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Andrew Morgan

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Andrew Morgan

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Crowd gathering on Wall Street after the 1929 crash

The Wall Street Crash of 1929, also known as the Great Crash, the Crash of 29 was a major American stock market crash that occurred in the autumn of 1929. It started in September and ended in mid-November, when share prices on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) collapsed. The pivotal role of the 1920s' high-flying bull market and the subsequent catastrophic collapse of the NYSE in late 1929 is often highlighted in explanations of the causes of the worldwide Great Depression.

It was the most devastating stock market crash in the history of the United States, when taking into consideration the full extent and duration of its aftereffects. The Great Crash is mostly associated with October 24, 1929, called Black Thursday, the day of the largest sell-off of shares in U.S. history, and October 29, 1929, called Black Tuesday, when investors traded some 16 million shares on the New York Stock Exchange in a single day. The crash, which followed the London Stock Exchange's crash of September, signaled the beginning of the Great Depression.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average, 1928-1930

The " Roaring Twenties", the decade following World War I that led to the crash, was a time of wealth and excess. Building on post-war optimism, rural Americans migrated to the cities in vast numbers throughout the decade with hopes of finding a more prosperous life in the ever-growing expansion of America's industrial sector.

Scholars believe that declines in the money supply caused by Federal Reserve decisions had a severely contractionary effect on output. Despite the inherent risk of speculation, it was widely believed that the stock market would continue to rise forever. On March 25, 1929, after the Federal Reserve warned of excessive speculation, a small crash occurred as investors started to sell stocks at a rapid pace, exposing the market's shaky foundation. Two days later, banker Charles E. Mitchell announced that his company, the National City Bank, would provide $25 million in credit to stop the market's slide. Mitchell's move brought a temporary halt to the financial crisis, and call money declined from 20 to 8 percent. However, the American economy showed ominous signs of trouble. Steel production declined, construction was sluggish, automobile sales went down, and consumers were building up large debts because of easy credit.

Despite all the economic warning signs and the market breaks in March and May 1929, stocks resumed their advance in June, and the gains continued almost unabated until early September 1929 (the Dow Jones average gained more than 20% between June and September). The market had been on a nine-year run that saw the Dow Jones Industrial Average increase in value tenfold, peaking at 381.17 on September 3, 1929. Shortly before the crash, economist Irving Fisher famously proclaimed "Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau." The optimism and the financial gains of the great bull market were shaken after a well-publicized September 8 prediction from financial expert Roger Babson that "a crash is coming, and it may be terrific". The initial September decline was thus called the "Babson Break" in the press. That was the start of the Great Crash, but until the severe phase of the crash in October, many investors regarded the September "Babson Break" as a "healthy correction" and buying opportunity.

On September 20, 1929, top British investor Clarence Hatry and many of his associates were jailed for fraud and forgery, leading to the suspension of his companies. This may have weakened the confidence of Americans in their own companies, although it had minimal impact on the London Stock Exchange. In the days leading up to the crash, the market was severely unstable. Periods of selling and high volumes were interspersed with brief periods of rising prices and recovery.

Overall Price Index[clarification needed ]on Wall Street from just before the crash in 1929 to 1932 when the price bottomed out

Selling intensified in mid-October. On October 24, "Black Thursday", the market lost 11% of its value at the opening bell on very heavy trading. The huge volume meant that the report of prices on the ticker tape in brokerage offices around the nation was hours late, and so investors had no idea what most stocks were trading for. Several leading Wall Street bankers met to find a solution to the panic and chaos on the trading floor. The meeting included Thomas W. Lamont, acting head of Morgan Bank; Albert Wiggin, head of the Chase National Bank; and Charles E. Mitchell, president of the National City Bank of New York. They chose Richard Whitney, vice president of the Exchange, to act on their behalf.

With the bankers' financial resources behind him, Whitney placed a bid to purchase 25,000 shares of U.S. Steel at $205 per share, a price well above the current market. As traders watched, Whitney then placed similar bids on other " blue chip" stocks. The tactic was similar to one that had ended the Panic of 1907 and succeeded in halting the slide. The Dow Jones Industrial Average recovered, closing down only 6.38 points (2.09%) for the day.

The trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange Building in 1930, six months after the crash of 1929

On October 28, "Black Monday", more investors facing margin calls decided to get out of the market, and the slide continued with a record loss in the Dow for the day of 38.33 points, or 12.82%.

On October 29, 1929, "Black Tuesday" hit Wall Street as investors traded some 16 million shares on the New York Stock Exchange in a single day. Around $14 billion of stock value was lost, wiping out thousands of investors. The panic selling reached its peak with some stocks having no buyers at any price. The Dow lost an additional 30.57 points, or 11.73%, for a total drop of 68.90 points, or 23.05% in two days.

On October 29, William C. Durant joined with members of the Rockefeller family and other financial giants to buy large quantities of stocks to demonstrate to the public their confidence in the market, but their efforts failed to stop the large decline in prices. The massive volume of stocks traded that day made the ticker continue to run until about 7:45 p.m.

After a one-day recovery on October 30, when the Dow regained 28.40 points, or 12.34%, to close at 258.47, the market continued to fall, arriving at an interim bottom on November 13, 1929, with the Dow closing at 198.60. The market then recovered for several months, starting on November 14, with the Dow gaining 18.59 points to close at 217.28, and reaching a secondary closing peak ( bear market rally) of 294.07 on April 17, 1930. The Dow then embarked on another, much longer, steady slide from April 1930 to July 8, 1932, when it closed at 41.22, its lowest level of the 20th century, concluding an 89.2% loss for the index in less than three years.

Beginning on March 15, 1933, and continuing through the rest of the 1930s, the Dow began to slowly regain the ground it had lost. The largest percentage increases of the Dow Jones occurred during the early and mid-1930s. In late 1937, there was a sharp dip in the stock market, but prices held well above the 1932 lows. The Dow Jones did not return to its peak close of September 3, 1929, for 25 years, until November 23, 1954.

In 1932, the Pecora Commission was established by the U.S. Senate to study the causes of the crash. The following year, the U.S. Congress passed the Glass-Steagall Act mandating a separation between commercial banks, which take deposits and extend loans, and investment banks, which underwrite, issue, and distribute stocks, bonds, and other securities.

After, stock markets around the world instituted measures to suspend trading in the event of rapid declines, claiming that the measures would prevent such panic sales. However, the one-day crash of Black Monday, October 19, 1987, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 22.6%, as well as Black Monday of March 16, 2020 (−12.9%), were worse in percentage terms than any single day of the 1929 crash (although the combined 25% decline of October 28-29, 1929 was larger than that of October 19, 1987, and remains the worst two-day decline as of 10 March 2023).

The crash followed a speculative boom that had taken hold in the late 1920s. During the latter half of the 1920s, steel production, building construction, retail turnover, automobiles registered, and even railway receipts advanced from record to record. The combined net profits of 536 manufacturing and trading companies showed an increase, in the first six months of 1929, of 36.6% over 1928, itself a record half-year. Iron and steel led the way with doubled gains. Such figures set up a crescendo of stock-exchange speculation that led hundreds of thousands of Americans to invest heavily in the stock market. Many people were borrowing money to buy more stocks. By August 1929, brokers were routinely lending small investors more than two thirds of the face value of the stocks that they were buying. Over $8.5 billion was out on loan, more than the entire amount of currency circulating in the United States at the time.

The rising share prices encouraged more people to invest on the hope that share prices would rise further. Speculation thus fueled further rises and created an economic bubble. Because of margin buying, investors stood to lose large sums of money if the market turned down or even if it failed to advance quickly enough. The average price to earnings ratio of S&P Composite stocks was 32.6 in September 1929, clearly above historical norms. According to the economist John Kenneth Galbraith, the exuberance also resulted in a large number of people placing their savings and money in leverage investment products like Goldman Sachs's "Blue Ridge trust" and "Shenandoah Trust," which crashed in 1929 as well, resulting in losses to banks of $475 billion in 2010 dollars ($637.44 billion in 2022).

The British economist Sir George Paish predicted the May slump.

Good harvests had built up a mass of 250 million bushels of wheat to be "carried over" when 1929 opened. By May there was also a winter wheat crop of 560 million bushels ready for harvest in the Mississippi Valley. The oversupply caused such a drop in wheat prices that the net incomes of farmers from wheat were threatened with extinction. Stock markets are always sensitive to the future state of commodity markets, and the slump in Wall Street that had been predicted for May by Sir George Paish arrived on time. In June 1929, the position was saved by a severe drought in the Dakotas and the Canadian West, as well as unfavorable seed times in Argentina and eastern Australia. The oversupply was now wanted to fill the gaps in the 1929 world wheat production. From 97¢ per bushel in May, the price of wheat rose to $1.49 in July. When it was seen that figure would make American farmers get more for their crop that year than in 1928, stocks went up again.

In August, the wheat price fell when France and Italy were bragging about a magnificent harvest, and the situation in Australia improved. That sent a shiver through Wall Street and stock prices quickly dropped, but word of cheap stocks brought a fresh rush of "stags" (amateur speculators) and investors. Congress voted for a $100 million relief package for the farmers on the hope of stabilizing wheat prices, but by October, the price had fallen to $1.31 per bushel.

Other important economic barometers were also slowing or even falling by mid-1929, including car sales, house sales, and steel production. The falling commodity and industrial production may have dented even American self-confidence, and the stock market peaked on September 3 at 381.17 just after Labor Day, and it started to falter after Roger Babson issued his prescient "market crash" forecast. By the end of September, the market had dropped 10% from the peak (the "Babson Break"). Selling intensified in early and mid-October, with sharp down days punctuated by a few up days. Panic selling of massive proportion started the week of October 21 and intensified and culminated on October 24, October 28, and especially October 29 ("Black Tuesday").

The president of the Chase National Bank, Albert H. Wiggin, said at the time:

We are reaping the natural fruit of the orgy of speculation in which millions of people have indulged. It was inevitable, because of the tremendous increase in the number of stockholders in recent years, that the number of sellers would be greater than ever when the boom ended and selling took the place of buying.

United States

Crowd at New York's American Union Bank during a bank run early in the Great Depression

Together, the 1929 stock market crash and the Great Depression formed the largest financial crisis of the 20th century. The panic of October 1929 has come to serve as a symbol of the economic contraction that gripped the world during the next decade. The falls in share prices on October 24 and 29, 1929 were practically instantaneous in all financial markets, except Japan.

The Wall Street Crash had a major impact on the U.S. and world economy, and it has been the source of intense academic historical, economic, and political debate from its aftermath until the present day. Some people believed that abuses by utility holding companies contributed to the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed. Many people blamed the crash on commercial banks that were too eager to put deposits at risk on the stock market.

In 1930, 1,352 banks held more than $853 million in deposits; in 1931, one year later, 2,294 banks failed with nearly $1.7 billion in deposits. Many businesses failed (28,285 failures and a daily rate of 133 in 1931).

The 1929 crash brought the Roaring Twenties to a halt. As tentatively expressed by economic historian Charles P. Kindleberger, in 1929, there was no lender of last resort effectively present, which, if it had existed and been properly exercised, would have been key in shortening the business slowdown that normally follows financial crises. The crash instigated widespread and long-lasting consequences for the United States. Historians still debate whether the 1929 crash sparked the Great Depression or if it merely coincided with bursting a loose credit-inspired economic bubble. Only 16% of American households were invested in the stock market within the United States during the period leading up to this depression, suggesting that the crash carried somewhat less weight in causing it.

Unemployed men march in Toronto.

However, the psychological effects of the crash reverberated across the nation as businesses became aware of the difficulties in securing capital market investments for new projects and expansions. Business uncertainty naturally affects job security for employees, and as the American worker (the consumer) faced uncertainty with regards to income, naturally the propensity to consume declined. The decline in stock prices caused bankruptcies and severe macroeconomic difficulties, including contraction of credit, business closures, firing of workers, bank failures, decline of the money supply, and other economically depressing events.

The resultant rise of mass unemployment is seen as a result of the crash, although the crash is by no means the sole event that contributed to the depression. The Wall Street Crash is usually seen as having the greatest impact on the events that followed and therefore is widely regarded as signaling the downward economic slide that initiated the Great Depression. True or not, the consequences were dire for almost everybody. Most academic experts agree on one aspect of the crash: It wiped out billions of dollars of wealth in one day, and this immediately depressed consumer buying.

The failure set off a worldwide run on US gold deposits (i.e., the dollar) and forced the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates into the slump. Some 4,000 banks and other lenders ultimately failed. Also, the uptick rule, which allowed short selling only when the last tick in a stock's price was positive, was implemented after the 1929 market crash to prevent short sellers from driving the price of a stock down in a bear raid.

The stock market crash of October 1929 led directly to the Great Depression in Europe. When stocks plummeted on the New York Stock Exchange, the world noticed immediately. Although financial leaders in the United Kingdom, as in the United States, vastly underestimated the extent of the crisis that ensued, it soon became clear that the world's economies were more interconnected than ever. The effects of the disruption to the global system of financing, trade, and production and the subsequent meltdown of the American economy were soon felt throughout Europe.

In 1930 and 1931, in particular, unemployed workers went on strike, demonstrated in public, and otherwise took direct action to call public attention to their plight. Within the UK, protests often focused on the so-called means test, which the government had instituted in 1931 to limit the amount of unemployment payments made to individuals and families. For working people, the means test seemed an intrusive and insensitive way to deal with the chronic and relentless deprivation caused by the economic crisis. The strikes were met forcefully, with police breaking up protests, arresting demonstrators, and charging them with crimes related to the violation of public order.

There is a debate among economists and historians as to what role the crash played in subsequent economic, social, and political events. The Economist argued in a 1998 article that the Depression did not start with the stock market crash, nor was it clear at the time of the crash that a depression was starting. They asked, "Can a very serious Stock Exchange collapse produce a serious setback to industry when industrial production is for the most part in a healthy and balanced condition?" They argued that there must be some setback, but there was not yet sufficient evidence to prove that it would be long or would necessarily produce a general industrial depression.

However, The Economist also cautioned that some bank failures were also to be expected and some banks may not have had any reserves left for financing commercial and industrial enterprises. It concluded that the position of the banks was the key to the situation, but what was going to happen could not have been foreseen.

Milton Friedman's A Monetary History of the United States, co-written with Anna Schwartz, argues that what made the "great contraction" so severe was not the downturn in the business cycle, protectionism, or the 1929 stock market crash in themselves but the collapse of the banking system during three waves of panics from 1930 to 1933.

Bierman, Harold (2008). "The 1929 Stock Market Crash". In Whaples, Robert (ed.). EH.Net Encyclopedia. Santa Clara, California: Economic History Association.

Brooks, John (1969). Once in Golconda: A True Drama of Wall Street 1920-1938. New York: Harper & Row. ISBN 0393013758

Galbraith, John Kenneth. "1929: New York City." Lapham's Quarterly, no. 2 (Spring 2015): 145-146

Klein, Maury (2001). Rainbow's End: The Crash of 1929. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0195135164

Klingaman, William K. (1989). 1929: The Year of the Great Crash. New York: Harper & Row. ISBN 0060160810

Shachtman, Tom (1979). The Day America Crashed: A Narrative Account of the Great Stock Market Crash of October 24, 1929. New York: G.P. Putnam. ISBN 0399116133.

Thomas, Gordon and Morgan-Witts, Max (1979). The Day the Bubble Burst: A Social History of the Wall Street Crash of 1929. Garden City, New York: Doubleday. ISBN 0385143702

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The Wall Street Crash of 1929, also known as the Great Crash, the Crash of 29 was a major American stock market crash that occurred in the autumn of 1929. It started in September and ended in mid-November, when share prices on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) collapsed.

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Andrew Morgan

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Table of Contents

1. What Caused the 1929 Stock Market Crash?

2. Black Tuesday

3. Effects of the 1929 Stock Market Crash: The Great Depression

The Stock Market Crash of 1929 occurred on October 29, 1929, when Wall Street investors traded some 16 million shares on the New York Stock Exchange in a single day. Billions of dollars were lost, wiping out thousands of investors. In the aftermath of that event, sometimes called "Black Tuesday," America and the rest of the industrialized world spiraled downward into the Great Depression, the deepest and longest-lasting economic downturn in the history of the Western industrialized world up to that time.

What Caused the 1929 Stock Market Crash?

Stock Market Crash of 1929

During the 1920s, the U.S. stock market underwent rapid expansion, reaching its peak in August 1929 after a period of wild speculation in the Roaring Twenties. By then, production had already declined and unemployment had risen, leaving stocks in great excess of their real value.

Among the other causes of the stock market crash of 1929 were low wages, the proliferation of debt, a struggling agricultural sector and an excess of large bank loans that could not be liquidated.

Did you know? The New York Stock Exchange was founded in 1817, although its origins date back to 1792 when a group of stockbrokers and merchants signed an agreement under a buttonwood tree on Wall Street.

Black Tuesday

Stock prices began to decline in September and early October 1929, and on October 18 a big drop in stock prices began. Panic soon set in, and on October 24, Black Thursday, a record 12,894,650 shares were traded. Investment companies and leading bankers attempted to stabilize the market by buying up great blocks of stock, producing a moderate rally on Friday.

On Monday, however, the storm broke anew, and the market went into free fall. Black Monday was followed by Black Tuesday-October 29, 1929-during which stock prices collapsed completely and 16,410,030 shares were traded on the New York Stock Exchange in a single day. Billions of dollars were lost, wiping out thousands of investors, and stock tickers ran hours behind because the machinery could not handle the tremendous volume of trading.

Effects of the 1929 Stock Market Crash: The Great Depression

After October 29, 1929, stock prices had nowhere to go but up, so there was considerable recovery during succeeding weeks. Overall, however, prices continued to drop as the United States slumped into the Great Depression, and by 1932 stocks were worth only about 20 percent of their value in the summer of 1929.

The stock market crash of 1929 was not the sole cause of the Great Depression, but it did act to accelerate the global economic collapse which it was also a symptom. Stock prices continued to drop through 1932 when the Dow Jones Industrial Average-a widely-used benchmark for blue-chip stocks in the United States-closed at 41.22, its lowest value of the 20th century, 89 percent below its peak.

By 1933, nearly half of America's banks had failed, and unemployment was approaching 15 million people or 30 percent of the U.S. workforce. The Dow Jones Industrial Average would not return to its pre-1929 heights until November of 1954, about 25 years later.

African Americans were particularly hard hit, as they were the " last hired, first fired." Women during the Great Depression fared slightly better, as traditionally female jobs of the era like teaching and nursing were more insulated than those dependent on fluctuating markets.

Life for the average family during the Great Depression was difficult. Storms and a severe drought in the Southern Plains ruined crops, causing the area to be nicknamed the Dust Bowl. "Okies," as fleeing residents were called, moved to big cities looking for work.

Did you know? The Great Depression helped bring an end to Prohibition. Politicians believed legalizing the consumption of alcohol could help create jobs and stimulate the economy.

The relief and reform measures in the New Deal programs enacted by the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt helped lessen the worst effects of the Great Depression; however, the U.S. economy would not fully turn around until after 1939, when World War II revitalized American industry.

