glass-Steagall Banking Bill, the Home Owners' Loan Act, the Tennessee Valley Authority Act and the National Industrial Recovery Act-that fundamentally reshaped many aspects of the American economy. This decisive action also did much to restore Americans' confidence that, as Roosevelt had declared in his inaugural address, "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

American Culture During the 1930s

During the Depression, most people did not have much money to spare. However, most people did have radios-and listening to the radio was free. The most popular broadcasts were those that distracted listeners from their everyday struggles: comedy programs like Amos 'n' Andy, soap operas and sporting events. Swing music encouraged people to cast aside their troubles and dance. Bandleaders like Benny Goodman and Fletcher Henderson drew crowds of young people to ballrooms and dance halls around the country. And even though money was tight, people kept on going to the movies. Musicals, "screwball" comedies and hard-boiled gangster pictures likewise offered audiences an escape from the grim realities of life in the 1930s.

The Second New Deal

President Roosevelt's early efforts had begun to restore Americans' confidence, but they had not ended the Depression. In the spring of 1935, he launched a second, more aggressive set of federal programs, sometimes called the Second New Deal. The Works Progress Administration provided jobs for unemployed people and built new public works like bridges, post offices, schools, highways and parks. The National Labor Relations Act (1935), also known as the Wagner Act, gave workers the right to form unions and bargain collectively for higher wages and fairer treatment. The Social Security Act (also 1935) guaranteed pensions to some older 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, President Roosevelt 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." He won the election by a landslide. Still, the Depression dragged on. Workers grew more militant: In December 1936, for example, the United Auto Workers started a sit-down strike at a GM plant in Flint, Michigan that 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 Depression

By the end of the 1930s, the New Deal had come to an end. Growing Congressional opposition made it difficult for President Roosevelt to introduce new programs. At the same time, as the threat of war loomed on the horizon, the president turned his attention away from domestic politics. In December 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and the U.S. entered World War II. The war effort stimulated American industry and the Great Depression was over.

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At the beginning of the 1930s, more than 15 million Americans-fully one-quarter of all wage-earning workers-were unemployed. President Herbert Hoover did not do much to alleviate the crisis: Patience and self-reliance, he argued, were all Americans needed to get them through this "passing incident in our national lives."

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“The Star-Spangled Banner” becomes official

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“The Star-Spangled Banner” becomes official

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Who - Herbert Hover
What - He signs the congressional act making “The Star-Spangled Banner” the official national anthem of the United States Of America
When - September 14, 1814
Where - Fort McHenry in Maryland
Why - To show the americans that theUsa would make it through the war .

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President Herbert Hoover signs a congressional act making "The Star-Spangled Banner" the official national anthem of the United States.

On September 14, 1814, Francis Scott Key composed the lyrics to "The Star-Spangled Banner" after witnessing the massive overnight British bombardment of Fort McHenry in Maryland during the War of 1812. Key, an American lawyer, watched the siege while under detainment on a British ship and penned the famous words after observing with awe that Fort McHenry's flag survived the 1,800-bomb assault.

After circulating as a handbill, the patriotic lyrics were published in a Baltimore newspaper on September 20, 1814. Key's words were later set to the tune of "To Anacreon in Heaven," a popular English song. Throughout the 19th century, "The Star-Spangled Banner" was regarded as the national anthem by most branches of the U.S. armed forces and other groups, but it was not until 1916, and the signing of an executive order by President Woodrow Wilson, that it was formally designated as such. In March 1931, Congress passed an act confirming Wilson's presidential order, and on March 3 President Hoover signed it into law.

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"The Star-Spangled Banner" becomes official

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President Herbert Hoover signs a congressional act making "The Star-Spangled Banner" the official national anthem of the United States. On September 14, 1814, Francis Scott Key composed the lyrics to "The Star-Spangled Banner" after witnessing the massive overnight British bombardment of Fort McHenry in Maryland during the War of 1812.