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Stock Market Crash: 1929 & Black Tuesday | HISTORY

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The Stock Market Crash of 1929 ushered in the Great Depression, as some 16 million shares were traded on Black Tuesday, Oct. 29, 1929, wiping out many investors.

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Music of 1930's (image/website with tracks)

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Music of 1930's (image/website with tracks)

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Marina McCafferty

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Search, stream and license songs managed by the music publishing company Shapiro Bernstein

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Garrett O'Connor

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appalachian scenic highway - Google Search

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Music of 1930's (University of Maine song, Stein Song by Rudy Vallee)

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Music of 1930's (University of Maine song, Stein Song by Rudy Vallee)

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Marina McCafferty

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Rudy Vallee - Stein Song (1930) University Of Maine

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This Was A #1 Hit For Rudy In 1930. Stein Song (University of Maine) Rudy Vallée (July 28, 1901 -- July 3, 1986) was an American singer, actor, bandleader, and entertainer. Rudy Vallée (July 28, 1901 -- July 3, 1986) was an American singer, actor, bandleader, and entertainer.

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Connor Page (go to 1:05 five of the song)

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"Song Of The South" -  Alabama (Lyrics In Description)

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I DO NOT OWN THE PIC OR THE SONG! NO COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT INTENDED!!! ALL CREDIT GOES TO ALABAMA, THE SONGWRITERS AND THE RECORD LABEL!!

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Esther susen

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Dakota Wotton

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Caitlyn Beyenberg

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Franklin D. Roosevelt; April 28, 1935 - On The Works Relief Program

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Franklin Delano Roosevelt (January 30, 1882 - April 12, 1945), commonly known by his initials FDR, was an American statesman and political leader who served as the 32nd President of the United States. A Democrat, he was elected four times and served from March 1933 to his death in April 1945.

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Garrett O'Connor

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nThe historic Appalachian trail is the world's longest, continuously-marked trail. With over 2,000 miles of hiking trails, there are plenty of opportunities to hop out of the car and explore the outdoors. The trail starts in Maine and then winds down through fourteen states, and officially ends in Georgia. Some people prepare for months to actually hike the entire length of the trail, which has been around since the 1920s, and is a permanent part of America's hiking heritage. But, it's also pretty fun to drive the Appalachian Trail, which is divided into three major sections: New England, Mid-Atlantic, and the Southern Appalachias. The New England stretch of the trail takes you from Maine to New Hampshire, a bit of Vermont, and Connecticut. The Mid-Atlantic states include New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware and Maryland. Then you'll hit the Southern Appalachias, in which we'll include Virginia and West Virginia, then over to Tennessee and down to North Carolina and Georgia.

NEW ENGLAND

Along your Appalachian trail road trip, there are plenty of opportunities to get out and hike the trail itself. The New England section of the Appalachian trail is found in Maine and New Hampshire. It's also the most difficult section of the trail due to the rugged terrain and unpredictable weather. Some parts of this section are even above the tree line, which only amplifies any severe weather. This may be the best place to start at if you actually plan on hiking through of the trail. Breathtaking highlights in the area include Baxter State Park and the White Mountain National Forest. The trail picks up again in eastern Vermont and goes up to the New York-Connecticut border, this section of the trail is much less difficult than the northernmost segment for hikers. Expect to see many stone walls from previously existing structures such as farm buildings. This section also contains some hiking through gorgeous farmland and lovely pastoral views. Consider resting your legs at the waterfalls in Gifford Woods State Forest Park or Kent Falls State Park.

What to do

Maine's Grafton Notch State Park features beautiful waterfalls and gorges. Once you hit the road, plan on driving the Mt Washington Auto Road in New Hampshire, which is a seasonal byway, where you can find mountain tours, a gift shop and cafe. While in New Hampshire visit Story Land, a super quirky theme park that was founded by Bob and Ruth Morell after they had bought huge dolls from Germany. Their park is based on these massive storybook dolls. Next up, is Crawford Notch State Park.This 5,700-acre park has loads fo hiking trails, a few waterfalls and insanely gorgeous mountain views. There's also a campground onsite. A little ways down the road is Gifford Woods State Forest Park, which also features Appalachian trail camping.

Once you hit Massachusetts, head to Western Gateway Heritage State Park in North Adams, to learn about the history of this part of Massachusetts. And a can't-miss museum is the Arrowhead Museum, which is the name of Herman Melville's House (the writer of Moby Dick).Over in Hancock, MA is the historic Hancock Shaker Village, which was established in 1791, and Bash Bish Falls State Park, home to Massachusetts' highest single-drop waterfall. Mount Washington State Forest is one of the prettiest forests along the route, and lies in the southern part of the Taconic Mountain range. Then take a leisurely stroll across the covered bridge at Kent Falls State Park, and hike to the cascading waterfalls.

Where to eat and sleep

The New England portion of the Appalachian Trail offers plenty of delicious places to eat. There's Polly's Pancake Parlor in Sugar Hill, NH, which is famous for its pancakes, obviously, but also its ambiance, as it's set in an early 1800s building that provides fantastic mountain views. A little drive away is the Sunny Day Diner in Lincoln, NH or the Blue Benn Diner in Bennington, VT, which is a classic 1945 railcar diner, where you can play some tunes on the jukebox while you eat all-day breakfast. Over in Massachusetts, there's East Side Cafe in Pittsfield, which has been a local favorite since the 1950s, and Collins Diner, a classic retro aluminum diner in Canaan, CT.

When you're ready to call it a day, head to in Bennington, VT, which is housed in a beautiful 1913 mansion, on 11 acres, and just a few minutes walk from Crawford Notch Campground in the White Mountain National Forest, or lakeside Loch Lyme Lodge, which offers cabins and cottages. Inn Of The Six Mountains in Killington is another great choice. The resort is s urrounded by the Green Mountains, and if you're visiting during winter for skiing, they provide free shuttle service. Or you could spend the night in luxury at the Four Chimney's Inn Maple Terrace Motel The Bennington Museum and the Bennington Battle Monument. Lastly, the in Williamstown, MA will make you feel right at home with simple rooms decorated in a charming country theme.

MID-ATLANTIC

The Mid-Atlantic section of the Appalachian Trail weaves in and out of some heavily populated urban areas, but the trail retains a feeling of remoteness as it passes to the west of major cities like Philadelphia or New York City. For hikers traveling through this section, the Mid-Atlantic makes it easy to resupply considering its proximity to so many cities. Dig the beautiful scenery at New York's Bear Mountain State Park and Pennyslvania's stunning Pinnacle Overlook.

What to do

Storm King Art Center in Mountainville, NY is a fun outdoor, open-air museum where you can easily spend an afternoon wandering around exhibits. Bear Mountain State Park in Tomkins Cove is 5,000 acres of scenic beauty located on the Hudson River, and Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Areais one of New Jersey's best-kept secrets. It's forty lush miles of the middle Delaware River, surrounded by forests and rolling hills and river inlets. For a history kick, head over to the Friends of The Daniel Boone Homestead in Birdsboro, PA, where it feels like you've stepped back in time. It's a fantastic place to learn about the culture of Oley Valley during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Then there's Hopewell Furnace National Historic Site in Elverson and the Ephrata Cloister in Lancaster County, PA. If you have time, plan to spend at least a day or two in Lancaster County, it's a gorgeous part of Pennsylvania and there's so much to do and see, you'd be remissed to just drive through without stopping. Lastly, there's the Haines Shoe House in Stonybrook. The house was initially built by a shoe salesman as an advertisement for his business, today it's a quirky, but iconic, roadside attraction.

Since 2001, the Appalachian Trail Museum in Gardners, PA has been dedicated to protecting the legends and stories of the community of hikers who work to preserve and protect the 2,200 mile Appalachian Trail since its creation in 1923. The museum is located along Pennsylvania's Pine Grove Furnace State Park. The museum itself was built over two hundred years ago, and at the time was used as a grist mill. Today it's across from one of the most famous points of the Appalachian Trail, the Pine Grove General Store, which is traditionally the half-way mark, and where hikers stop to attempt the famous ritual of trying to eat half a gallon of ice cream in one sitting. Today the museum currently exhibits over 13,000 images of hikers who have passed though the area over the years, and they also have a trail shelter built by famous hiking legend Earl Shafer. In 1948 Shafer was the first person to hike the entire trail and has gone down in hiker glory.

Next up, is Gettysburg National Military Park, which is probably the most important battlefield in America, commemorating the turning point of the Civil War. There's so many exhibits and a fantastic driving tour of the park. Plus, Gettysburg is a beautiful historic town to spend the day. If you want to get out to stretch your legs, head to Cunningham Falls State Park in Thurmont, MD, which is home to a 78-foot tall cascading waterfall, Maryland's largest. Washington Monument State Park in Middletown features a 34-foot tall monument, and is just 4 miles from the town of Boonsboro, another great town to visit while on the Appalachian Trail.

Where to eat and sleep

Milford Diner in Milford, PA offers traditional, homecooked diner food in a very cool colonial-themed diner. In Belvidere, NJ there's Hot Dog Johnny's in Belvidere, which will make you tingle with retro roadfood n ostalgia. Pennsylvania's Historic Hotel Bethlehem is a beautiful boutique hotel that's also pet-friendly, and has an onsite ice cream shoppe. For a quirkier place to sleep, there's the Red Caboose Motel & Restaurant in Ronks, PA, which is located on 10 acres in Amish Country. Here you can sleep in a historic train car and caboose, which comes with flat-screen TVs and some come with their own private deck. There's also an onsite country restaurant, petting zoo and buggy rides are also offered. Be warned, the Red Caboose Motel closes in winter.

THE SOUTHERN APPALACHIAS

This section of the Appalachiain trail offers some of the most scenic views and least-traveled sections of hiking trails. This segment in the Virginias is also a great place for hikers planning shorter trips. Skyline Drive offers amenities and accommodations closer to the trail than anywhere else along the entire length. Running from northern Tennessee to the trail's end point at Springer Mountain in Georgia, this section takes hikers over the tallest peak on the entire trail at the famous Clingmans Dome. This section is mostly full of well-maintained trails, but some parts offer long and strenuous climbs. And there's no better site to see for somebody who started their hike up in Maine than Vogel State Park, one of the oldest and most popular state parks in Georgia and one of the last stops on the southern end of the Appalachian Trail.

What to do

Skyline Drive runs the entire length of Harpers Ferry National Historical Park is located smack dab where the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers meet. This historic town has hiking and a charming downtown district that will make you feel like you're stepping back in time to the 1800s. The 110-mile Skyline Drive Shenandoah National Park in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. While in Virginia don't miss the Luray Caverns, which has drawn visitors along the Appalachain trail since its discovery in 1878. To get your fill of history, visit the Frontier Culture Museum in Staunton, which is a fantastic living history museum focused on the stories of Old World migrants who settled in Shenandoah Valley.
SPOTLIGHT: SHENANDOAH NATIONAL PARK
Shenandoah National Park is 200,000 square miles large and offers 500 miles of trails within the park and encompasses part of eight counties, with exposed rock that dates back over 1 billion years. Here are a few of the best spots to hit up: Old Rag Mountain is one of the most popular of all the trails and with good reason. At dusk you can see an insanely beautiful view of the Blue Valley. If you're looking for a hike with a more refreshing surrounding, try hiking to Crabtree Falls. This waterfall is the highest vertical-drop cascading waterfall east of the Mississippi River and its beauty draws spectators from all over. Next, explore the Shenandoah Caverns, which offer mile-long tours. Give your legs a break and take in the spectacular views from the comfort of your car and drive along the 101 miles of ​ Skyline Drive.

A few other can't miss-places along the trail include Natural Bridge Park in Rockbridge County, VA. This is a beautiful geological wonder, which allegedly features some graffitti from George Washington. There's McAfee's Knob in Catawba, which is a breathtaking scenic overlook in Roanoke County. Rock Castle Gorge Trail in Floyd is a great places to hike, and even camp along the Appalachian Trail. Mystery Hill in Blowing Rock will make you question gravity and science, and Biltmore Estate in Asheville will give you a taste of the finer things. The Biltmore Estate was built by George Vanderbilt in the style of a Châteauesque mansion. It's basically America's version of Downton Abbey.

The Ghost Town in The Sky in Maggie Valley is a kitschy roadside attraction that's a fun little stop. It's a wild west-themed amusement park that sits right on the top of a mountain. Since you're so close, you should probably take a drive down one of America's most important classic drives, the Blue Ridge Parkway. This drive connects Shenandoah National Park with Skyline Drive. Prepare for a gorgeous and windy scenic drive along mountain ridges. And the Museum of the Cherokee Indian in Cherokee, NC is a fitting end to your Appalachian Trail road trip. Here can you learn all about the first peoples to use the area where the trail would later be established.
SPOTLIGHT: Great Smoky Mountains National Park and Tuckaleechee Caverns
While checking out the Appalachian Trail make sure to put Laurel Falls on your hiking map. It's a 2.6-mile hike with a moderate path making it enjoyable for most hiking levels (the trail does include stairs). At the end of the trail enjoy a magnificent 25-foot waterfall. Clingmans Dome is the perfect spot to enjoy a 360-degree view of the Smoky Mountains. The observation dome is the highest point in the park. Take the 0.5-mile trail to the tower to enjoy spectacular views. If you'd rather take some time to shop visit the Appalachian Quilt Trail offering items from local artists, farmer's markets, and quilts. Rest up at the LeConte Lodge on Mount LeConte. It's the third highest peak in the Smokies, and the LeConte Lodge is the only lodging accommodations in the entire park. Experience a rustic stay with cabins, kerosene lanterns, and washbasins for sponge baths.

If you're going to be visiting Great Smoky Mountains National Park plan on a detour to visit Tuckaleechee Caverns. Hidden 150 feet under the mountains, the c avern is a mile long caving system that stretches out underneath the mountains themselves. According to the legends, the Tuckaleechee caves were used in 1850 by the local Cherokee tribe to hide from the European settlers. The caves were officially discovered by a group of sawmill workers who noticed water pouring into a very large sinkhole. According to the workers, the water was disappearing into what they realized was a massive cave system hidden behind a thin sheet of rock.

Clingmans Dome in Gatlinburg, TN is the third tallest mountain east of the Rockies, and at 6,643 feet, your view of the Great Smoky Mountains is unparalleled. It's also the highest point in Tennessee. Dry Falls in Highlands, NC is a beautiful 65-foot tall waterfall in the middle of the forest (don't worry there's a trail to it). Black Rock Mountain State Park in Clayton, GA is named after it's dark cliffs that jut out from Georgia's Blue RidgeMountains. Lastly, Tallulah Gorge State Park at Tallullah Falls is a fitting end to your Appalachian Trail road trip. It's home to a thousand foot gorge, tons of waterfalls and campground and a former Victorian-era resort town.

Where to eat and sleep

in Mount Airy, NC is a retro-kitschy Michie Tavern in Charlottesville has opened its doors to travelers for over 200 years, providing hearty, homemade southern food based on recipes from the 1800s. The Chalet Restaurant & Switzerland Inn in Little Switzerland is a very unique lodge and restaurant. It's been in operation since 1910, and located right on the mountain top by Asheville and Blowing Rock. The rooms are large, the mountain views are stunning and the on-site restaurant serves food all day long. It's located at milepost 334 along the Blue Ridge Parkway. If you're vegetarian, then check out The Grit, which prides itself on being a 100% meat-free eatery, serving delicious fare in a historic building. There's also the historic Big Meadows Lodge in Shenandoah National Park and the stately Natural Bridge Hotel. Lastly, the Mayberry Motor Inn Andy Griffith Show-themed courtyard-style hotel, just off US Route 52 and less than two miles from the Andy Griffith Museum.
BEST TIME TO TRAVEL THE APPALACHIAN TRAIL
The best time to drive down the Appalachian Trail is in the fall. Many places are seasonal along the route, and some are closed in winter, also some roads will be closed seasonally as well. Summer can be hot, but autumn is pretty much perfect. From September through mid-November the leaves will be changing and provide a gorgeous backdrop to your journey.

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Ultimate Road Trip: The Appalachian Trail

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nThe historic Appalachian trail is the world's longest, continuously-marked trail. With over 2,000 miles of hiking trails, there are plenty of opportunities to hop out of the car and explore the outdoors. The trail starts in Maine and then winds down through fourteen states, and officially ends in Georgia.

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Jameson Peters

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Dakota wotton

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Social Security Act of 1935

TITLE I- GRANTS TO STATES FOR OLD-AGE ASSISTANCE

TITLE II- FEDERAL OLD-AGE BENEFITS

TITLE III- GRANTS TO STATES FOR UNEMPLOYMENT COMPENSATION ADMINISTRATION

TITLE IV- GRANTS TO STATES FOR AID TO DEPENDENT CHILDREN

TITLE V- GRANTS TO STATES FOR MATERNAL AND CHILD WELFARE

TITLE VI- PUBLIC HEALTH WORK

TITLE VII- SOCIAL SECURITY BOARD

TITLE VIII- TAXES WITH RESPECT TO EMPLOYMENT

TITLE IX- TAX ON EMPLOYERS OF EIGHT OR MORE

TITLE X- GRANTS TO STATES FOR AID TO THE BLIND

TITLE XI- GENERAL PROVISIONS

The Social Security Act (Act of August 14, 1935) [H. R. 7260]

An act to provide for the general welfare by establishing a system of Federal old-age benefits, and by enabling the several States to make more adequate provision for aged persons, blind persons, dependent and crippled children, maternal and child welfare, public health, and the administration of their unemployment compensation laws; to establish a Social Security Board; to raise revenue; and for other purposes.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,

TITLE I- GRANTS TO STATES FOR OLD-AGE ASSISTANCE

APPROPRIATION

SECTION 1. For the purpose of enabling each State to furnish financial assistance, as far as practicable under the conditions in such State, to aged needy individuals, there is hereby authorized to be appropriated for the fiscal year ended June 30, 1936, the sum of $49,750,000, and there is hereby authorized to be appropriated for each fiscal year thereafter a sum sufficient to carry out the purposes of this title. The sums made available under this section shall be used for making payments to States which have submitted, and had approved by the Social Security Board established by Title VII (hereinafter referred to as the Board ), State plans for old-age assistance.

STATE OLD-AGE ASSISTANCE PLANS

(b) The Board shall approve any plan which fulfills the conditions specified in subsection (a), except that it shall not approve any plan which imposes, as a condition of eligibility for old-age assistance under the plan-
(1) An age requirement of more than sixty-five years, except that the plan may impose, effective until January 1, 1940, an age requirement of as much as seventy years; or
(2) Any residence requirement which excludes any resident of the State who has resided therein five years during the nine years immediately preceding the application for old-age assistance and has resided therein continuously for one year immediately preceding the application; or (3) Any citizenship requirement which excludes any citizen of the United States.

PAYMENT TO STATES

SEC. 3. (a) From the sums appropriated therefor, the Secretary of the Treasury shall pay to each State which has an approved plan for old-age assistance, for each quarter, beginning with the quarter commencing July 1, 1935,
(1) an amount, which shall be used exclusively as old-age assistance, equal to one-half of the total of the sums expended during such quarter as old-age assistance under the State plan with respect to each individual who at the time of such expenditure is sixty-five years of age or older and is not an inmate of a public institution, not counting so much of such expenditure with respect to any individual for any month as exceeds $30, and
(2) 5 per centum of such amount, which shall be used for paying the costs of administering the State plan or for old-age assistance, or both, and for no other purpose: Provided, That the State plan, in order to be approved by the Board, need not provide for financial participation before July 1, 1937, by the State, in the case of any State which the Board, upon application by the State and after reasonable notice and opportunity for hearing to the State, finds is prevented by its constitution from providing such financial participation.

(b) The method of computing and paying such amounts shall be as follows:
(1) The Board shall, prior to the beginning of each quarter, estimate the amount to be paid to the State for such quarter under the provisions of clause (1) of subsection (a), such estimate to be based on
(A) a report filed by the State containing its estimate of the total sum to be expended in such quarter in accordance with the provisions of such clause, and stating the amount appropriated or made available by the State and its political subdivisions for such expenditures in such quarter, and if such amount is less than one-half of the total sum of such estimated expenditures, the source or sources from which the difference is expected to be derived,
(B) records showing the number of aged individuals in the State, and
(C) such other investigation as the Board may find necessary.

(2) The Board shall then certify to the Secretary of the Treasury the amount so estimated by the Board, reduced or increased, as the case may be, by any sum by which it finds that its estimate for any prior quarter was greater or less than the amount which should have been paid to the State under clause (1) of subsection (a) for such quarter, except to the extent that such sum has been applied to make the amount certified for any prior quarter greater or less than the amount estimated by the Board for such prior quarter.

(3) The Secretary of the Treasury shall thereupon, through the Division of Disbursement of the Treasury Department and prior to audit or settlement by the General Accounting Office, pay to the State, at the time or times fixed by the Board, the amount so certified, increased by 5 per centum.

OPERATION OF STATE PLANS

SEC. 4. In the case of any State plan for old-age assistance which has been approved by the Board, if the Board, after reasonable notice and opportunity for hearing to the State agency administering or supervising the administration of such plan, finds-
(1) that the plan has been so changed as to impose any age, residence, or citizenship requirement prohibited by section 2 (b), or that in the administration of the plan any such prohibited requirement is imposed, with the knowledge of such State agency, in a substantial number of cases; or
(2) that in the administration of the plan there is a failure to comply substantially with any provision required by section 2 (a) to be included in the plan; the Board shall notify such State agency that further payments will not be made to the State until the Board is satisfied that such prohibited requirement is no longer so imposed, and that there is no longer any such failure to comply. Until it is so satisfied it shall make no further certification to the Secretary of the Treasury with respect to such State.

ADMINISTRATION

SEC. 5. There is hereby authorized to be appropriated for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1936, the sum of $250,000, for all necessary expenses of the Board in administering the provisions of this title.

DEFINITION

SEC. 6. When used in this title the term old age assistance means money payments to aged individuals.

OLD-AGE BENEFIT PAYMENTS

SEC. 202. (a) Every qualified individual (as defined in section 210) shall be entitled to receive, with respect to the period beginning on the date he attains the age of sixty-five, or on January 1, 1942, whichever is the later, and ending on the date of his death, an old-age benefit (payable as nearly as practicable in equal monthly installments) as follows:
(1) If the total wages (as defined in section 210) determined by the Board to have been paid to him, with respect to employment (as defined in section 210) after December 31, 1936, and before he attained the age of sixty- five, were not more than $3,000, the old-age benefit shall be at a monthly rate of one-half of 1 per centum of such total wages;
(2) If such total wages were more than $3,000, the old-age benefit shall be at a monthly rate equal to the sum of the following:
(A) One-half of 1 per centum of $3,000; plus
(B) One-twelfth of 1 per centum of the amount by which such total wages exceeded $3,000 and did not exceed $45,000; plus
(C) One-twenty-fourth of 1 per centum of the amount by which such total wages exceeded $45,000.
(b) In no case shall the monthly rate computed under subsection (a) exceed $85.
(c) If the Board finds at any time that more or less than the correct amount has theretofore been paid to any individual under this section, then, under regulations made by the Board, proper adjustments shall be made in connection with subsequent payments under this section to the same individual.
(d) Whenever the Board finds that any qualified individual has received wages with respect to regular employment after he attained the age of sixty-five, the old-age benefit payable to such individual shall be reduced, for each calendar month in any part of which such regular employment occurred, by an amount equal to one month s benefit. Such reduction shall be made, under regulations prescribed by the Board, by deductions from one or more payments of old-age benefit to such individual.

PAYMENTS UPON DEATH

SEC. 203. (a) If any individual dies before attaining the age of sixty-five, there shall be paid to his estate an amount equal to 3 " per centum of the total wages determined by the Board to have been paid to him, with respect to employment after December 31, 1936.
(b) If the Board finds that the correct amount of the old-age benefit payable to a qualified individual during his life under section 202 was less than 3 " per centum of the total wages by which such old-age benefit was measurable, then there shall be paid to his estate a sum equal to the amount, if any, by which such 3 " per centum exceeds the amount (whether more or less than the correct amount) paid to him during his life as old-age benefit.
(c) If the Board finds that the total amount paid to a qualified individual under an old-age benefit during his life was less than the correct amount to which he was entitled under section 202, and that the correct amount of such old-age benefit was 3 " per centum or more of the total wages by which such old-age benefit was measurable, then there shall be paid to his estate a sum equal to the amount, if any, by which the correct amount of the old- age benefit exceeds the amount which was so paid to him during his life.

PAYMENTS TO AGED INDIVIDUALS NOT QUALIFIED FOR BENEFITS

SEC. 204. (a) There shall be paid in a lump sum to any individual who, upon attaining the age of sixty-five, is not a qualified individual, an amount equal to 3 " per centum of the total wages determined by the Board to have been paid to him, with respect to employment after December 31, 1936, and before he attained the age of sixty-five.
(b) After any individual becomes entitled to any payment under subsection (a), no other payment shall be made under this title in any manner measured by wages paid to him, except that any part of any payment under subsection (a) which is not paid to him before his death shall be paid to his estate.

AMOUNTS OF $500 OR LESS PAYABLE TO ESTATES

SEC. 205. If any amount payable to an estate under section 203 or 204 is $500 or less, such amount may, under regulations prescribed by the Board, be paid to the persons found by the Board to be entitled thereto under the law of the State in which the deceased was domiciled, without the necessity of compliance with the requirements of law with respect to the administration of such estate.

OVERPAYMENTS DURING LIFE

SEC. 206. If the Board finds that the total amount paid to a qualified individual under an old-age benefit during his life was more than the correct amount to which he was entitled under section 202, and was 3 " per centum or more of the total wages by which such old-age benefit was measurable, then upon his death there shall be repaid to the United States by his estate the amount, if any, by which such total amount paid to him during his life exceeds whichever of the following is the greater:
(1) Such 3 " per centum, or
(2) the correct amount to which he was entitled under section 202.

METHOD OF MAKING PAYMENTS

SEC. 207. The Board shall from time to time certify to the Secretary of the Treasury the name and address of each person entitled to receive a payment under this title, the amount of such payment, and the time at which it should be made, and the Secretary of the Treasury through the Division of Disbursement of the Treasury Department, and prior to audit or settlement by the General Accounting Office, shall make payment in accordance with the certification by the Board.

ASSIGNMENT

SEC. 208. The right of any person to any future payment under this title shall not be transferable or assignable, at law or in equity, and none of the moneys paid or payable or rights existing under this title shall be subject to execution, levy, attachment, garnishment, or other legal process, or to the operation of any bankruptcy or insolvency law.

PENALTIES

SEC. 209. Whoever in any application for any payment under this title makes any false statement as to any material fact, knowing such statement to be false, shall be fined not more than $1,000 or imprisoned for not more than one year, or both.

DEFINITIONS

SEC. 210. When used in this title-- (a) The term wages means all remuneration for employment, including the cash value of all remuneration paid in any medium other than cash; except that such term shall not include that part of the remuneration which, after remuneration equal to $3,000 has been paid to an individual by an employer with respect to employment during any calendar year, is paid to such employer with respect to employment during such calendar year.
(b) The term employment means any service, of whatever nature, performed within the United States by an employee for his employer, except-
(1) Agricultural labor;
(2) Domestic service in a private home;
(3) Casual labor not in the course of the employer s trade or business;
(4) Service performed as an officer or member of the crew of a vessel documented under the laws of the United States or of any foreign country;
(5) Service performed in the employ of the United States Government or of an instrumentality of the United States;
(6) Service performed in the employ of a State, a political subdivision thereof, or an instrumentality of one or more States or political subdivisions;
(7) Service performed in the employ of a corporation, community chest, fund, or foundation, organized and operated exclusively for religious, charitable, scientific, literary, or educational purposes, or for the prevention of cruelty to children or animals, no part of the net earnings of which inures to the benefit of any private shareholder or individual.

(c) The term qualified individual means any individual with respect to whom it appears to the satisfaction of the Board that-
(1) He is at least sixty-five years of age; and
(2) The total amount of wages paid to him, with respect to employment after December 31, 1936, and before he attained the age of sixty-five, was not less than $2,000; and
(3) Wages were paid to him, with respect to employment on some five days after December 31, 1936, and before he attained the age of sixty-five, each day being in a different calendar year.

TITLE III-GRANTS TO STATES FOR UNEMPLOYMENT COMPENSATION ADMINISTRATION APPROPRIATION

SECTION 301. For the purpose of assisting the States in the administration of their unemployment compensation laws, there is hereby authorized to be appropriated, for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1936, the sum of $4,000,000, and for each fiscal year thereafter the sum of $49,000,000, to be used as hereinafter provided.

PAYMENTS TO STATES

PROVISIONS OF STATE LAWS

SEC. 303. (a) The Board shall make no certification for payment to any State unless it finds that the law of such State, approved by the Board under Title IX, includes provisions for-
(1) Such methods of administration (other than those relating to selection, tenure of office, and compensation of personnel) as are found by the Board to be reasonably calculated to insure full payment of unemployment compensation when due; and
(2) Payment of unemployment compensation solely through public employment offices in the State or such other agencies as the Board may approve; and
(3) Opportunity for a fair hearing, before an impartial tribunal, for all individuals whose claims for unemployment compensation are denied; and
(4) The payment of all money received in the unemployment fund of such State, immediately upon such receipt, to the Secretary of the Treasury to the credit of the Unemployment Trust Fund established by section 904; and
(5) Expenditure of all money requisitioned by the State agency from the Unemployment Trust Fund, in the payment of unemployment compensation, exclusive of expenses of admin- istration; and
(6) The making of such reports, in such form and containing such information, as the Board may from time to time require, and compliance with such provisions as the Board may from time to time find necessary to assure the correctness and verification of such reports; and
(7) Making available upon request to any agency of the United States charged with the administration of public works or assistance through public employment, the name, address, ordinary occupation, and employment status of each recipient of unemployment compensation, and a statement of such recipient s rights to further compensation under such law.
(b) Whenever the Board, after reasonable notice and opportunity for hearing to the State agency charged with the administration of the State law finds that in the administration of the law there is--
(1) a denial, in a substantial number of cases, of unemployment compensation to individuals entitled thereto under such law; or
(2) a failure to comply substantially with any provision specified in subsection (a); the Board shall notify such State agency that further payments will not be made to the State until the Board is satisfied that there is no longer any such denial or failure to comply. Until it is so satisfied it shall make no further certification to the Secretary of the Treasury with respect to such State.

TITLE IV-GRANTS TO STATES FOR AID TO DEPENDENT CHILDREN APPROPRIATION

SECTION 401. For the purpose of enabling each State to furnish financial assistance, as far as practicable under the conditions in such State, to needy dependent children, there is hereby authorized to be appropriated for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1936, the sum of $24,750,000, and there is hereby authorized to be appropriated for each fiscal year thereafter a sum sufficient to carry out the purposes of this title. The sums made available under this section shall be used for making payments to States which have submitted, and had approved by the Board, State plans for aid to dependent children.

STATE PLANS FOR AID TO DEPENDENT CHILDREN

PAYMENT TO STATES

SEC. 403. (a) From the sums appropriated therefor, the Secretary of the Treasury shall pay to each State which has an approved plan for aid to dependent children, for each quarter, beginning with the quarter commencing July 1, 1935, an amount, which shall be used exclusively for carrying out the State plan, equal to one-third of the total of the sums expended during such quarter under such plan, not counting so much of such expenditure with respect to any dependent child for any month as exceeds $18, or if there is more than one dependent child in the same home, as exceeds $18 for any month with respect to one such dependent child and $12 for such month with respect to each of the other dependent children.
(b) The method of computing and paying such amounts shall be as follows:
(1) The Board shall, prior to the beginning of each quarter, estimate the amount to be paid to the State for such quarter under the provisions of subsection
(a), such estimate to be based on
(A) a report filed by the State containing its estimate of the total sum to be expended in such quarter in accordance with the provisions of such subsection and stating the amount appropriated or made available by the State and its political subdivisions for such expenditures in such quarter, and if such amount is less than two-thirds of the total sum of such estimated expenditures, the source or sources from which the difference is expected to be derived,
(B) records showing the number of dependent children in the State, and
(C) such other investigation as the Board may find necessary.
(2) The Board shall then certify to the Secretary of the Treasury the amount so estimated by the Board, reduced or increased, as the case may be, by any sum by which it finds that its estimate for any prior quarter was greater or less than the amount which should have been paid to the State for such quarter, except to the extent that such sum has been applied to make the amount certified for any prior quarter greater or less than the amount estimated by the Board for such prior quarter.
(3) The Secretary of the Treasury shall thereupon, through the Division of Disbursement of the Treasury Department and prior to audit or settlement by the General Accounting Office, pay to the State, at the time or times fixed by the Board, the amount so certified.

OPERATION OF STATE PLANS

SEC. 404. In the case of any State plan for aid to dependent children which has been approved by the Board, if the Board, after reasonable notice and opportunity for hearing to the State agency administering or supervising the administration of such plan, finds-
(1) that the plan has been so changed as to impose any residence requirement prohibited by section 402 (b), or that in the administration of the plan any such prohibited requirement is imposed, with the knowledge of such State agency, in a substantial number of cases; or
(2) that in the administration of the plan there is a failure to comply substantially with any provision required by section 402 (a) to be included in the plan; the Board shall notify such State agency that further payments will not be made to the State until the Board is satisfied that such prohibited requirement is no longer so imposed, and that there is no longer any such failure to comply. Until it is so satisfied it shall make no further certification to the Secretary of the Treasury with respect to such State.

ADMINISTRATION

SEC. 405. There is hereby authorized to be appropriated for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1936, the sum of $250,000 for all necessary expenses of the Board in administering the provisions of this title.

DEFINITIONS

SEC. 406. When used in this title-
(a) The term dependent child means a child under the age of sixteen who has been deprived of parental support or care by reason of the death, continued absence from the home, or physical or mental incapacity of a parent, and who is living with his father, mother, grandfather, grandmother, brother, sister, stepfather, stepmother, stepbrother, stepsister, uncle, or aunt, in a place of residence maintained by one or more of such relatives as his or their own home;
(b) The term aid to dependent children means money payments with respect to a dependent child or dependent children.

PART 1-MATERNAL AND CHILD HEALTH SERVICES

APPROPRIATION

SECTION 501. For the purpose of enabling each State to extend and improve, as far as practicable under the conditions in such State, services for promoting the health of mothers and children, especially in rural areas and in areas suffering from severe economic distress, there is hereby authorized to be appropriated for each fiscal year, beginning with the fiscal year ending June 30, 1936, the sum of $3,800,000. The sums made available under this section shall be used for making payments to States which have submitted, and had approved by the Chief of the Children s Bureau, State plans for such services.

ALLOTMENTS TO STATES

SEC. 502. (a) Out of the sums appropriated pursuant to section 501 for each fiscal year the Secretary of Labor shall allot to each State $20,000, and such part of $1,800,000 as he finds that the number of live births in such State bore to the total number of live births in the United States, in the latest calendar year for which the Bureau of the Census has available statistics.
(b) Out of the sums appropriated pursuant to section 501 for each fiscal year the Secretary of Labor shall allot to the States $980,000 (in addition to the allotments made under subsection (a)), according to the financial need of each State for assistance in carrying out its State plan, as determined by him after taking into consideration the number of live births in such State.
(c) The amount of any allotment to a State under subsection (a) for any fiscal year remaining unpaid to such State at the end of such fiscal year shall be available for payment to such State under section 504 until the end of the second succeeding fiscal year. No payment to a State under section 504 shall be made out of its allotment for any fiscal year until its allotment for the preceding fiscal year has been exhausted or has ceased to be available.

APPROVAL OF STATE PLANS

SEC. 503. (a) A State plan for maternal and child-health services must (1) provide for financial participation by the State;
(2) provide for the administration of the plan by the State health agency or the supervision of the administration of the plan by the State health agency;
(3) provide such methods of administration (other than those relating to selection, tenure of office, and compensation of personnel) as are necessary for the efficient operation of the plan;
(4) provide that the State health agency will make such reports, in such form and containing such information, as the Secretary of Labor may from time to time require, and comply with such provisions as he may from time to time find necessary to assure the correctness and verification of such reports;
(5) provide for the extension and improvement of local maternal and child-health services administered by local child health units;
(6) provide for cooperation with medical, nursing, and welfare groups and organizations; and
(7) provide for the development of demonstration services in needy areas and among groups in special need.
(b) The Chief of the Children s Bureau shall approve any plan which fulfills the conditions specified in subsection (a) and shall thereupon notify the Secretary of Labor and the State health agency of his approval.

PAYMENT TO STATES

OPERATION OF STATE PLANS

SEC. 505. In the case of any State plan for maternal and child-health services which has been approved by the Chief of the Children s Bureau, if the Secretary of Labor, after reasonable notice and opportunity for hearing to the State agency administering or supervising the administration of such plan, finds that in the administration of the plan there is a failure to comply substantially with any provision required by section 503 to be included in the plan, he shall notify such State agency that further payments will not be made to the State until he is satisfied that there is no longer any such failure to comply. Until he is so satisfied he shall make no further certification to the Secretary of the Treasury with respect to such State.

PART 2-SERVICES FOR CRIPPLED CHILDREN

APPROPRIATION

SEC. 511. For the purpose of enabling each State to extend and improve (especially in rural areas and in areas suffering from severe economic distress), as far as practicable under the conditions in such State, services for locating crippled children and for providing medical, surgical, corrective, and other services and care, and facilities for diagnosis, hospitalization, and aftercare, for children who are crippled or who are suffering from conditions which lead to crippling, there is hereby authorized to be appropriated for each fiscal year beginning with the fiscal year ending June 30, 1936, the sum of $2,850,000. The sums made available under this section shall be used for making payments to States which have submitted, and had approved by the Chief of the Children s Bureau, State plans for such services.