# data[].attributes.body
Who: Americans.
What: Putting all their money in stocks.
When: During 1929-1939.
Where: The United States.
Why: They didn't have much money so they invested in stock and quit their jobs.

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What Caused the Great Depression?

Throughout the 1920s, the U.S. economy expanded rapidly, and the nation's total wealth more than doubled between 1920 and 1929, a period dubbed " the Roaring Twenties."

The stock market, centered at the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street in New York City, was the scene of reckless speculation, where everyone from millionaire tycoons to cooks and janitors poured their savings into stocks. As a result, the stock market underwent rapid expansion, reaching its peak in August 1929.

By then, production had already declined and unemployment had risen, leaving stock prices much higher than their actual value. Additionally, wages at that time were low, consumer debt was proliferating, the agricultural sector of the economy was struggling due to drought and falling food prices and banks had an excess of large loans that could not be liquidated.

The American economy entered a mild recession during the summer of 1929, as consumer spending slowed and unsold goods began to pile up, which in turn slowed factory production. Nonetheless, stock prices continued to rise, and by the fall of that year had reached stratospheric levels that could not be justified by expected future earnings.

Stock Market Crash of 1929

On October 24, 1929, as nervous investors began selling overpriced shares en masse, the stock market crash that some had feared happened at last. A record 12.9 million shares were traded that day, known as "Black Thursday."

Five days later, on October 29, or "Black Tuesday," some 16 million shares were traded after another wave of panic swept Wall Street. Millions of shares ended up worthless, and those investors who had bought stocks "on margin" (with borrowed money) were wiped out completely.

As consumer confidence vanished in the wake of the stock market crash, the downturn in spending and investment led factories and other businesses to slow down production and begin firing their workers. For those who were lucky enough to remain employed, wages fell and buying power decreased.

Many Americans forced to buy on credit fell into debt, and the number of foreclosures and repossessions climbed steadily. The global adherence to the gold standard, which joined countries around the world in fixed currency exchange, helped spread economic woes from the United States throughout the world, especially in Europe.

Bank Runs and the Hoover Administration

Despite assurances from President Herbert Hoover and other leaders that the crisis would run its course, matters continued to get worse over the next three years. By 1930, 4 million Americans looking for work could not find it; that number had risen to 6 million in 1931.

Meanwhile, the country's industrial production had dropped by half. Bread lines, soup kitchens and rising numbers of homeless people became more and more common in America's towns and cities. Farmers couldn't afford to harvest their crops and were forced to leave them rotting in the fields while people elsewhere starved. In 1930, severe droughts in the Southern Plains brought high winds and dust from Texas to Nebraska, killing people, livestock and crops. The " Dust Bowl " inspired a mass migration of people from farmland to cities in search of work.

In the fall of 1930, the first of four waves of banking panics began, as large numbers of investors lost confidence in the solvency of their banks and demanded deposits in cash, forcing banks to liquidate loans in order to supplement their insufficient cash reserves on hand.

Bank runs swept the United States again in the spring and fall of 1931 and the fall of 1932, and by early 1933 thousands of banks had closed their doors.

In the face of this dire situation, Hoover's administration tried supporting failing banks and other institutions with government loans; the idea was that the banks in turn would loan to businesses, which would be able to hire back their employees.

FDR and the Great Depression

Hoover, a Republican who had formerly served as U.S. secretary of commerce, believed that government should not directly intervene in the economy and that it did not have the responsibility to create jobs or provide economic relief for its citizens.

In 1932, however, with the country mired in the depths of the Great Depression and some 15 million people unemployed, Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt won an overwhelming victory in the presidential election.