ALLOTMENTS TO STATES

SEC. 512. (a) Out of the sums appropriated pursuant to section 511 for each fiscal year the Secretary of Labor shall allot to each State $20,000, and the remainder to the States according to the need of each State as determined by him after taking into consideration the number of crippled children in such State in need of the services referred to section 511 and the cost of furnishing such service to them
(b) The amount of any allotment to a State under subsection (a) for any fiscal year remaining unpaid to such State at the end of such fiscal year shall be available for payment to such State under section 514 until the end of the second succeeding fiscal year. No payment to a State under section 514 shall be made out of its allotment for any fiscal year until its allotment for the preceding fiscal year has been exhausted or has ceased to be available.

APPROVAL OF STATE PLANS

SEC. 513. (a) A State plan for services for crippled children must
(1) provide for financial participation by the State;
(2) provide for the administration of the plan by a State agency or the supervision of the administration of the plan by a State agency;
(3) provide such methods of administration (other than those relating to selection, tenure of office, and compensation of personnel) as are necessary for the efficient operation of the plan;
(4) provide that the State agency will make such reports, in such form and containing such information, as the Secretary of Labor may from time to time require, and comply with such provisions as he may from time to time find necessary to assure the correctness and verification of such reports;
(5) provide for carrying out the purposes specified in section 511; and
(6) provide for cooperation with medical, health, nursing, and welfare groups and organizations and with any agency in such State charged with administering State laws providing for vocational rehabilitation of physically handicapped children.

(b) The Chief of the Children s Bureau shall approve any plan which fulfills the conditions specified in subsection (a) and shall thereupon notify the Secretary of Labor and the State agency of his approval.

PAYMENT TO STATES

SEC. 514. (a) From the sums appropriated therefor and the allotments available under section 512, the Secretary of the Treasury shall pay to each State which has an approved plan for services for crippled children, for each quarter, beginning the quarter commencing July 1, 1935, an amount which shall be used exclusively for carrying out the State plan, equal to one-half of the total sum expended during such quarter for carrying out such plan.
(b) The method of computing and paying such amounts shall be as follows:
(1) The Secretary of Labor shall, prior the beginning of each quarter, estimate the amount to be paid to the State for such quarter under the provisions of subsection (a), such estimate to be based on
(A) a report filed by the State containing its estimate of the total sum to be expended in such quarter in accordance with the provisions of such subsection and stating the amount appropriated or made available by the State and its political subdivisions for such expenditures in such quarter and if such amount is less than one-half of the total sum of such estimated expenditures the source or sources from which the difference is expected to be derived, and
(B) such investigation as he may find necessary.
(2) The Secretary of Labor shall then certify the amount so estimated by him to the Secretary of the Treasury, reduced or increased as the case may be, by any sum by which the Secretary of Labor finds that his estimate for any prior quarter was greater or less than the amount which should have been paid to the State for such quarter, except to the extent that such sum has been applied to make the amount certified for any prior quarter greater or less than the amount estimated by the Secretary of Labor for such prior quarter.
(3) The Secretary of the Treasury shall thereupon, through the Division of Disbursement of the Treasury Department and prior to audit or settlement by the General Accounting Office, pay to the State, at the time or times fixed by the Secretary of Labor, the amount so certified.

OPERATION OF STATE PLANS

SEC. 515. In the case of any State plan for services for crippled children which has been approved by the Chief of the Children s Bureau, if the Secretary of Labor, after reasonable notice and opportunity for hearing to the State agency administering or supervising the administration of such plan finds that in the administration of the plan there a failure to comply substantially with any provision required by section 513 to be included in the plan, he shall notify such State agency that further payments will not be made to the State until he is satisfied that there is no longer any such failure to comply. Until he is so satisfied he shall make no further certification to the Secretary of the Treasury with respect to such State.

PART 3- CHILD WELFARE SERVICES

SEC. 521. (a) For the purpose of enabling the United States, through the Children s Bureau, to cooperate with State public-welfare agencies establishing, extending, and strengthening, especially in predominantly rural areas, public-welfare services (hereinafter in this section referred to as child-welfare services ) for the protection and care of homeless, dependent, and neglected children, and children in danger of becoming delinquent, there is hereby authorized to be appropriated for each fiscal year, beginning with the year ending June 30, 1936, the sum of $1,500,000. Such amount shall be allotted by the Secretary of Labor for use by cooperating State public- welfare agencies on the basis of plans developed jointly by the State agency and the Children s Bureau, to each State, $10,000, and the remainder to each State on the basis of such plans, not to exceed such part of the remainder as the rural population of such State bears to the total rural population of the United States. The amount so allotted shall be expended for payment of part of the cost of district, county or other local child- welfare services in areas predominantly rural, and for developing State services for the encouragement and assist- ance of adequate methods of community child-welfare organization in areas predominantly rural and other areas of special need. The amount of any allotment to a State under this section for any fiscal year remaining unpaid to such State at the end of such fiscal year shall be available for payment to such State under this section until the end of the second succeeding fiscal year. No payment to a State under this section shall be made out of its allotment for any fiscal year until its allotment for the preceding fiscal year has been exhausted or has ceased to be available.
(b) From the sums appropriated therefor and the allotments available under subsection (a) the Secretary of Labor shall from time to time certify to the Secretary of the Treasury the amounts to be paid to the States, and the Secretary of the Treasury shall, through the Division of Disbursement of the Treasury Department and prior to audit or settlement by the General Accounting Office, make payments of such amounts from such allotments at the time or times specified by the Secretary of Labor.

PART 4- VOCATIONAL REHABILITATION

SEC. 531. (a) In order to enable the United States to cooperate with the States and Hawaii in extending and strengthening their programs of vocational rehabilitation of the physically disabled, and to continue to carry out the provisions and purposes of the Act entitled An Act to provide for the promotion of vocational rehabilitation of persons disabled in industry or otherwise and their return to civil employment , approved June 2, 1920, as amended (U.S.C., title 29, ch. 4; U.S.C., Supp. VII title 29, secs. 31, 32, 34, 35, 37, 39, and 40), there is hereby authorized to be appropriated for the fiscal years ending June 30, 1936, and June 30, 1937, the sum of $841,000 for each such fiscal year in addition to the amount of the existing authorization, and for each fiscal year thereafter the sum of $1,938,000. Of the sums appropriated pursuant to such authorization for each fiscal year, $5,000 shall be apportioned to the Territory of Hawaii and the remainder shall be apportioned among the several States in the manner provided in such Act of June 2, 1920, as amended.
(b) For the administration of such Act of June 2, 1920, as amended, by the Federal agency authorized to administer it, there is hereby authorized to be appropriated for the fiscal years ending June 30, 1936, and June 30, 1937, the sum of $22,000 for each such fiscal year in addition to the amount of the existing authorization, and for each fiscal year thereafter the sum of $102,000.

PART 5- ADMINISTRATION

SEC. 541. (a) There is hereby authorized to be appropriated for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1936, the sum of $425,000, for all necessary expenses of the Children s Bureau in administering the provisions of this title, except section 531.
(b) The Children s Bureau shall make such studies and investigations as will promote the efficient administration of this title, except section 531.
(c) The Secretary of Labor shall include in his annual report to Congress a full account of the administration of this title, except section 531.

SECTION 601. For the purpose of assisting States, counties, health districts, and other political subdivisions of the States in establishing and maintaining adequate public-health services, including the training of personnel for State and local health work, there is hereby authorized to be appropriated for each fiscal year, beginning with the fiscal year ending June 30,1936, the sum of $8,000,000 to be used as hereinafter provided.

STATE AND LOCAL PUBLIC HEALTH SERVICES

SEC. 602. (a) The Surgeon General of the Public Health Service, with the approval of the Secretary of the Treasury, shall, at the beginning of each fiscal year, allot to the States the total of (1) the amount appropriated for such year pursuant to section 601; and (2) the amounts of the allotments under this section for the preceding fiscal year remaining unpaid to the States at the end of such fiscal year. The amounts of such allotments shall be determined on the basis of (1) the population; (2) the special health problems; and (3) the financial needs; of the respective States. Upon making such allotments the Surgeon General of the Public Health Service shall certify the amounts thereof to the Secretary of the Treasury.
(b) The amount of an allotment to any State under subsection (a) for any fiscal year, remaining unpaid at the end of such fiscal year, shall be available for allotment to States under subsection (a) for the succeeding fiscal year, in addition to the amount appropriated for such year.
(c) Prior to the beginning of each quarter of the fiscal year, the Surgeon General of the Public Health Service shall, with the approval of the Secretary of the Treasury, determine in accordance with rules and regulations previously prescribed by such Surgeon General after consultation with a conference of the State and Territorial health authorities, the amount to be paid to each State for such quarter from the allotment to such State, and shall certify the amount so determined to the Secretary of the Treasury. Upon receipt of such certification, the Secretary of the Treasury shall, through the Division of Disbursement of the Treasury Department and prior to audit or settlement by the General Accounting Office, pay in accordance with such certification.
(d) The moneys so paid to any State shall be expended solely in carrying out the purposes specified in section 601, and in accordance with plans presented by the health authority of such State and approved by the Surgeon General of the Public Health Service.

INVESTIGATIONS

SEC. 603. (a) There is hereby authorized to be appropriated for each fiscal year, beginning with the fiscal year ending June 30, 1936, the sum of $2,000,000 for expenditure by the Public Health Service for investigation of disease and problems of sanitation (including the printing and binding of the findings of such investigations), and f or the pay and allowances and traveling expenses of personnel of the Public Health Service, including commissioned officers, engaged in such investigations or detailed to cooperate with the health authorities of any State in carrying out the purposes specified in section 601: Provided, That no personnel of the Public Health Service shall be detailed to cooperate with the health authorities of any State except at the request of the proper authorities of such State.
(b) The personnel of the Public Health Service paid from any appropriation not made pursuant to subsection (a) may be detailed to assist in carrying out the purposes of this title. The appropriation from which they are paid shall be reimbursed from the appropriation made pursuant to subsection (a) to the extent of their salaries and allowances for services performed while so detailed.
(c) The Secretary of the Treasury shall include in his annual report to Congress a full account of the administration of this title.

SECTION 701. There is hereby established a Social Security Board (in this Act referred to as the Board ) to be composed of three members to be appointed by the President, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate. During his term of membership on the Board , no member shall engage in any other business, vocation, or employment. Not more than two of the members of the Board shall be members of the same political party. Each member shall receive a salary at the rate of $10,000 a year and shall hold office for a term of six years, except that
(1) any member appointed to fill a vacancy occurring prior to the expiration of the term for which his predecessor was appointed, shall be appointed for the remainder of such term; and
(2) the terms of office of the members first taking office after the date of the enactment of this Act shall expire, as designated by the President at the time of appointment, one at the end of two years, one at the end of four years, and one at the end of six years, after the date of the enactment of this Act. The President shall designate one of the members as the chairman of the Board.

DUTIES OF THE SOCIAL SECURITY BOARD

SEC. 702. The Board shall perform the duties imposed upon it by this Act and shall also have the duty of studying and making recommendations as to the most effective methods of providing economic security through social insurance, and as to legislation and matters of administrative policy concerning old-age pensions, unemployment compensation, accident compensation, and related subjects.

EXPENSES OF THE BOARD

SEC. 703. The Board is authorized to appoint and fix the compensation of such officers and employees, and to make such expenditures, as may be necessary for carrying out its functions under this Act. Appointments of attorneys and experts may be made without regard to the civil-service laws.

REPORTS

SEC. 704. The Board shall make a full report to Congress, at the beginning of each regular session, of the administration of the functions with which it is charged.

INCOME TAX ON EMPLOYEES

DEDUCTION OF TAX FROM WAGES

SEC. 802. (a) The tax imposed by section 801 shall be collected by the employer of the taxpayer by deducting the amount of the tax from the wages as and when paid. Every employer required so to deduct the tax is hereby made liable for the payment of such tax, and is hereby indemnified against the claims and demands of any person for the amount of any such payment made by such employer.
(b) If more or less than the correct amount of tax imposed by section 801 is paid with respect to any wage payment, then, under regulations made under this title, proper adjustments, with respect both to the tax and the amount to be deducted, shall be made, without interest, in connection with subsequent wage payments to the same individual by the same employer.

DEDUCTIBILITY FROM INCOME TAX

SEC. 803. For the purposes of the income tax imposed by Title I of the Revenue Act of 1934 or by any Act of Congress in substitution therefor, the tax imposed by section 801 shall not be allowed as a deduction to the taxpayer in computing his net income for the year in which such tax is deducted from his wages.

EXCISE TAX ON EMPLOYERS

ADJUSTMENT OF EMPLOYERS TAX

SEC. 805. If more or less than the correct amount of tax imposed by section 804 is paid with respect to any wage payment, then, under regulations made under this title, proper adjustments with respect the tax shall be made, without interest, in connection with subsequent wage payments to the same individual by the same employer.

REFUNDS AND DEFICIENCIES

SEC. 806. If more or less than the correct amount of tax imposed by section 801 or 804 is paid or deducted with respect to any wage payment and the overpayment or underpayment of tax cannot be adjusted under section 802 (b) or 805 the amount of the overpayment shall be refunded and the amount of the underpayment shall be collected in such manner and at such times (subject to the statutes of limitations properly applicable thereto) as may be prescribed by regulations made under this title.

COLLECTION AND PAYMENT OF TAXES

SEC. 807. (a) The taxes imposed by this title shall be collected by the Bureau of Internal Revenue under the direction of the Secretary of the Treasury and shall be paid into the Treasury of the United States as internal- revenue collections. If the tax is not paid when due, there shall be added as part of the tax interest (except in the case of adjustments made in accordance with the provisions of sections 802 (b) and 805) at the rate of one-half of 1 per centum per month from the date the tax became due until paid.
(b) Such taxes shall be collected and paid in such manner, at such times, and under such conditions, not inconsistent with this title (either by making and filing returns, or by stamps, coupons, tickets, books, or other reasonable devices or methods necessary or helpful in securing a complete and proper collection and payment of the tax or in securing proper identification of the taxpayer), as may be prescribed by the Commissioner of Internal Revenue, with the approval of the Secretary of the Treasury.
(c) All provisions of law, including penalties, applicable with respect to any tax imposed by section 600 or section 800 of the Revenue Act of 1926 and the provisions of section 607 of the Revenue Act of 1934, shall, insofar as applicable and not inconsistent with the provisions of this title, be applicable with respect to the taxes imposed by this title.
(d) In the payment of any tax under this title a fractional part of a cent shall be disregarded unless it amounts to one-half cent or more, in which case it shall be increased to 1 cent.

RULES AND REGULATIONS

SEC. 808. The Commissioner of Internal Revenue, with the approval of the Secretary of the Treasury, shall make and publish rules and regulations for the enforcement of this title.

SALE OF STAMPS BY POSTMASTERS

SEC. 809. The Commissioner of Internal Revenue shall furnish to the Postmaster General without prepayment a suitable quantity of stamps, coupons, tickets, books, or other devices prescribed by the Commissioner under section 807 for the collection or payment of any tax imposed by this title, to be distributed to, and kept on sale by, all post offices of the first and second classes, and such post offices of the third and fourth classes as
(1) are located in county seats, or
(2) are certified by the Secretary of the Treasury to the Postmaster General as necessary to the proper administration of this title. The Postmaster General may require each such postmaster to furnish bond in such increased amount as he may from time to time determine, and each such postmaster shall deposit the receipts from the sale of such stamps, coupons, tickets, books, or other devices, to the credit of, and render accounts to, the Postmaster General at such times and in such form as the Postmaster General may by regulations prescribe. The Postmaster General shall at least once a month transfer to the Treasury, as internal- revenue collections all receipts so deposited together with a statement of the additional expenditures in the District of Columbia and elsewhere incurred by the Post Office Department in performing the duties imposed upon said Department by this Act, and the Secretary of the Treasury is hereby authorized and directed to advance from time to time to the credit of the Post Office Department from appropriations made for the collection of the taxes imposed by this title, such sums as may be required for such additional expenditures incurred by the Post Office Department.

PENALTIES

SEC. 810. (a) Whoever buys, sells, offers for sale, uses, transfers, takes or gives in exchange, or pledges or gives in pledge, except as authorized in this title or in regulations made pursuant thereto, any stamp, coupon, ticket, book, or other device, prescribed by the Commissioner of Internal Revenue under section 807 for the collection or payment of any tax imposed by this title, shall be fined not more than $1,000 or imprisoned for not more than six months, or both.
(b) Whoever, with intent to defraud, alters, forges, makes, or counterfeits any stamp, coupon, ticket, book, or other device prescribed by the Commissioner of Internal Revenue under section 807 for the collection or payment of any tax imposed by this title, or uses, sells, lends, or has in his possession any such altered, forged, or counterfeited stamp, coupon, ticket, book, or other device, or makes, uses, sells, or has in his possession any ma- terial in imitation of the material used in the manufacture of such stamp, coupon, ticket, book, or other device, shall be fined not more than $5,000 or imprisoned not more than five years, or both.

DEFINITIONS

IMPOSITION OF TAX

SECTION 901. On and after January 1, 1936, every employer (as defined in section 907) shall pay for each calendar year an excise tax, with respect to having individuals in his employ, equal to the following percentages of the total wages (as defined in section 907) payable by him (regardless of the time of payment) with respect to employment (as defined in section 907) during such calendar year:
(1) With respect to employment during the calendar year 1936 the rate shall be 1 per centum;
(2) With respect to employment during the calendar year 1937 the rate shall be 2 per centum;
(3) With respect to employment after December 31, 1937, the rate shall be 3 per centum.

CREDIT AGAINST TAX

SEC. 902. The taxpayer may credit against the tax imposed by section 901 the amount of contributions, with respect to employment during the taxable year, paid by him (before the date of filing of his return for the taxable year) into an unemployment fund under a State law. The total credit allowed to a taxpayer under this section for all contributions paid into unemployment funds with respect to employment during such taxable year shall not exceed 90 per centum of the tax against which it is credited, and credit shall be allowed only for contributions made under the laws of States certified for the taxable year as provided in section 903.

CERTIFICATION OF STATE LAWS

SEC. 903 (a) The Social Security Board shall approve any State law submitted to it, within thirty days of such submission, which it finds provides that-
(1) All compensation is to be paid through public employment offices in the State or such other agencies as the Board may approve;
(2) No compensation shall be payable with respect to any day of unemployment occurring within two years after the first day of the first period with respect to which contributions are required;
(3) All money received in the unemployment fund shall immediately upon such receipt be paid over to the Secretary of the Treasury to the credit of the Unemployment Trust Fund established by section 904;
(4) All money withdrawn from the Unemployment Trust Fund by the State agency shall be used solely in the payment of compensation, exclusive of expenses of administration;
(5) Compensation shall not be denied in such State to any otherwise eligible individual for refusing to accept new work under any of the following conditions:
(A) If the position offered is vacant due directly to a strike, lockout, or other labor dispute;
(B) if the wages, hours, or other conditions of the work offered are substantially less favorable to the individual than those prevailing for similar work in the locality;
(C) if as a condition of being employed the individual would be required to join a company union or to resign from or refrain from joining any bona-fide labor organization;
(6) All the rights, privileges, or immunities conferred by such law or by acts done pursuant thereto shall exist subject to the power of the legislature to amend or repeal such law at any time. The Board shall, upon approving such law, notify the Governor of the State of its approval.
(b) On December 31 in each taxable year the Board shall certify to the Secretary of the Treasury each State whose law it has previously approved, except that it shall not certify any State which, after reasonable notice and opportunity for hearing to the State agency, the Board finds has changed its law so that it no longer contains the provisions specified in subsection (a) or has with respect to such taxable year failed to comply substantially with any such provision.
(c) If, at any time during the taxable year, the Board has reason to believe that a State whose law it has previously approved, may not be certified under subsection (b), it shall promptly so notify the Governor of such State.

UNEMPLOYMENT TRUST FUND

ADMINISTRATION, REFUNDS, AND PENALTIES

INTERSTATE COMMERCE

SEC. 906. No person required under a State law to make payments to an unemployment fund shall be relieved from compliance therewith on the ground that he is engaged in interstate commerce, or that the State law does not distinguish between employees engaged in interstate commerce and those engaged in intrastate commerce.

DEFINITIONS

SEC. 907. When used in this title -- (a) The term employer does not include any person unless on each of some twenty days during the taxable year, each day being in a different calendar week, the total number of individuals who were in his employ for some portion of the day (whether or not at the same moment of time) was eight or more.
(b) The term wages means all remuneration for employment, including the cash value of all remuneration paid in any medium other than cash.
(c) The term employment means any service, of whatever nature, performed within the United States by an employee for his employer, except-
(1) Agricultural labor;
(2) Domestic service in a private home;
(3) Service performed as an officer or member of a crew of a vessel on the navigable waters of the United States;
(4) Service performed by an individual in the employ of his son, daughter, or spouse, and service performed by a child under the age of twenty-one in the employ of his father or mother;
(5) Service performed in the employ of the United States Government or of an instrumentality of the United States;
(6) Service performed in the employ of a State, a political subdivision thereof, or an instrumentality of one or more States or political subdivisions;
(7) Service performed in the employ of a corporation, community chest, fund, or foundation, organized and operated exclusively for religious, charitable, scientific, literary, or educational purposes, or for the prevention of cruelty to children or animals, no part of the net earnings of which inures to the benefit of any private shareholder or individual.
(d) The term State agency means any State officer, board, or other authority, designated under a State law to administer the unemployment fund in such State.
(e) The term unemployment fund means a special fund, established under a State law and administered by a State agency, for the payment of compensation.
(f) The term contributions means payments required by a State law to be made by an employer into an unemployment fund, to the extent that such payments are made by him without any part thereof being deducted or deductible from the wages of individuals in his employ.
(g) The term compensation means cash benefits payable to individuals with respect to their unemployment.

RULES AND REGULATIONS

SEC. 908. The Commissioner of Internal Revenue, with the approval of the Secretary of the Treasury, shall make and publish rules and regulations for the enforcement of this title, except sections 903, 904, and 910.

ALLOWANCE OF ADDITIONAL CREDIT

SEC. 909. (a) In addition to the credit allowed under section 902, a taxpayer may, subject to the conditions imposed by section 910, credit against the tax imposed by section 901 for any taxable year after the taxable year 1937, an amount, with respect to each State law, equal to the amount, if any, by which the contributions, with respect to employment in such taxable year, actually paid by the taxpayer under such law before the date of filing his return for such taxable year, is exceeded by whichever of the following is the lesser- (1) The amount of contributions which he would have been required to pay under such law for such taxable year if he had been subject to the highest rate applicable from time to time throughout such year to any employer under such law; or (2) Two and seven-tenths per centum of the wages payable by him with respect to employment with respect to which contributions for such year were required under such law.
(b) If the amount of the contributions actually so paid by the taxpayer is less than the amount which he should have paid under the State law, the additional credit under subsection (a) shall be reduced proportionately.
(c) The total credits allowed to a taxpayer under this title shall not exceed 90 per centum of the tax against which such credits are taken.

CONDITIONS OF ADDITIONAL CREDIT ALLOWANCE

SEC. 910. (a) A taxpayer shall be allowed the additional credit under section 909, with respect to his contribution rate under a State law being lower, for any taxable year, than that of another employer subject to such law, only if the Board finds that under such law--
(1) Such lower rate, with respect to contributions to a pooled fund, is permitted on the basis of not less than three years of compensation experience;
(2) Such lower rate, with respect to contributions to a guaranteed employment account, is permitted only when his guaranty of employment was fulfilled in the preceding calendar year, and such guaranteed employment account amounts to not less than 7 " per centum of the total wages payable by him, in accordance with such guaranty, with respect to employment in such State in the preceding calendar year;
(3) Such lower rate, with respect to contributions to a separate reserve account, is permitted only when
(A) compensation has been payable from such account throughout the preceding calendar year, and
(B) such account amounts to not less than five times the largest amount of compensation paid from such account within any one of the three preceding calendar years, and
(C) such account amounts to not less than 7 " per centum of the total wages payable by him (plus the total wages payable by any other employers who may be contributing to such account) with respect to employment in such State in the preceding calendar year.
(b) Such additional credit shall be reduced, if any contributions under such law are made by such taxpayer at a lower rate under conditions not fulfilling the requirements of subsection (a), by the amount bearing the same ratio to such additional credit as the amount of contributions made at such lower rate bears to the total of his contributions paid for such year under such law.
(c) As used in this section-
(1) The term reserve account means a separate account in an unemployment fund, with respect to an employer or group of employers, from which compensation is payable only with respect to the unemployment of individuals who were in the employ of such employer, or of one of the employers comprising the group.
(2) The term pooled fund means an unemployment fund or any part thereof in which all contributions are mingled and undivided, and from which compensation is payable to all eligible individuals, except that to individuals last employed by employers with respect to whom reserve accounts are maintained by the State agency, it is payable only when such accounts are exhausted.
(3) The term guaranteed employment account means a separate account, in an unemployment fund, of contributions paid by an employer (or group of employers) who
(A) guarantees in advance thirty hours of wages for each of forty calendar weeks (or more, with one weekly hour deducted for each added week guaranteed) in twelve months, to all the individuals in his employ in one or more distinct establishments, except that any such individual s guaranty may commence after a probationary period (included within twelve or less consecutive calendar weeks), and
(B) gives security or assurance, satisfactory to the State agency, for the fulfillment of such guaranties, from which account compensation shall be payable with respect to the unemployment of any such individual whose guaranty is not fulfilled or renewed and who is otherwise eligible for compensation under the State law.
(4) The term year of compensation experience , as applied to an employer, means any calendar year throughout which compensation was payable with respect to any individual in his employ who became unemployed and was eligible for compensation.

SECTION 1001. For the purpose of enabling each State to furnish financial assistance, as far as practicable under the conditions in such State, to needy individuals who are blind, there is hereby authorized to be appropriated for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1936, the sum of $3,000,000, and there is hereby authorized to be appropriated for each fiscal year thereafter a sum sufficient to carry out the purposes of this title. The sums made available under this section shall be used for making payments to States which have submitted, and had approved by the Social Security Board, State plans for aid to the blind.

STATE PLANS FOR AID TO THE BLIND

SEC. 1002. (a) A State plan for aid to the blind must
(1) provide that it shall be in effect in all political subdivisions of the State, and, if administered by them, be mandatory upon them;
(2) provide for financial participation by the State;
(3) either provide for the establishment or designation of a single State agency to administer the plan, or provide for the establishment or designation of a single State agency to supervise the administration of the plan;
(4) provide for granting to any individual, whose claim for aid is denied, an oppor- tunity for a fair hearing before such State agency;
(5) provide such methods of administration (other than those relating to selection, tenure of office, and compensation of personnel) as are found by the Board to be necessary for the efficient operation of the plan;
(6) provide that the State agency will make such reports, in such form and containing such information, as the Board may from time to time require, and comply with such provisions as the Board may from time to time find necessary to assure the correctness and verification of such reports; and
(7) provide that no aid will be furnished any individual under the plan with respect to any period with respect to which he is receiving old-age assistance under the State plan approved under section 2 of this Act.
(b) The Board shall approve any plan which fulfills the conditions specified in subsection (a), except that it shall not approve any plan which imposes, as a condition of eligibility for aid to the blind under the plan-
(1) Any residence requirement which excludes any resident of the State who has resided therein five years during the nine years immediately preceding the application for aid and has resided therein continuously for one year immediately preceding the application or
(2) Any citizenship requirement which excludes any citizen of the United States.

PAYMENT TO STATES

OPERATION OF STATE PLANS

SEC. 1004. In the case of any State plan for aid to the blind which has been approved by the Board, if the Board, after reasonable notice and opportunity for hearing to the State agency administering or supervising the administration of such a plan, finds--
(1) that the plan has been so changed as to impose any residence or citizenship requirement prohibited by section 1002 (b), or that in the administration of the plan any such prohibited requirement is imposed, with the knowledge of such State agency, in a substantial number of cases; or
(2) that in the administration of the plan there is a failure to comply substantially with any provision required by section 1002 (a) be included in the plan; the Board shall notify such State agency that further payments will not be made to the State until the Board is satisfied that such prohibited requirement is no longer so imposed, and that there is no longer any such failure to comply. Until it is satisfied it shall make no further certification to the Secretary of the Treasury with respect to such State.

ADMINISTRATION

SEC. 1005. There is hereby authorized to be appropriated for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1936 the sum of $30,000, for all necessary expenses of the Board in administering the provisions of this title.

DEFINITION

SEC. 1006. When used in this title the term aid to the blind means money payments to blind individuals.

RULES AND REGULATIONS

SEC. 1102. The Secretary of the Treasury, the Secretary of Labor, and the Social Security Board respectively, shall make and publish such rules and regulations, not inconsistent with this Act, as may be necessary to the efficient administration of the functions with which each is charged under this Act.

SEPARABILITY

SEC. 1103. If any provision of this Act, or the application thereof to any person or circumstance is held invalid, the remainder of the Act, and the application of such provision to other persons or circumstances shall not be affected thereby.

RESERVATION OF POWER

SEC. 1104. The right to alter, amend, or repeal any provision of this Act is hereby reserved to the Congress.

SHORT TITLE

SEC. 1105. This Act may be cited as the Social Security Act.

Approved, August 14, 1935.

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Section 201. (a) There is hereby created an account in the Treasury of the United States to be known as the Old-Age Reserve Account hereinafter in this title called the Account. There is hereby authorized to be appropriated to the Account for each fiscal year,…

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Connor Page

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Ryan Thornton

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Driving across the new bridge above Hoover Dam.

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This video was uploaded from an Android phone.

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Alexis Walsh

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Maddy Noble

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Jacob Shaw

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Alyssa Brooks

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The Great Depression and the American Dream.

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Economic theory is about the fundamentals of economics and how they apply to current events. Learning about economic theory may help you better understand the global economy.

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Jessica Sutherland

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Jameson Peters

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Riding the Rails during the Great Depression

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Riding the rails was dangerous. The bulls were hired to keep hoboes off trains, so you couldn't just go to a railroad yard and climb on. Most hoboes would hide along the tracks outside the yard. They'd run along the train as it gained speed, grab hold and jump into open boxcars.

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Maddy Noble

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Unemployment During the great depression

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Unemployment During the great depression Black Thursday occurred on October 29th 1929. It was the official start of the Great Depression Government Response Hoover didn't do much to help "The Forgotten Man" because of his laissez-faire belief Hoover asked businesses to stop cutting wages and laying people off Some stock prices dropped from $100-$3.

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Brief History of the Direct Federal Highway Construction Program - The Trailblazers - History of FHWA - Highway History - Federal Highway Administration

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The FHWA has, for a continuous span of 70 years, contributed its highway engineering expertise to the planning, location, design and construction of highways and parkways in the federal domain for other governmental agencies. The many beautiful highways and parkways constructed under the direct federal program are a legacy for future generations to enjoy as they serve the transportation systems in our national Forests and Parks.

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Connor Page

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President Franklin D. Roosevelt Declares War on Japan (Full Speech) | War Archives

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Alyssa Brooks

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Economic theory is about the fundamentals of economics and how they apply to current events. Learning about economic theory may help you better understand the global economy.

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Clyde Carr

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A " Hooverville" was a shanty town built during the Great Depression by the homeless in the United States. They were named after Herbert Hoover, who was President of the United States during the onset of the Depression and was widely blamed for it. The term was coined by Charles Michelson, publicity chief of the Democratic National Committee. There were hundreds of Hoovervilles across the country during the 1930s and hundreds of thousands of people lived in these slums.

Homelessness was present before the Great Depression, and was a common sight before 1929. Most large cities built municipal lodging houses for the homeless, but the Depression exponentially increased demand. The homeless clustered in shanty towns close to free soup kitchens. These settlements were often trespassing on private lands, but they were frequently tolerated or ignored out of necessity. The New Deal enacted special relief programs aimed at the homeless under the Federal Transient Service (FTS), which operated from 1933 to 1935.

Some of the men who were forced to live in these conditions possessed construction skills, and were able to build their houses out of stone. Most people, however, resorted to building their residences out of wood from crates, cardboard, scraps of metal, or whatever materials were available to them. They usually had a small stove, bedding and a couple of simple cooking implements. Men, women and children alike lived in Hoovervilles. Most of these unemployed residents of the Hoovervilles relied on public charities or begged for food from those who had housing during this era.

Democrats coined many terms based on opinions of Herbert Hoover such as "Hoover blanket" (old newspaper used as blanketing). A "Hoover flag" was an empty pocket turned inside out and "Hoover leather" was cardboard used to line a shoe when the sole wore through. A "Hoover wagon" was an automobile with horses hitched to it, often with the engine removed.

After 1940 the economy recovered, unemployment fell, and shanty housing eradication programs destroyed all the Hoovervilles.

Among the hundreds of Hoovervilles across the U.S. during the 1930s were those in:

Anacostia in the District of Columbia: The Bonus Army, a group of World War I veterans seeking expedited benefits, established a Hooverville in 1932. Many of these men came from afar, illegally by riding on railroad freight trains to join the movement. At its maximum there were 15,000 people living there. The camp was demolished by units of the U.S. Army, commanded by Gen. Douglas MacArthur.

Central Park, New York City: Scores of homeless families camped out at the Great Lawn at Central Park, then an empty reservoir.

Riverside Park, New York City: A shantytown occupied Riverside Park at 72nd Street during the depression.

Seattle had eight Hoovervilles during the 1930s. Its largest Hooverville on the tidal flats adjacent to the Port of Seattle lasted from 1932 to 1941.

St. Louis in 1930 had the largest Hooverville in America. It consisted of four distinct sectors. St. Louis's racially integrated Hooverville depended upon private philanthropy, had an unofficial mayor, created its own churches and other social institutions, and remained a viable community until 1936, when the federal Works Progress Administration allocated slum clearance funds for the area.

Hoovervilles have often featured in popular culture, and still appear in editorial cartoons. Movies such as My Man Godfrey (1936) and Sullivan's Travels (1941) sometimes sentimentalized Hooverville life. Hooverville featured in the 2007 Doctor Who stories Daleks in Manhattan and Evolution of the Daleks, which were set in 1930 New York. This version of the shanty town was based in Central Park.

Man's Castle, a 1933 film directed by Frank Borzage, focuses on a number of down-and-out characters living in a New York City Hooverville; the main characters (played by Spencer Tracy and Loretta Young) are lovers who cohabitate in a shanty outfitted with a skylight.

In My Man Godfrey, a 1936 screwball comedy, "Forgotten man" Godfrey Smith (played by William Powell) is living in a Hooverville when he is patronised and "adopted" by Irene (Carole Lombard).

In Sullivan's Travels, a 1941 comedy film written and directed by Preston Sturges, John L. Sullivan, a wanderlust movie director, played by Joel McCrea, visits a Hooverville and accidentally becomes a genuine tramp.

The musical has a song called "We'd Like to Thank You, Herbert Hoover", which takes place in a Hooverville beneath the 59th Street Bridge. In the song, the chorus sings of the hardships they now suffer because of the Great Depression and their contempt for the former president.

In 1987, the Liverpool group The Christians had a British hit with the song "Hooverville (And They Promised Us The World)".

During a temporary housing crisis, the comic strip Piled Higher and Deeper refers to a fictional solution to the resulting housing crisis at Stanford University as "Hooverville" due to its proximity to Stanford's Hoover Tower.

The 2005 version of , directed by Peter Jackson, depicts the Hooverville in New York's Central Park at the beginning of the film.

The 2005 movie Cinderella Man also referenced the Central Park encampment.

In the novel Bud, Not Buddy, set during the Great Depression, an early scene involves the police dismantling a Hooverville. Bud calls it "Hooperville".

In Nelson Algren's A Walk on the Wild Side, the main character Dove Linkhorn is described as descending from "Forest solitaries spare and swart, left landless as ever in sandland and Hooverville now the time of the forests have passed."

In John Steinbeck's famous novel The Grapes of Wrath, the Joad family briefly settles into a Hooverville in California.

In Harry Turtledove's "Timeline-191" series of books, the equivalent of Hoovervilles in the United States and Confederate States are called Blackfordburghs and Mitcheltowns respectively, after fictional presidents Hosea Blackford of the US and Burton Mitchel of the CS. The term "Hoovervilles" still exists in this timeline, albeit as a partisan term used by Socialists (who alongside the right-wing Democrats dominate US politics) to highlight their continued existence under President Hoover and to detract from Blackford's poor legacy.

Hoovervilles are part of James Lincoln Collier's 2000 novel The Worst of Times: A Story of the Great Depression.

The comic book The Long Flight Home portrays a Hooverville filled with anthropomorphic-animals. Kit Cloudkicker was also a resident of it before joining Don Karnage's air pirates.

Photos of a new father figure in Hooverville in Portland, Oregon, near the Ross Island Bridge, from a Library of Congress website

Hoovervilles and Homelessness from the Great Depression in Washington State Project, including photographs, paintings, maps, essays and first-hand accounts of life in Seattle's Hoovervilles.

Photos and details of a Hooverville in Seattle, Washington, from a King County, Washington website

Photographs of California Hoovervilles (Sacramento, Kern County), via Calisphere, California Digital Library

"Missouri Hooverville photographs". University of Missouri-St. Louis.

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A " Hooverville" was a shanty town built during the Great Depression by the homeless in the United States. They were named after Herbert Hoover, who was President of the United States during the onset of the Depression and was widely blamed for it.

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Maddy Lewis

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Jacob Shaw

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Alexis Walsh

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Jessica Sutherland

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Ryan Thornton

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Hoover Dam is a concrete arch-gravity dam in the Black Canyon of the Colorado River, on the border between the U.S. states of Nevada and Arizona. Constructed between 1931 and 1936, during the Great Depression, it was dedicated on September 30, 1935, by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Its construction was the result of a massive effort involving thousands of workers, and cost over 100 lives. In bills passed by Congress during its construction, it was referred to as the Hoover Dam, after President Herbert Hoover, but was named the Boulder Dam by the Roosevelt administration. In 1947, the name Hoover Dam was restored by Congress.