By Inauguration Day (March 4, 1933), every U.S. state had ordered all remaining banks to close at the end of the fourth wave of banking panics, and the U.S. Treasury didn't have enough cash to pay all government workers. Nonetheless, FDR (as he was known) projected a calm energy and optimism, famously declaring "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

Roosevelt took immediate action to address the country's economic woes, first announcing a four-day "bank holiday" during which all banks would close so that Congress could pass reform legislation and reopen those banks determined to be sound. He also began addressing the public directly over the radio in a series of talks, and these so-called " fireside chats " went a long way toward restoring public confidence.

During Roosevelt's first 100 days in office, his administration passed legislation that aimed to stabilize industrial and agricultural production, create jobs and stimulate recovery.

In addition, Roosevelt sought to reform the financial system, creating the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation ( FDIC) to protect depositors' accounts and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to regulate the stock market and prevent abuses of the kind that led to the 1929 crash.

The New Deal: A Road to Recovery

Among the programs and institutions of the New Deal that aided in recovery from the Great Depression was the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), which built dams and hydroelectric projects to control flooding and provide electric power to the impoverished Tennessee Valley region, and the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a permanent jobs program that employed 8.5 million people from 1935 to 1943.

When the Great Depression began, the United States was the only industrialized country in the world without some form of unemployment insurance or social security. In 1935, Congress passed the Social Security Act, which for the first time provided Americans with unemployment, disability and pensions for old age.

After showing early signs of recovery beginning in the spring of 1933, the economy continued to improve throughout the next three years, during which real GDP (adjusted for inflation) grew at an average rate of 9 percent per year.

A sharp recession hit in 1937, caused in part by the Federal Reserve's decision to increase its requirements for money in reserve. Though the economy began improving again in 1938, this second severe contraction reversed many of the gains in production and employment and prolonged the effects of the Great Depression through the end of the decade.

Depression-era hardships fueled the rise of extremist political movements in various European countries, most notably that of Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime in Germany. German aggression led war to break out in Europe in 1939, and the WPA turned its attention to strengthening the military infrastructure of the United States, even as the country maintained its neutrality.

African Americans in the Great Depression

One-fifth of all Americans receiving federal relief during the Great Depression were Black, most in the rural South. But farm and domestic work, two major sectors in which Black workers were employed, were not included in the 1935 Social Security Act, meaning there was no safety net in times of uncertainty. Rather than fire domestic help, private employers could simply pay them less without legal repercussions. And those relief programs for which African Americans were eligible on paper were rife with discrimination in practice since all relief programs were administered locally.

Despite these obstacles, Roosevelt's "Black Cabinet," led by Mary McLeod Bethune, ensured nearly every New Deal agency had a Black advisor. The number of African Americans working in government tripled.

Women in the Great Depression

There was one group of Americans who actually gained jobs during the Great Depression: Women. From 1930 to 1940, the number of employed women in the United States rose 24 percent from 10.5 million to 13 million Though they'd been steadily entering the workforce for decades, the financial pressures of the Great Depression drove women to seek employment in ever greater numbers as male breadwinners lost their jobs. The 22 percent decline in marriage rates between 1929 and 1939 also created an increase in single women in search of employment.

Women during the Great Depression had a strong advocate in First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who lobbied her husband for more women in office-like Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, the first woman to ever hold a cabinet position.

Jobs available to women paid less but were more stable during the banking crisis: nursing, teaching and domestic work. They were supplanted by an increase in secretarial roles in FDR's rapidly-expanding government. But there was a catch: over 25 percent of the National Recovery Administration's wage codes set lower wages for women, and jobs created under the WPA confined women to fields like sewing and nursing that paid less than roles reserved for men.

Married women faced an additional hurdle: By 1940, 26 states had placed restrictions known as marriage bars on their employment, as working wives were perceived as taking away jobs from able-bodied men-even if, in practice, they were occupying jobs men would not want and doing them for far less pay.

Great Depression Ends and World War II Begins

With Roosevelt's decision to support Britain and France in the struggle against Germany and the other Axis Powers, defense manufacturing geared up, producing more and more private-sector jobs.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 led to America's entry into World War II, and the nation's factories went back into full production mode.