Since about 1900, the Black Canyon and nearby Boulder Canyon had been investigated for their potential to support a dam that would control floods, provide irrigation water and produce hydroelectric power. In 1928, Congress authorized the project. The winning bid to build the dam was submitted by a consortium named Six Companies, Inc., which began construction in early 1931. Such a large concrete structure had never been built before, and some of the techniques used were unproven. The torrid summer weather and lack of facilities near the site also presented difficulties. Nevertheless, Six Companies turned the dam over to the federal government on March 1, 1936, more than two years ahead of schedule.

Hoover Dam impounds Lake Mead and is located near Boulder City, Nevada, a municipality originally constructed for workers on the construction project, about 30 mi (48 km) south-east of Las Vegas, Nevada. The dam's generators provide power for public and private utilities in Nevada, Arizona, and California. Hoover Dam is a major tourist attraction, with 7 million tourists a year. The heavily traveled U.S. Route 93 (US 93) ran along the dam's crest until October 2010, when the Hoover Dam Bypass opened.

River view of the future dam site, c. 1904

As the United States developed the Southwest, the Colorado River was seen as a potential source of irrigation water. An initial attempt at diverting the river for irrigation purposes occurred in the late 1890s, when land speculator William Beatty built the Alamo Canal just north of the Mexican border; the canal dipped into Mexico before running to a desolate area Beatty named the Imperial Valley. Though water from the Alamo Canal allowed for the widespread settlement of the valley, the canal proved expensive to operate. After a catastrophic breach that caused the Colorado River to fill the Salton Sea, the Southern Pacific Railroad spent $3 million in 1906-07 to stabilize the waterway, an amount it hoped in vain that it would be reimbursed for by the federal government. Even after the waterway was stabilized, it proved unsatisfactory because of constant disputes with landowners on the Mexican side of the border.

As the technology of electric power transmission improved, the Lower Colorado was considered for its hydroelectric-power potential. In 1902, the Edison Electric Company of Los Angeles surveyed the river in the hope of building a 40-foot (12 m) rock dam which could generate 10,000 horsepower (7,500 kW). However, at the time, the limit of transmission of electric power was 80 miles (130 km), and there were few customers (mostly mines) within that limit. Edison allowed land options it held on the river to lapse-including an option for what became the site of Hoover Dam.

In the following years, the Bureau of Reclamation (BOR), known as the Reclamation Service at the time, also considered the Lower Colorado as the site for a dam. Service chief Arthur Powell Davis proposed using dynamite to collapse the walls of Boulder Canyon, 20 miles (32 km) north of the eventual dam site, into the river. The river would carry off the smaller pieces of debris, and a dam would be built incorporating the remaining rubble. In 1922, after considering it for several years, the Reclamation Service finally rejected the proposal, citing doubts about the unproven technique and questions as to whether it would, in fact, save money.

In 1922, the Reclamation Service presented a report calling for the development of a dam on the Colorado River for flood control and electric power generation. The report was principally authored by Davis and was called the Fall-Davis report after Interior Secretary Albert Fall. The Fall-Davis report cited use of the Colorado River as a federal concern because the river's basin covered several states, and the river eventually entered Mexico. Though the Fall-Davis report called for a dam "at or near Boulder Canyon", the Reclamation Service (which was renamed the Bureau of Reclamation the following year) found that canyon unsuitable. One potential site at Boulder Canyon was bisected by a geologic fault; two others were so narrow there was no space for a construction camp at the bottom of the canyon or for a spillway. The Service investigated Black Canyon and found it ideal; a railway could be laid from the railhead in Las Vegas to the top of the dam site. Despite the site change, the dam project was referred to as the "Boulder Canyon Project".

Sketch of the proposed dam site and reservoir, c. 1921

With little guidance on water allocation from the Supreme Court, proponents of the dam feared endless litigation. Delph Carpenter, a Colorado attorney, proposed that the seven states which fell within the river's basin (California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, Colorado and Wyoming) form an interstate compact, with the approval of Congress. Such compacts were authorized by Article I of the United States Constitution but had never been concluded among more than two states. In 1922, representatives of seven states met with then- Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover. Initial talks produced no result, but when the Supreme Court handed down the Wyoming v. Colorado decision undermining the claims of the upstream states, they became anxious to reach an agreement. The resulting Colorado River Compact was signed on November 24, 1922.

Legislation to authorize the dam was introduced repeatedly by two California Republicans, Representative Phil Swing and Senator Hiram Johnson, but representatives from other parts of the country considered the project as hugely expensive and one that would mostly benefit California. The 1927 Mississippi flood made Midwestern and Southern congressmen and senators more sympathetic toward the dam project. On March 12, 1928, the failure of the St. Francis Dam, constructed by the city of Los Angeles, caused a disastrous flood that killed up to 600 people. As that dam was a curved-gravity type, similar in design to the arch-gravity as was proposed for the Black Canyon dam, opponents claimed that the Black Canyon dam's safety could not be guaranteed. Congress authorized a board of engineers to review plans for the proposed dam. The Colorado River Board found the project feasible, but warned that should the dam fail, every downstream Colorado River community would be destroyed, and that the river might change course and empty into the Salton Sea. The Board cautioned: "To avoid such possibilities, the proposed dam should be constructed on conservative if not ultra-conservative lines."

On December 21, 1928, President Coolidge signed the bill authorizing the dam. The Boulder Canyon Project Act appropriated $165 million for the project along with the downstream Imperial Dam and All-American Canal, a replacement for Beatty's canal entirely on the U.S. side of the border. It also permitted the compact to go into effect when at least six of the seven states approved it. This occurred on March 6, 1929, with Utah's ratification; Arizona did not approve it until 1944.

Design, preparation and contracting

Even before Congress approved the Boulder Canyon Project, the Bureau of Reclamation was considering what kind of dam should be used. Officials eventually decided on a massive concrete arch-gravity dam, the design of which was overseen by the Bureau's chief design engineer John L. Savage. The monolithic dam would be thick at the bottom and thin near the top and would present a convex face towards the water above the dam. The curving arch of the dam would transmit the water's force into the abutments, in this case the rock walls of the canyon. The wedge-shaped dam would be 660 ft (200 m) thick at the bottom, narrowing to 45 ft (14 m) at the top, leaving room for a highway connecting Nevada and Arizona.

On January 10, 1931, the Bureau made the bid documents available to interested parties, at five dollars a copy. The government was to provide the materials, and the contractor was to prepare the site and build the dam. The dam was described in minute detail, covering 100 pages of text and 76 drawings. A $2 million bid bond was to accompany each bid; the winner would have to post a $5 million performance bond. The contractor had seven years to build the dam, or penalties would ensue.

The Wattis Brothers, heads of the Utah Construction Company, were interested in bidding on the project, but lacked the money for the performance bond. They lacked sufficient resources even in combination with their longtime partners, Morrison-Knudsen, which employed the nation's leading dam builder, Frank Crowe. They formed a joint venture to bid for the project with Pacific Bridge Company of Portland, Oregon; Henry J. Kaiser & W. A. Bechtel Company of San Francisco; MacDonald & Kahn Ltd. of Los Angeles; and the J.F. Shea Company of Portland, Oregon. The joint venture was called Six Companies, Inc. as Bechtel and Kaiser were considered one company for purposes of Six in the name. The name was descriptive and was an inside joke among the San Franciscans in the bid, where "Six Companies" was also a Chinese benevolent association in the city. There were three valid bids, and Six Companies' bid of $48,890,955 was the lowest, within $24,000 of the confidential government estimate of what the dam would cost to build, and five million dollars less than the next-lowest bid.

The city of Las Vegas had lobbied hard to be the headquarters for the dam construction, closing its many speakeasies when the decision maker, Secretary of the Interior Ray Wilbur, came to town. Instead, Wilbur announced in early 1930 that a model city was to be built in the desert near the dam site. This town became known as Boulder City, Nevada. Construction of a rail line joining Las Vegas and the dam site began in September 1930.

Soon after the dam was authorized, increasing numbers of unemployed people converged on southern Nevada. Las Vegas, then a small city of some 5,000, saw between 10,000 and 20,000 unemployed descend on it. A government camp was established for surveyors and other personnel near the dam site; this soon became surrounded by a squatters' camp. Known as McKeeversville, the camp was home to men hoping for work on the project, together with their families. Another camp, on the flats along the Colorado River, was officially called Williamsville, but was known to its inhabitants as "Ragtown". When construction began, Six Companies hired large numbers of workers, with more than 3,000 on the payroll by 1932 and with employment peaking at 5,251 in July 1934. "Mongolian" (Chinese) labor was prevented by the construction contract, while the number of black people employed by Six Companies never exceeded thirty, mostly lowest-pay-scale laborers in a segregated crew, who were issued separate water buckets.

As part of the contract, Six Companies, Inc. was to build Boulder City to house the workers. The original timetable called for Boulder City to be built before the dam project began, but President Hoover ordered work on the dam to begin in March 1931 rather than in October. The company built bunkhouses, attached to the canyon wall, to house 480 single men at what became known as River Camp. Workers with families were left to provide their own accommodations until Boulder City could be completed, and many lived in Ragtown. The site of Hoover Dam endures extremely hot weather, and the summer of 1931 was especially torrid, with the daytime high averaging 119.9 °F (48.8 °C). Sixteen workers and other riverbank residents died of heat prostration between June 25 and July 26, 1931.

General Superintendent Frank Crowe (right) with Bureau of Reclamation engineer Walker Young in 1935

The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW or "Wobblies"), though much-reduced from their heyday as militant labor organizers in the early years of the century, hoped to unionize the Six Companies workers by capitalizing on their discontent. They sent eleven organizers, several of whom were arrested by Las Vegas police. On August 7, 1931, the company cut wages for all tunnel workers. Although the workers sent the organizers away, not wanting to be associated with the "Wobblies", they formed a committee to represent them with the company. The committee drew up a list of demands that evening and presented them to Crowe the following morning. He was noncommittal. The workers hoped that Crowe, the general superintendent of the job, would be sympathetic; instead, he gave a scathing interview to a newspaper, describing the workers as "malcontents".

On the morning of the 9th, Crowe met with the committee and told them that management refused their demands, was stopping all work, and was laying off the entire work force, except for a few office workers and carpenters. The workers were given until 5 p.m. to vacate the premises. Concerned that a violent confrontation was imminent, most workers took their paychecks and left for Las Vegas to await developments. Two days later, the remainder were talked into leaving by law enforcement. On August 13, the company began hiring workers again, and two days later, the strike was called off. While the workers received none of their demands, the company guaranteed there would be no further reductions in wages. Living conditions began to improve as the first residents moved into Boulder City in late 1931.

A second labor action took place in July 1935, as construction on the dam wound down. When a Six Companies manager altered working times to force workers to take lunch on their own time, workers responded with a strike. Emboldened by Crowe's reversal of the lunch decree, workers raised their demands to include a $1-per-day raise. The company agreed to ask the Federal government to supplement the pay, but no money was forthcoming from Washington. The strike ended.

Before the dam could be built, the Colorado River needed to be diverted away from the construction site. To accomplish this, four diversion tunnels were driven through the canyon walls, two on the Nevada side and two on the Arizona side. These tunnels were 56 ft (17 m) in diameter. Their combined length was nearly 16,000 ft, or more than 3 miles (5 km). The contract required these tunnels to be completed by October 1, 1933, with a $3,000-per-day fine to be assessed for any delay. To meet the deadline, Six Companies had to complete work by early 1933, since only in late fall and winter was the water level in the river low enough to safely divert.

Tunneling began at the lower portals of the Nevada tunnels in May 1931. Shortly afterward, work began on two similar tunnels in the Arizona canyon wall. In March 1932, work began on lining the tunnels with concrete. First the base, or invert, was poured. Gantry cranes, running on rails through the entire length of each tunnel were used to place the concrete. The sidewalls were poured next. Movable sections of steel forms were used for the sidewalls. Finally, using pneumatic guns, the overheads were filled in. The concrete lining is 3 feet (1 m) thick, reducing the finished tunnel diameter to 50 ft (15 m). The river was diverted into the two Arizona tunnels on November 13, 1932; the Nevada tunnels were kept in reserve for high water. This was done by exploding a temporary cofferdam protecting the Arizona tunnels while at the same time dumping rubble into the river until its natural course was blocked.

Following the completion of the dam, the entrances to the two outer diversion tunnels were sealed at the opening and halfway through the tunnels with large concrete plugs. The downstream halves of the tunnels following the inner plugs are now the main bodies of the spillway tunnels. The inner diversion tunnels were plugged at approximately one-third of their length, beyond which they now carry steel pipes connecting the intake towers to the power plant and outlet works. The inner tunnels' outlets are equipped with gates that can be closed to drain the tunnels for maintenance.

Groundworks, rock clearance and grout curtain

To protect the construction site from the Colorado River and to facilitate the river's diversion, two cofferdams were constructed. Work on the upper cofferdam began in September 1932, even though the river had not yet been diverted. The cofferdams were designed to protect against the possibility of the river's flooding a site at which two thousand men might be at work, and their specifications were covered in the bid documents in nearly as much detail as the dam itself. The upper cofferdam was 96 ft (29 m) high, and 750 feet (230 m) thick at its base, thicker than the dam itself. It contained 650,000 cubic yards (500,000 m ³) of material.

When the cofferdams were in place and the construction site was drained of water, excavation for the dam foundation began. For the dam to rest on solid rock, it was necessary to remove accumulated erosion soils and other loose materials in the riverbed until sound bedrock was reached. Work on the foundation excavations was completed in June 1933. During this excavation, approximately 1,500,000 cu yd (1,100,000 m ³) of material was removed. Since the dam was an arch-gravity type, the side-walls of the canyon would bear the force of the impounded lake. Therefore, the side-walls were also excavated to reach virgin rock, as weathered rock might provide pathways for water seepage. Shovels for the excavation came from the Marion Power Shovel Company.

The men who removed this rock were called "high scalers". While suspended from the top of the canyon with ropes, the high-scalers climbed down the canyon walls and removed the loose rock with jackhammers and dynamite. Falling objects were the most common cause of death on the dam site; the high scalers' work thus helped ensure worker safety. One high scaler was able to save a life in a more direct manner: when a government inspector lost his grip on a safety line and began tumbling down a slope towards almost certain death, a high scaler was able to intercept him and pull him into the air. The construction site had become a magnet for tourists. The high scalers were prime attractions and showed off for the watchers. The high scalers received considerable media attention, with one worker dubbed the "Human Pendulum" for swinging co-workers (and, at other times, cases of dynamite) across the canyon. To protect themselves against falling objects, some high scalers dipped cloth hats in tar and allowed them to harden. When workers wearing such headgear were struck hard enough to inflict broken jaws, they sustained no skull damage. Six Companies ordered thousands of what initially were called "hard boiled hats" (later " hard hats") and strongly encouraged their use.

The cleared, underlying rock foundation of the dam site was reinforced with grout, forming a grout curtain. Holes were driven into the walls and base of the canyon, as deep as 150 feet (46 m) into the rock, and any cavities encountered were to be filled with grout. This was done to stabilize the rock, to prevent water from seeping past the dam through the canyon rock, and to limit "uplift"-upward pressure from water seeping under the dam. The workers were under severe time constraints due to the beginning of the concrete pour. When they encountered hot springs or cavities too large to readily fill, they moved on without resolving the problem. A total of 58 of the 393 holes were incompletely filled. After the dam was completed and the lake began to fill, large numbers of significant leaks caused the Bureau of Reclamation to examine the situation. It found that the work had been incompletely done, and was based on less than a full understanding of the canyon's geology. New holes were drilled from inspection galleries inside the dam into the surrounding bedrock. It took nine years (1938-47) under relative secrecy to complete the supplemental grout curtain.

Columns of Hoover Dam being filled with concrete, February 1934 (looking upstream from the Nevada rim)

The first concrete was poured into the dam on June 6, 1933, 18 months ahead of schedule. Since concrete heats and contracts as it cures, the potential for uneven cooling and contraction of the concrete posed a serious problem. Bureau of Reclamation engineers calculated that if the dam were to be built in a single continuous pour, the concrete would take 125 years to cool, and the resulting stresses would cause the dam to crack and crumble. Instead, the ground where the dam would rise was marked with rectangles, and concrete blocks in columns were poured, some as large as 50 ft square (15 m) and 5 feet (1.5 m) high. Each five-foot form contained a set of 1-inch (25 mm) steel pipes; cool river water would be poured through the pipes, followed by ice-cold water from a refrigeration plant. When an individual block had cured and had stopped contracting, the pipes were filled with grout. Grout was also used to fill the hairline spaces between columns, which were grooved to increase the strength of the joints.

The concrete was delivered in huge steel buckets 7 feet high (2.1 m) and almost 7 feet in diameter; Crowe was awarded two patents for their design. These buckets, which weighed 20 short tons (18.1 t; 17.9 long tons) when full, were filled at two massive concrete plants on the Nevada side, and were delivered to the site in special railcars. The buckets were then suspended from aerial cableways which were used to deliver the bucket to a specific column. As the required grade of aggregate in the concrete differed depending on placement in the dam (from pea-sized gravel to 9 inches [230 mm] stones), it was vital that the bucket be maneuvered to the proper column. When the bottom of the bucket opened up, disgorging 8 cu yd (6.1 m ³) of concrete, a team of men worked it throughout the form. Although there are myths that men were caught in the pour and are entombed in the dam to this day, each bucket deepened the concrete in a form by only 1 inch (25 mm), and Six Companies engineers would not have permitted a flaw caused by the presence of a human body.

A total of 3,250,000 cubic yards (2,480,000 cubic meters) of concrete was used in the dam before concrete pouring ceased on May 29, 1935. In addition, 1,110,000 cu yd (850,000 m ³) were used in the power plant and other works. More than 582 miles (937 km) of cooling pipes were placed within the concrete. Overall, there is enough concrete in the dam to pave a two-lane highway from San Francisco to New York. Concrete cores were removed from the dam for testing in 1995; they showed that "Hoover Dam's concrete has continued to slowly gain strength" and the dam is composed of a "durable concrete having a compressive strength exceeding the range typically found in normal mass concrete". Hoover Dam concrete is not subject to alkali-silica reaction (ASR), as the Hoover Dam builders happened to use nonreactive aggregate, unlike that at downstream Parker Dam, where ASR has caused measurable deterioration.

The upstream face of Hoover Dam slowly disappears as Lake Mead fills, May 1935 (looking downstream from the Arizona rim)

With most work finished on the dam itself (the powerhouse remained uncompleted), a formal dedication ceremony was arranged for September 30, 1935, to coincide with a western tour being made by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The morning of the dedication, it was moved forward three hours from 2 p.m. Pacific time to 11 a.m.; this was done because Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes had reserved a radio slot for the President for 2 p.m. but officials did not realize until the day of the ceremony that the slot was for 2 p.m. Eastern Time. Despite the change in the ceremony time, and temperatures of 102 °F (39 °C), 10,000 people were present for the President's speech, in which he avoided mentioning the name of former President Hoover, who was not invited to the ceremony. To mark the occasion, a three-cent stamp was issued by the United States Post Office Department -bearing the name "Boulder Dam", the official name of the dam between 1933 and 1947. After the ceremony, Roosevelt made the first visit by any American president to Las Vegas.