This expanding industrial production, as well as widespread conscription beginning in 1942, reduced the unemployment rate to below its pre-Depression level. The Great Depression had ended at last, and the United States turned its attention to the global conflict of World War II.

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HISTORY Vault

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Great Depression: Black Thursday, Facts & Effects

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The Great Depression was the worst economic downturn in the history of the industrialized world, lasting from 1929 to 1939. At its peak, the U.S. unemployment rate topped 20 percent.

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who: all of earth
what:war
when:  Sep 1, 1939 – Sep 2, 1945
where:land,air,and sea
why cause Germany came to power full

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World War II: Summary, Combatants & Facts

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World War II was a global war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. Rising to power in an unstable Germany, Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist (Nazi Party) rearmed the nation and signed treaties with Italy and Japan to further his ambitions of world domination. Hitler’s invasion of Poland drove Great Britain and France to declare war on Germany, and World War II had begun. The majority of the world’s countries eventually formed two opposing alliances: the Allies and the Axis.

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The airship Hindenburg, the largest dirigible ever built and the pride of Nazi Germany, bursts into flames upon touching its mooring mast in Lakehurst, New Jersey, killing 36 passengers and crew-members, on May 6, 1937.

Frenchman Henri Giffard constructed the first successful airship in 1852. His hydrogen-filled blimp carried a three-horsepower steam engine that turned a large propeller and flew at a speed of six miles per hour. The rigid airship, often known as the "zeppelin" after the last name of its innovator, Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, was developed by the Germans in the late 19th century. Unlike French airships, the German ships had a light framework of metal girders that protected a gas-filled interior. However, like Giffard's airship, they were lifted by highly flammable hydrogen gas and vulnerable to explosion. Large enough to carry substantial numbers of passengers, one of the most famous rigid airships was the Graf Zeppelin, a dirigible that traveled around the world in 1929. In the 1930s, the Graf Zeppelin pioneered the first transatlantic air service, leading to the construction of the Hindenburg, a larger passenger airship.

On May 3, 1937, the Hindenburg left Frankfurt, Germany, for a journey across the Atlantic to Lakehurst's Navy Air Base. Stretching 804 feet from stern to bow, it carried 36 passengers and crew of 61. While attempting to moor at Lakehurst, the airship suddenly burst into flames, probably after a spark ignited its hydrogen core. Rapidly falling 200 feet to the ground, the hull of the airship incinerated within seconds. Thirteen passengers, 21 crewmen, and 1 civilian member of the ground crew lost their lives, and most of the survivors suffered substantial injuries.

Radio announcer Herb Morrison, who came to Lakehurst to record a routine voice-over for an NBC newsreel, immortalized the Hindenberg disaster in a famous on-the-scene description in which he emotionally declared, "Oh, the humanity!" The recording of Morrison's commentary was immediately flown to New York, where it was aired as part of America's first coast-to-coast radio news broadcast. Lighter-than-air passenger travel rapidly fell out of favor after the Hindenberg disaster, and no rigid airships survived World War II.

Fact Check

We strive for accuracy and fairness. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! HISTORY reviews and updates its content regularly to ensure it is complete and accurate.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The airship Hindenburg, the largest dirigible ever built and the pride of Nazi Germany, bursts into flames upon touching its mooring mast in Lakehurst, New Jersey, killing 36 passengers and crew-members, on May 6, 1937. Frenchman Henri Giffard constructed the first successful airship in 1852.

# data[].attributes.body
Who:  The United States
What: The worst economic downturn in the history of the industrialized world.
when: 1929- 1939
where: United States
why:  production had declined and unemployment had risen, leaving stock prices much higher than their actual value.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
What Caused the Great Depression?

Throughout the 1920s, the U.S. economy expanded rapidly, and the nation's total wealth more than doubled between 1920 and 1929, a period dubbed " the Roaring Twenties."