Most work had been completed by the dedication, and Six Companies negotiated with the government through late 1935 and early 1936 to settle all claims and arrange for the formal transfer of the dam to the Federal Government. The parties came to an agreement and on March 1, 1936, Secretary Ickes formally accepted the dam on behalf of the government. Six Companies was not required to complete work on one item, a concrete plug for one of the bypass tunnels, as the tunnel had to be used to take in irrigation water until the powerhouse went into operation.

Oskar J. W. Hansen's memorial at the dam which reads in part "They died to make the desert bloom."[74]

There were 112 deaths reported as associated with the construction of the dam. The first was Bureau of Reclamation employee Harold Connelly who died on May 15, 1921, after falling from a barge while surveying the Colorado River for an ideal spot for the dam. Surveyor John Gregory ("J.G.") Tierney, who drowned on December 20, 1922, in a flash flood while looking for an ideal spot for the dam was the second person. The official list's final death occurred on December 20, 1935, when Patrick Tierney, electrician's helper and the son of J.G. Tierney, fell from one of the two Arizona-side intake towers. Included in the fatality list are three workers who took their own lives on site, one in 1932 and two in 1933. Of the 112 fatalities, 91 were Six Companies employees, three were Bureau of Reclamation employees, and one was a visitor to the site; the remainder were employees of various contractors not part of Six Companies.

Ninety-six of the deaths occurred during construction at the site. Not included in the official number of fatalities were deaths that were recorded as pneumonia. Workers alleged that this diagnosis was a cover for death from carbon monoxide poisoning (brought on by the use of gasoline-fueled vehicles in the diversion tunnels), and a classification used by Six Companies to avoid paying compensation claims. The site's diversion tunnels frequently reached 140 °F (60 °C), enveloped in thick plumes of vehicle exhaust gases. A total of 42 workers were recorded as having died from pneumonia and were not included in the above total; none were listed as having died from carbon monoxide poisoning. No deaths of non-workers from pneumonia were recorded in Boulder City during the construction period.

The initial plans for the facade of the dam, the power plant, the outlet tunnels and ornaments clashed with the modern look of an arch dam. The Bureau of Reclamation, more concerned with the dam's functionality, adorned it with a Gothic-inspired balustrade and eagle statues. This initial design was criticized by many as being too plain and unremarkable for a project of such immense scale, so Los Angeles-based architect Gordon B. Kaufmann, then the supervising architect to the Bureau of Reclamation, was brought in to redesign the exteriors. Kaufmann greatly streamlined the design and applied an elegant Art Deco style to the entire project. He designed sculpted turrets rising seamlessly from the dam face and clock faces on the intake towers set for the time in Nevada and Arizona-both states are in different time zones, but since Arizona does not observe daylight saving time, the clocks display the same time for more than half the year.

Tile floor designed by Allen Tupper True

At Kaufmann's request, Denver artist Allen Tupper True was hired to handle the design and decoration of the walls and floors of the new dam. True's design scheme incorporated motifs of the Navajo and Pueblo tribes of the region. Although some were initially opposed to these designs, True was given the go-ahead and was officially appointed consulting artist. With the assistance of the National Laboratory of Anthropology, True researched authentic decorative motifs from Indian sand paintings, textiles, baskets and ceramics. The images and colors are based on Native American visions of rain, lightning, water, clouds, and local animals-lizards, serpents, birds-and on the Southwestern landscape of stepped mesas. In these works, which are integrated into the walkways and interior halls of the dam, True also reflected on the machinery of the operation, making the symbolic patterns appear both ancient and modern.

With the agreement of Kaufmann and the engineers, True also devised for the pipes and machinery an innovative color-coding which was implemented throughout all BOR projects. True's consulting artist job lasted through 1942; it was extended so he could complete design work for the Parker, Shasta and Grand Coulee dams and power plants. True's work on the Hoover Dam was humorously referred to in a poem published in The New Yorker, part of which read, "lose the spark, and justify the dream; but also worthy of remark will be the color scheme".

Complementing Kaufmann and True's work, sculptor Oskar J. W. Hansen designed many of the sculptures on and around the dam. His works include the monument of dedication plaza, a plaque to memorialize the workers killed and the bas-reliefs on the elevator towers. In his words, Hansen wanted his work to express "the immutable calm of intellectual resolution, and the enormous power of trained physical strength, equally enthroned in placid triumph of scientific accomplishment", because "[t]he building of Hoover Dam belongs to the sagas of the daring." Hansen's dedication plaza, on the Nevada abutment, contains a sculpture of two winged figures flanking a flagpole.

Surrounding the base of the monument is a terrazzo floor embedded with a "star map". The map depicts the Northern Hemisphere sky at the moment of President Roosevelt's dedication of the dam. This is intended to help future astronomers, if necessary, calculate the exact date of dedication. The 30-foot-high (9.1 m) bronze figures, dubbed "Winged Figures of the Republic", were both formed in a continuous pour. To put such large bronzes into place without marring the highly polished bronze surface, they were placed on ice and guided into position as the ice melted. Hansen's bas-relief on the Nevada elevator tower depicts the benefits of the dam: flood control, navigation, irrigation, water storage, and power. The bas-relief on the Arizona elevator depicts, in his words, "the visages of those Indian tribes who have inhabited mountains and plains from ages distant."

Water is released from the jet-flow gates for testing in 1998.[92]

Excavation for the powerhouse was carried out simultaneously with the excavation for the dam foundation and abutments. The excavation of this U-shaped structure located at the downstream toe of the dam was completed in late 1933 with the first concrete placed in November 1933. Filling of Lake Mead began February 1, 1935, even before the last of the concrete was poured that May. The powerhouse was one of the projects uncompleted at the time of the formal dedication on September 30, 1935; a crew of 500 men remained to finish it and other structures. To make the powerhouse roof bombproof, it was constructed of layers of concrete, rock, and steel with a total thickness of about 3.5 feet (1.1 m), topped with layers of sand and tar.

In the latter half of 1936, water levels in Lake Mead were high enough to permit power generation, and the first three Allis Chalmers built Francis turbine- generators, all on the Nevada side, began operating. In March 1937, one more Nevada generator went online and the first Arizona generator by August. By September 1939, four more generators were operating, and the dam's power plant became the largest hydroelectricity facility in the world. The final generator was not placed in service until 1961, bringing the maximum generating capacity to 1,345 megawatts at the time. Original plans called for 16 large generators, eight on each side of the river, but two smaller generators were installed instead of one large one on the Arizona side for a total of 17. The smaller generators were used to serve smaller communities at a time when the output of each generator was dedicated to a single municipality, before the dam's total power output was placed on the grid and made arbitrarily distributable.

Before water from Lake Mead reaches the turbines, it enters the intake towers and then four gradually narrowing penstocks which funnel the water down towards the powerhouse. The intakes provide a maximum hydraulic head (water pressure) of 590 ft (180 m) as the water reaches a speed of about 85 mph (140 km/h). The entire flow of the Colorado River usually passes through the turbines. The spillways and outlet works (jet-flow gates) are rarely used. The jet-flow gates, located in concrete structures 180 feet (55 m) above the river and also at the outlets of the inner diversion tunnels at river level, may be used to divert water around the dam in emergency or flood conditions, but have never done so, and in practice are used only to drain water from the penstocks for maintenance. Following an uprating project from 1986 to 1993, the total gross power rating for the plant, including two 2.4 megawatt Pelton turbine-generators that power Hoover Dam's own operations is a maximum capacity of 2080 megawatts. The annual generation of Hoover Dam varies. The maximum net generation was 10.348 TWh in 1984, and the minimum since 1940 was 2.648 TWh in 1956. The average power generated was 4.2 TWh/year for 1947-2008. In 2015, the dam generated 3.6 TWh.

The amount of electricity generated by Hoover Dam has been decreasing along with the falling water level in Lake Mead due to the prolonged drought since year 2000 and high demand for the Colorado River's water. By 2014 its generating capacity was downrated by 23% to 1592 MW and was providing power only during periods of peak demand. Lake Mead fell to a new record low elevation of 1,071.61 feet (326.63 m) on July 1, 2016, before beginning to rebound slowly. Under its original design, the dam would no longer be able to generate power once the water level fell below 1,050 feet (320 m), which might have occurred in 2017 had water restrictions not been enforced. To lower the minimum power pool elevation from 1,050 to 950 feet (320 to 290 m), five wide-head turbines, designed to work efficiently with less flow, were installed. Water levels were maintained at over 1,075 feet (328 m) in 2018 and 2019, but fell to a new record low of 1,071.55 feet (326.61 m) on June 10, 2021 and were projected to fall below 1,066 feet (325 m) by the end of 2021.

Control of water was the primary concern in the building of the dam. Power generation has allowed the dam project to be self-sustaining: proceeds from the sale of power repaid the 50-year construction loan, and those revenues also finance the multimillion-dollar yearly maintenance budget. Power is generated in step with and only with the release of water in response to downstream water demands.

Lake Mead and downstream releases from the dam also provide water for both municipal and irrigation uses. Water released from the Hoover Dam eventually reaches several canals. The Colorado River Aqueduct and Central Arizona Project branch off Lake Havasu while the All-American Canal is supplied by the Imperial Dam. In total, water from Lake Mead serves 18 million people in Arizona, Nevada, and California and supplies the irrigation of over 1,000,000 acres (400,000 ha) of land.

In 2018, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) proposed a $3 billion pumped-storage hydroelectricity project-a "battery" of sorts-that would use wind and solar power to recirculate water back up to Lake Mead from a pumping station 20 miles (32 km) downriver.

Power distribution

Electricity from the dam's powerhouse was originally sold pursuant to a fifty-year contract, authorized by Congress in 1934, which ran from 1937 to 1987. In 1984, Congress passed a new statute which set power allocations to southern California, Arizona, and Nevada from the dam from 1987 to 2017. The powerhouse was run under the original authorization by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power and Southern California Edison; in 1987, the Bureau of Reclamation assumed control. In 2011, Congress enacted legislation extending the current contracts until 2067, after setting aside 5% of Hoover Dam's power for sale to Native American tribes, electric cooperatives, and other entities. The new arrangement began on October 1, 2017.

The Bureau of Reclamation reports that the energy generated under the contracts ending in 2017 was allocated as follows:

Tourists gather around one of the generators in the Nevada wing of the powerhouse to hear its operation explained, September 1940.

A worker stands by the 30 ft (9.1 m) diameter Nevada penstock before its junction with another penstock that delivers water to a turbine.

Water enters the Arizona spillway (left) during the 1983 floods. Lake Mead water level was 1,225.6 ft (373.6 m)

The dam is protected against over-topping by two spillways. The spillway entrances are located behind each dam abutment, running roughly parallel to the canyon walls. The spillway entrance arrangement forms a classic side-flow weir with each spillway containing four 100-foot-long (30 m) and 16-foot-wide (4.9 m) steel-drum gates. Each gate weighs 5,000,000 pounds (2,300 metric tons) and can be operated manually or automatically. Gates are raised and lowered depending on water levels in the reservoir and flood conditions. The gates cannot entirely prevent water from entering the spillways but can maintain an extra 16 ft (4.9 m) of lake level.

Water flowing over the spillways falls dramatically into 600-foot-long (180 m), 50-foot-wide (15 m) spillway tunnels before connecting to the outer diversion tunnels and reentering the main river channel below the dam. This complex spillway entrance arrangement combined with the approximate 700-foot (210 m) elevation drop from the top of the reservoir to the river below was a difficult engineering problem and posed numerous design challenges. Each spillway's capacity of 200,000 cu ft/s (5,700 m ³/s) was empirically verified in post-construction tests in 1941.

The large spillway tunnels have only been used twice, for testing in 1941 and because of flooding in 1983. Both times, when inspecting the tunnels after the spillways were used, engineers found major damage to the concrete linings and underlying rock. The 1941 damage was attributed to a slight misalignment of the tunnel invert (or base), which caused cavitation, a phenomenon in fast-flowing liquids in which vapor bubbles collapse with explosive force. In response to this finding, the tunnels were patched with special heavy-duty concrete and the surface of the concrete was polished mirror-smooth. The spillways were modified in 1947 by adding flip buckets, which both slow the water and decrease the spillway's effective capacity, in an attempt to eliminate conditions thought to have contributed to the 1941 damage. The 1983 damage, also due to cavitation, led to the installation of aerators in the spillways. Tests at Grand Coulee Dam showed that the technique worked, in principle.

There are two lanes for automobile traffic across the top of the dam, which formerly served as the Colorado River crossing for U.S. Route 93. In the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks, authorities expressed security concerns and the Hoover Dam Bypass project was expedited. Pending the completion of the bypass, restricted traffic was permitted over Hoover Dam. Some types of vehicles were inspected prior to crossing the dam while semi-trailer trucks, buses carrying luggage, and enclosed- box trucks over 40 ft (12 m) long were not allowed on the dam at all, and were diverted to U.S. Route 95 or Nevada State Routes 163/ 68. The four-lane Hoover Dam Bypass opened on October 19, 2010. It includes a composite steel and concrete arch bridge, the Mike O'Callaghan-Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge, 1,500 ft (460 m) downstream from the dam. With the opening of the bypass, through traffic is no longer allowed across Hoover Dam; dam visitors are allowed to use the existing roadway to approach from the Nevada side and cross to parking lots and other facilities on the Arizona side.

Hoover Dam opened for tours in 1937 after its completion but following Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, it was closed to the public when the United States entered World War II, during which only authorized traffic, in convoys, was permitted. After the war, it reopened September 2, 1945, and by 1953, annual attendance had risen to 448,081. The dam closed on November 25, 1963, and March 31, 1969, days of mourning in remembrance of Presidents Kennedy and Eisenhower. In 1995, a new visitors' center was built, and the following year, visits exceeded one million for the first time. The dam closed again to the public on September 11, 2001; modified tours were resumed in December and a new "Discovery Tour" was added the following year. Today, nearly a million people per year take the tours of the dam offered by the Bureau of Reclamation. Increased security concerns by the government have led to most of the interior structure's being inaccessible to tourists. As a result, few of True's decorations can now be seen by visitors. Visitors can only purchase tickets on-site and have the options of a guided tour of the whole facility or only the power plant area. The only self-guided tour option is for the visitor center itself, where visitors can view various exhibits and enjoy a 360-degree view of the dam.

View upstream from Hoover Dam, October 2021, during the Southwestern North American megadrought

The changes in water flow and use caused by Hoover Dam's construction and operation have had a large impact on the Colorado River Delta. The construction of the dam has been implicated in causing the decline of this estuarine ecosystem. For six years after the construction of the dam, while Lake Mead filled, virtually no water reached the mouth of the river. The delta's estuary, which once had a freshwater-saltwater mixing zone stretching 40 miles (64 km) south of the river's mouth, was turned into an inverse estuary where the level of salinity was higher close to the river's mouth.

The Colorado River had experienced natural flooding before the construction of the Hoover Dam. The dam eliminated the natural flooding, threatening many species adapted to the flooding, including both plants and animals. The construction of the dam devastated the populations of native fish in the river downstream from the dam. Four species of fish native to the Colorado River, the Bonytail chub, Colorado pikeminnow, Humpback chub, and Razorback sucker, are listed as endangered.

1933 Los Angeles Times political cartoon commenting on the attempts of Ickes to keep "Hoover" off the dam.

During the years of lobbying leading up to the passage of legislation authorizing the dam in 1928, the press generally referred to the dam as "Boulder Dam" or as "Boulder Canyon Dam", even though the proposed site had shifted to Black Canyon. The Boulder Canyon Project Act of 1928 (BCPA) never mentioned a proposed name or title for the dam. The BCPA merely allows the government to "construct, operate, and maintain a dam and incidental works in the main stream of the Colorado River at Black Canyon or Boulder Canyon".

When Secretary of the Interior Ray Wilbur spoke at the ceremony starting the building of the railway between Las Vegas and the dam site on September 17, 1930, he named the dam "Hoover Dam", citing a tradition of naming dams after Presidents, though none had been so honored during their terms of office. Wilbur justified his choice on the ground that Hoover was "the great engineer whose vision and persistence ... has done so much to make [the dam] possible". One writer complained in response that "the Great Engineer had quickly drained, ditched, and dammed the country."

After Hoover's election defeat in 1932 and the accession of the Roosevelt administration, Secretary Ickes ordered on May 13, 1933, that the dam be referred to as Boulder Dam. Ickes stated that Wilbur had been imprudent in naming the dam after a sitting president, that Congress had never ratified his choice, and that it had long been referred to as Boulder Dam. Unknown to the general public, Attorney General Homer Cummings informed Ickes that Congress had indeed used the name "Hoover Dam" in five different bills appropriating money for construction of the dam. The official status this conferred to the name "Hoover Dam" had been noted on the floor of the House of Representatives by Congressman Edward T. Taylor of Colorado on December 12, 1930, but was likewise ignored by Ickes.

When Ickes spoke at the dedication ceremony on September 30, 1935, he was determined, as he recorded in his diary, "to try to nail down for good and all the name Boulder Dam." At one point in the speech, he spoke the words "Boulder Dam" five times within thirty seconds. Further, he suggested that if the dam were to be named after any one person, it should be for California Senator Hiram Johnson, a lead sponsor of the authorizing legislation. Roosevelt also referred to the dam as Boulder Dam, and the Republican-leaning Los Angeles Times, which at the time of Ickes' name change had run an editorial cartoon showing Ickes ineffectively chipping away at an enormous sign "HOOVER DAM", reran it showing Roosevelt reinforcing Ickes, but having no greater success.

In the following years, the name "Boulder Dam" failed to fully take hold, with many Americans using both names interchangeably and mapmakers divided as to which name should be printed. Memories of the Great Depression faded, and Hoover to some extent rehabilitated himself through good works during and after World War II. In 1947, a bill passed both Houses of Congress unanimously restoring the name "Hoover Dam." Ickes, who was by then a private citizen, opposed the change, stating, "I didn't know Hoover was that small a man to take credit for something he had nothing to do with."

Hoover Dam was recognized as a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark in 1984. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1981 and was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1985, cited for its engineering innovations.

Bureau of Reclamation (2006). Reclamation: Managing Water in the West: Hoover Dam. US Department of the Interior.

Cummings, Homer (1939). Selected Papers of Homer Cummings. New York: Scribners.

Dunar, Andrew J.; McBride, Dennis (2001) [1993]. Building Hoover Dam: An Oral History of the Great Depression. Reno, Nev.: University of Nevada Press. ISBN 978-0-87417-489-2.

Hiltzik, Michael A. (2010). Colossus: Hoover Dam and the Making of the American Century. New York: Free Press. ISBN 978-1-4165-3216-3.

The Story of the Hoover Dam. Las Vegas: Nevada Publications, Inc. 2006. ISBN 978-0-913814-79-6.

Rogers, Jerry; Wiltshire, Richard; Gilbert, David (2011). "Celebrating the 75th Anniversary of Hoover Dam: Highlights of the October 20-22, 2010, ASCE Hoover Dam 75th Anniversary History Symposium/Tours/Proceedings". In R. Edward Beighley II; Mark W. Killgore (eds.). World Environmental and Water Resources Congress 2011: Bearing Knowledge for Sustainability. doi:10.1061/41173(414)200. ISBN 978-0-7844-1173-5.