The stock market, centered at the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street in New York City, was the scene of reckless speculation, where everyone from millionaire tycoons to cooks and janitors poured their savings into stocks. As a result, the stock market underwent rapid expansion, reaching its peak in August 1929.

By then, production had already declined and unemployment had risen, leaving stock prices much higher than their actual value. Additionally, wages at that time were low, consumer debt was proliferating, the agricultural sector of the economy was struggling due to drought and falling food prices and banks had an excess of large loans that could not be liquidated.

The American economy entered a mild recession during the summer of 1929, as consumer spending slowed and unsold goods began to pile up, which in turn slowed factory production. Nonetheless, stock prices continued to rise, and by the fall of that year had reached stratospheric levels that could not be justified by expected future earnings.

Stock Market Crash of 1929

On October 24, 1929, as nervous investors began selling overpriced shares en masse, the stock market crash that some had feared happened at last. A record 12.9 million shares were traded that day, known as "Black Thursday."

Five days later, on October 29, or "Black Tuesday," some 16 million shares were traded after another wave of panic swept Wall Street. Millions of shares ended up worthless, and those investors who had bought stocks "on margin" (with borrowed money) were wiped out completely.

As consumer confidence vanished in the wake of the stock market crash, the downturn in spending and investment led factories and other businesses to slow down production and begin firing their workers. For those who were lucky enough to remain employed, wages fell and buying power decreased.

Many Americans forced to buy on credit fell into debt, and the number of foreclosures and repossessions climbed steadily. The global adherence to the gold standard, which joined countries around the world in fixed currency exchange, helped spread economic woes from the United States throughout the world, especially in Europe.

Bank Runs and the Hoover Administration

Despite assurances from President Herbert Hoover and other leaders that the crisis would run its course, matters continued to get worse over the next three years. By 1930, 4 million Americans looking for work could not find it; that number had risen to 6 million in 1931.

Meanwhile, the country's industrial production had dropped by half. Bread lines, soup kitchens and rising numbers of homeless people became more and more common in America's towns and cities. Farmers couldn't afford to harvest their crops and were forced to leave them rotting in the fields while people elsewhere starved. In 1930, severe droughts in the Southern Plains brought high winds and dust from Texas to Nebraska, killing people, livestock and crops. The " Dust Bowl " inspired a mass migration of people from farmland to cities in search of work.

In the fall of 1930, the first of four waves of banking panics began, as large numbers of investors lost confidence in the solvency of their banks and demanded deposits in cash, forcing banks to liquidate loans in order to supplement their insufficient cash reserves on hand.

Bank runs swept the United States again in the spring and fall of 1931 and the fall of 1932, and by early 1933 thousands of banks had closed their doors.

In the face of this dire situation, Hoover's administration tried supporting failing banks and other institutions with government loans; the idea was that the banks in turn would loan to businesses, which would be able to hire back their employees.

FDR and the Great Depression

Hoover, a Republican who had formerly served as U.S. secretary of commerce, believed that government should not directly intervene in the economy and that it did not have the responsibility to create jobs or provide economic relief for its citizens.

In 1932, however, with the country mired in the depths of the Great Depression and some 15 million people unemployed, Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt won an overwhelming victory in the presidential election.

By Inauguration Day (March 4, 1933), every U.S. state had ordered all remaining banks to close at the end of the fourth wave of banking panics, and the U.S. Treasury didn't have enough cash to pay all government workers. Nonetheless, FDR (as he was known) projected a calm energy and optimism, famously declaring "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

Roosevelt took immediate action to address the country's economic woes, first announcing a four-day "bank holiday" during which all banks would close so that Congress could pass reform legislation and reopen those banks determined to be sound. He also began addressing the public directly over the radio in a series of talks, and these so-called " fireside chats " went a long way toward restoring public confidence.

During Roosevelt's first 100 days in office, his administration passed legislation that aimed to stabilize industrial and agricultural production, create jobs and stimulate recovery.

In addition, Roosevelt sought to reform the financial system, creating the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation ( FDIC) to protect depositors' accounts and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to regulate the stock market and prevent abuses of the kind that led to the 1929 crash.

The New Deal: A Road to Recovery

Among the programs and institutions of the New Deal that aided in recovery from the Great Depression was the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), which built dams and hydroelectric projects to control flooding and provide electric power to the impoverished Tennessee Valley region, and the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a permanent jobs program that employed 8.5 million people from 1935 to 1943.

When the Great Depression began, the United States was the only industrialized country in the world without some form of unemployment insurance or social security. In 1935, Congress passed the Social Security Act, which for the first time provided Americans with unemployment, disability and pensions for old age.

After showing early signs of recovery beginning in the spring of 1933, the economy continued to improve throughout the next three years, during which real GDP (adjusted for inflation) grew at an average rate of 9 percent per year.

A sharp recession hit in 1937, caused in part by the Federal Reserve's decision to increase its requirements for money in reserve. Though the economy began improving again in 1938, this second severe contraction reversed many of the gains in production and employment and prolonged the effects of the Great Depression through the end of the decade.

Depression-era hardships fueled the rise of extremist political movements in various European countries, most notably that of Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime in Germany. German aggression led war to break out in Europe in 1939, and the WPA turned its attention to strengthening the military infrastructure of the United States, even as the country maintained its neutrality.

African Americans in the Great Depression

One-fifth of all Americans receiving federal relief during the Great Depression were Black, most in the rural South. But farm and domestic work, two major sectors in which Black workers were employed, were not included in the 1935 Social Security Act, meaning there was no safety net in times of uncertainty. Rather than fire domestic help, private employers could simply pay them less without legal repercussions. And those relief programs for which African Americans were eligible on paper were rife with discrimination in practice since all relief programs were administered locally.

Despite these obstacles, Roosevelt's "Black Cabinet," led by Mary McLeod Bethune, ensured nearly every New Deal agency had a Black advisor. The number of African Americans working in government tripled.

Women in the Great Depression

There was one group of Americans who actually gained jobs during the Great Depression: Women. From 1930 to 1940, the number of employed women in the United States rose 24 percent from 10.5 million to 13 million Though they'd been steadily entering the workforce for decades, the financial pressures of the Great Depression drove women to seek employment in ever greater numbers as male breadwinners lost their jobs. The 22 percent decline in marriage rates between 1929 and 1939 also created an increase in single women in search of employment.

Women during the Great Depression had a strong advocate in First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who lobbied her husband for more women in office-like Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, the first woman to ever hold a cabinet position.

Jobs available to women paid less but were more stable during the banking crisis: nursing, teaching and domestic work. They were supplanted by an increase in secretarial roles in FDR's rapidly-expanding government. But there was a catch: over 25 percent of the National Recovery Administration's wage codes set lower wages for women, and jobs created under the WPA confined women to fields like sewing and nursing that paid less than roles reserved for men.

Married women faced an additional hurdle: By 1940, 26 states had placed restrictions known as marriage bars on their employment, as working wives were perceived as taking away jobs from able-bodied men-even if, in practice, they were occupying jobs men would not want and doing them for far less pay.

Great Depression Ends and World War II Begins

With Roosevelt's decision to support Britain and France in the struggle against Germany and the other Axis Powers, defense manufacturing geared up, producing more and more private-sector jobs.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 led to America's entry into World War II, and the nation's factories went back into full production mode.

This expanding industrial production, as well as widespread conscription beginning in 1942, reduced the unemployment rate to below its pre-Depression level. The Great Depression had ended at last, and the United States turned its attention to the global conflict of World War II.

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Great Depression: Black Thursday, Facts & Effects

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The Great Depression was the worst economic downturn in the history of the industrialized world, lasting from 1929 to 1939. At its peak, the U.S. unemployment rate topped 20 percent.