Stevens, Joseph E. (1988). Hoover Dam: An American Adventure. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. ISBN 978-0-8061-2283-0.

True, Jere; Kirby, Victoria Tupper (2009). Allen Tupper True: An American Artist. San Francisco: Canyon Leap. ISBN 978-0-9817238-1-5.

Arrigo, Anthony F. (2014). Imaging Hoover Dam: The Making of a Cultural Icon. Reno, NV: University of Nevada Press.

Bartojay, Katie; Joy, Westin (October 21-22, 2010). Wiltshire, Richard L.; Gilbert, David R.; Rogers, Jerry R. (eds.). Long-Term Properties of Hoover Dam Mass Concrete. Hoover Dam 75th Anniversary History Symposium. Las Vegas, Nevada: American Society of Civil Engineers. pp. 74-84. ISBN 978-0-7844-1141-4.

Cohn, Jeffrey P. (December 2001). "Resurrecting the Dammed: A Look at Colorado River Restoration". BioScience. 51 (12): 998-1003. doi:10.1641/0006-3568(2001)051[0998:RTDALA]2.0.CO;2.

Fiedler, William R. (October 21-22, 2010). Wiltshire, Richard L.; Gilbert, David R.; Rogers, Jerry R. (eds.). Performance of Spillway Structures Using Hoover Dam Spillways as a Benchmark. Hoover Dam 75th Anniversary History Symposium. Las Vegas, Nevada: American Society of Civil Engineers. pp. 267-287. ISBN 978-0-7844-1141-4.

Glenn, Edward P.; Lee, Christopher; Felger, Richard; Zengel, Scott (August 1996). "Effects of Water Management on the Wetlands of the Colorado River Delta, Mexico". Conservation Biology. 10 (4): 1175-1186. Bibcode:1996ConBi..10.1175G. doi:10.1046/j.1523-1739.1996.10041175.x. JSTOR 2387153.

Minckley, W. L.; Marsh, Paul C.; Deacon, James E.; Dowling, Thomas E.; Hedrick, Philip W.; Matthews, William J.; Mueller, Gordon (2003). "A Conservation Plan for Native Fishes of the Lower Colorado River". BioScience. 53 (3): 219-234. doi:10.1641/0006-3568(2003)053[0219:ACPFNF]2.0.CO;2. ISSN 0006-3568.

Rodriguez, C. A.; Flessa, K. W.; Téllez-Duarte, M. S.; Dettman, D. L.; Ávila-Serrano, G. A. (2001). "Macrofaunal and isotopic estimates of the former extent of the Colorado River estuary, upper Gulf of California, México" (PDF). Journal of Arid Environments. 49 (1): 183-193. Bibcode:2001JArEn..49..183R. doi:10.1006/jare.2001.0845.

Rogers, J. David (October 21-22, 2010). Wiltshire, Richard L.; Gilbert, David R.; Rogers, Jerry R. (eds.). Hoover Dam: Evolution of the Dam's Design. Hoover Dam 75th Anniversary History Symposium. Las Vegas, Nevada: American Society of Civil Engineers. pp. 85-123. ISBN 978-0-7844-1141-4.

Schmidt, John C.; Webb, Robert H.; Valdez, Richard A.; Marzolf, G. Richard; Stevens, Lawrence E. (September 1998). "Science and Values in River Restoration in the Grand Canyon". BioScience. 48 (9): 735-747. doi:10.2307/1313336. JSTOR 1313336.

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Hoover Dam is a concrete arch-gravity dam in the Black Canyon of the Colorado River, on the border between the U.S. states of Nevada and Arizona. Constructed between 1931 and 1936, during the Great Depression, it was dedicated on September 30, 1935, by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

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Caitlyn Beyenberg

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America's Great Depression and Roosevelt's New Deal

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Providing temporary employment through relief and recovery programs was a pivotal element of the New Deal. During the 1930's, the Civil Works Administration (CWA), Work Projects Administration (WPA), and Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) employed millions of people.

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Marina McCafferty

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Huddie Ledbetter (known as "Leadbelly," 1885-1949), an African American singer, wrote songs about the experiences of African Americans during the 1930s. He was considered by some to be the king of the 12-string blues guitar. Some of his best-known songs are "Cotton Fields," "The Midnight Special," "Rock Island Line," "Take This Hammer," and "Goodnight Irene."

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Abbey Libbey

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Why did the United States have a prohibition movement, and enact prohibition? We offer some generalizations in answer to that question.

Prohibition in the United States was a measure designed to reduce drinking by eliminating the businesses that manufactured, distributed, and sold alcoholic beverages. The Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution took away license to do business from the brewers, distillers, vintners, and the wholesale and retail sellers of alcoholic beverages. The leaders of the prohibition movement were alarmed at the drinking behavior of Americans, and they were concerned that there was a culture of drink among some sectors of the population that, with continuing immigration from Europe, was spreading.

The prohibition movement's strength grew, especially after the formation of the Anti-Saloon League in 1893. The League, and other organizations that supported prohibition such as the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, soon began to succeed in enacting local prohibition laws. Eventually the prohibition campaign was a national effort.

During this time, the brewing industry was the most prosperous of the beverage alcohol industries. Because of the competitive nature of brewing, the brewers entered the retail business. Americans called retail businesses selling beer and whiskey by the glass saloons. To expand the sale of beer, brewers expanded the number of saloons. Saloons proliferated. It was not uncommon to find one saloon for every 150 or 200 Americans, including those who did not drink. Hard-pressed to earn profits, saloonkeepers sometimes introduced vices such as gambling and prostitution into their establishments in an attempt to earn profits. Many Americans considered saloons offensive, noxious institutions.

The prohibition leaders believed that once license to do business was removed from the liquor traffic, the churches and reform organizations would enjoy an opportunity to persuade Americans to give up drink. This opportunity would occur unchallenged by the drink businesses ("the liquor traffic") in whose interests it was to urge more Americans to drink, and to drink more beverage alcohol. The blight of saloons would disappear from the landscape, and saloonkeepers no longer allowed to encourage people, including children, to drink beverage alcohol.

Some prohibition leaders looked forward to an educational campaign that would greatly expand once the drink businesses became illegal, and would eventually, in about thirty years, lead to a sober nation. Other prohibition leaders looked forward to vigorous enforcement of prohibition in order to eliminate supplies of beverage alcohol. After 1920, neither group of leaders was especially successful. The educators never received the support for the campaign that they dreamed about; and the law enforcers were never able to persuade government officials to mount a wholehearted enforcement campaign against illegal suppliers of beverage alcohol.

The best evidence available to historians shows that consumption of beverage alcohol declined dramatically under prohibition. In the early 1920s, consumption of beverage alcohol was about thirty per cent of the pre-prohibition level. Consumption grew somewhat in the last years of prohibition, as illegal supplies of liquor increased and as a new generation of Americans disregarded the law and rejected the attitude of self-sacrifice that was part of the bedrock of the prohibition movement. Nevertheless, it was a long time after repeal before consumption rates rose to their pre-prohibition levels. In that sense, prohibition "worked."

We have included a table of data about alcohol consumption. We also present some data in graphic form, including the consumption of beer in gallons, the consumption of distilled spirits in gallons, and the consumption of absolute alcohol in gallons for beer and spirits, and, in total, for all beverage alcohol. We also have some separate data for malt beverage production (beer).

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Why did the United States have a prohibition movement, and enact prohibition? We offer some generalizations in answer to that question.

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Jacob Shaw

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The Great Depression lasted from 1929 to 1939 and was the worst economic depression in the history of the United States. Economists and historians point to the stock market crash of October 24, 1929, as the start of the downturn. But the truth is that many things caused the Great Depression, not just one single event.

In the United States, the Great Depression crippled the presidency of Herbert Hoover and led to the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932. Promising the nation a New Deal, Roosevelt would become the nation's longest-serving president. The economic downturn wasn't just confined to the United States; it affected much of the developed world. One cause of the depression in Europe, was that the Nazis came to power in Germany, sowing the seeds of World War II.

Stock Market Crash of 1929

Remembered today as "Black Tuesday," the stock market crash of October 29, 1929 was neither the sole cause of the Great Depression nor the first crash that month, but it's typically remembered as the most obvious marker of the Depression beginning. The market, which had reached record highs that very summer, had begun to decline in September.

On Thursday, October 24, the market plunged at the opening bell, causing a panic. Though investors managed to halt the slide, just five days later on "Black Tuesday" the market crashed, losing 12% of its value and wiping out $14 billion of investments. By two months later, stockholders had lost more than $40 billion dollars. Even though the stock market regained some of its losses by the end of 1930, the economy was devastated. America truly entered what is called the Great Depression.

Bank Failures

The effects of the stock market crash rippled throughout the economy. Nearly 700 banks failed in waning months of 1929 and more than 3,000 collapsed in 1930. Federal deposit insurance was as-yet unheard of, so when the banks failed, people lost all their money. Some people panicked, causing bank runs as people desperately withdrew their money, which in turned forced more banks to close. By the end of the decade, more than 9,000 banks had failed. Surviving institutions, unsure of the economic situation and concerned for their own survival, became unwilling to lend money. This exacerbated the situation, leading to less and less spending.

Reduction in Purchasing Across the Board

With people's investments worthless, their savings diminished or depleted, and credit tight to nonexistent, spending by consumers and companies alike ground to a standstill. As a result, workers were laid off en masse. In a chain reaction, as people lost their jobs, they were unable to keep up with paying for items they had bought through installment plans; repossessions and evictions were commonplace. More and more unsold inventory began to accumulate. The unemployment rate rose above 25%, which meant even less spending to help alleviate the economic situation.

American Economic Policy With Europe

As the Great Depression tightened its grip on the nation, the government was forced to act. Vowing to protect U.S. industry from overseas competitors, Congress passed the Tariff Act of 1930, better known as the Smoot-Hawley Tariff. The measure imposed near-record tax rates on a wide range of imported goods. A number of American trading partners retaliated by imposing tariffs on U.S.-made goods. As a result, world trade fell by two-thirds between 1929 and 1934. By then, Franklin Roosevelt and a Democrat-controlled Congress passed new legislation allowing the president to negotiate significantly lower tariff rates with other nations.

Drought Conditions

The economic devastation of the Great Depression was made worse by environmental destruction. A years-long drought coupled with farming practices which did not use soil-preservation techniques created a vast region from southeast Colorado to the Texas panhandle that came to be called the Dust Bowl. Massive dust storms choked towns, killing crops and livestock, sickening people and causing untold millions in damage. Thousands fled the region as the economy collapsed, something John Steinbeck chronicled in his masterpiece "The Grapes of Wrath." It would be years, if not decades, before the region's environment recovered.

The Legacy of the Great Depression

There were other causes of the Great Depression, but these five factors are considered by more history and economics scholars as the most significant. They led to major governmental reforms and new federal programs; some, like Social Security, federal support of conservation tillage and sustainable agriculture, and federal deposit insurance, are still with us today. And although the U.S. has experienced significant economic downturns since, nothing has matched the severity or duration of the Great Depression.

Sources and Further Reading

Eichengreen, Barry. "Hall of Mirrors: The Great Depression, the Great Recession, and the Uses-and Misuses of History." Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.

Turkel, Studs. "Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression." New York: The New Press, 1986.

Watkins, Tom H. "The Great Depression: America in the 1930s." New York: Little, Brown, 1993.

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The Great Depression lasted from 1929 to 1939 and was the worst economic depression in the history of the United States. Economists and historians point to the stock market crash of October 24, 1929, as the start of the downturn. But the truth is that many things caused the Great Depression, not just one single event.

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Prohibition is the act or practice of forbidding something by law; more particularly the term refers to the banning of the manufacture, storage (whether in barrels or in bottles), transportation, sale, possession, and consumption of alcoholic beverages. The word is also used to refer to a period of time during which such bans are enforced.

In the early twentieth century, much of the impetus for the prohibition movement in the Nordic countries[citation needed ] and North America came from moralistic convictions of pietistic Protestants. Prohibition movements in the West coincided with the advent of women's suffrage, with newly empowered women as part of the political process strongly supporting policies that curbed alcohol consumption.

The first half of the 20th century saw periods of prohibition of alcoholic beverages in several countries:

After several years, prohibition failed in North America and elsewhere. Rum-running or bootlegging became widespread, and organized crime took control of the distribution of alcohol. Distilleries and breweries in Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean flourished as their products were either consumed by visiting Americans or illegally exported to the United States. Detroit and Chicago became notorious as havens for prohibition dodgers during the time known as the Roaring Twenties - 75% of all alcohol smuggled into the United States crossed the Detroit- Windsor border. Prohibition generally came to an end in the late 1920s or early 1930s in most of North America and Europe, although a few locations continued prohibition for many more years.

During the coronavirus outbreak of 2020, alcohol sales, and even the transportation of alcohol outside of one's home, was made illegal. This order came into effect during the nationwide lockdown on 27 March 2020. The purpose of the ban was intended to prevent drunken fights, reduce domestic violence, stop drunk driving, and eliminate the weekend binge-drinking so prevalent across South Africa.

Police, medics, and analysts estimate-conservatively-that alcohol is involved in, or responsible for, at least 40% of all emergency hospital admissions. By reducing the number of people within hospitals, and of course within social gatherings, the goal of prohibition was to reduce the rate of transmission, and thus slow the spread of the virus.

Sale of alcohol is banned in Afghanistan.

In Bangladesh, alcohol is somewhat prohibited due to its proscription in the Islamic faith. The purchase and consumption is still allowed in the country. The Garo tribe consume a type of rice beer, and Christians in this country drink and purchase wine for their holy communion.

In India alcohol is a state subject and individual states can legislate prohibition, but currently most states do not have prohibition and sale/consumption is freely available in 25 out of 29 states. Prohibition is in force in the states of Gujarat, Bihar and Nagaland, parts of Manipur, and the union territory of Lakshadweep. All other States and union territories of India permit the sale of alcohol.

Election days and certain national holidays such as Independence Day are meant to be dry days when liquor sale is not permitted but consumption is allowed. Some Indian states observe dry days on major religious festivals/occasions depending on the popularity of the festival in that region.[citation needed ]

The Maldives ban the import of alcohol, x-raying all baggage on arrival. Alcoholic beverages are available only to foreign tourists on resort islands and may not be taken off the resort.

Pakistan allowed the free sale and consumption of alcohol for three decades from 1947, but restrictions were introduced by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto just weeks before he was removed as prime minister in 1977. Since then, only members of non-Muslim minorities such as Hindus, Christians and Zoroastrians are allowed to apply for alcohol permits. The monthly quota is dependent upon one's income, but is actually about five bottles of liquor or 100 bottles of beer. In a country of 180 million, only about 60 outlets are allowed to sell alcohol. The Murree Brewery in Rawalpindi was once the only legal brewery, but today there are more. The ban officially is enforced by the country's Islamic Ideology Council, but it is not strictly policed. Members of religious minorities, however, often sell their liquor permits to Muslims as part of a continuing black market trade in alcohol.

In 1955 Sri Lanka passed a law prohibiting adult women from buying alcohol. In January 2018, Finance Minister Mangala Samaraweera announced that the law would be amended, allowing women to legally consume alcohol and work in venues that sell alcohol. The legalization was overruled by President Maithripala Sirisena several days later.

The consumption, importation and brewing of, and trafficking in liquor is strictly against the law.

The sale, consumption, importation and brewing of, and trafficking in liquor is strictly against the law.

Alcohol is banned in Yemen.

In Brunei, alcohol consumption and sale is banned in public. Non-Muslims are allowed to purchase a limited amount of alcohol from their point of embarcation overseas for their own private consumption, and non-Muslims who are at least the age of 18 are allowed to bring in not more than two bottles of liquor (about two litres) and twelve cans of beer per person into the country.

Alcohol sales are banned in small shops and convenience stores.

Alcohol is banned only for Muslims in Malaysia due to its Islamic faith and sharia law. Nevertheless, alcoholic products can easily be found in supermarkets, specialty shops, and convenience stores all over the country. Non- halal restaurants also typically sell alcohol.

There are only restrictions during elections in the Philippines. Alcohol is prohibited from purchase two days prior to an election. The Philippine Commission on Elections may opt to extend the liquor ban. In the 2010 elections, the liquor ban was a minimum two days; in the 2013 elections, there was a proposal that it be extended to five days. This was overturned by the Supreme Court.

Other than election-related prohibition, alcohol is freely sold to anyone above the legal drinking age.

Alcohol sales are prohibited during elections from 18:00 the day prior to voting, until the end of the day of voting itself. Alcohol is also prohibited on major Buddhist holy days, and sometimes on royal commemoration days, such as birthdays.

Thailand also enforces time-limited bans on alcohol on a daily basis. Alcohol can only be legally purchased in stores or restaurants between 11:00-14:00 and 17:00-midnight. The law is enforced by all major retailers (most notably 7-Eleven) and restaurants, but is frequently ignored by the smaller "mom and pop" stores. Hotels and resorts are exempt from the rules.

The consumption of alcohol is also banned at any time within 200 meters of a filling station (where sale of alcohol is also illegal), schools, temples or hospitals as well as on board any type of road vehicle regardless of whether it is being consumed by the driver or passenger.

At certain times of the year-Thai New Year ( Songkran) is an example-the government may also enforce arbitrary bans on the sale and consumption of alcohol in specific public areas where large scale festivities are due to take place and large crowds are expected.

Thailand strictly regulates alcohol advertising, as specified in the Alcoholic Beverage Control Act, B.E. 2551 (2008) (ABCA). Sales of alcohol via "electronic channels" (internet) are prohibited.

On 14 September 2012, the Government of the Czech Republic banned all sales of alcoholic drinks with more than 20% alcohol. From this date, it was illegal to sell such alcoholic beverages in shops, supermarkets, bars, restaurants, filling stations, e-shops etc. This measure was taken in response to the wave of methanol poisoning cases resulting in the deaths of 18 people in the Czech Republic. Since the beginning of the " methanol affair" the total number of deaths has increased to 25. The ban was to be valid until further notice, though restrictions were eased towards the end of September. The last bans on Czech alcohol with regard to the poisoning cases were lifted on 10 October 2012, when neighbouring Slovakia and Poland allowed its import once again.

The Nordic countries, with the exception of Denmark, have had a strong temperance movement since the late-1800s, closely linked to the Christian revival movement of the late-nineteenth century, but also to several worker organisations. As an example, in 1910 the temperance organisations in Sweden had some 330,000 members, which was about 6% of a population of 5.5 million. This heavily influenced the decisions of Nordic politicians in the early 20th century.

In 1907, the Faroe Islands passed a law prohibiting all sale of alcohol, which was in force until 1992. Very restricted private importation from Denmark was allowed from 1928 onwards.

In 1914, Sweden put in place a rationing system, the Bratt System, in force until 1955. A referendum in 1922 rejected an attempt to enforce total prohibition.

In 1915, Iceland instituted total prohibition. The ban for wine was lifted in 1922 and spirits in 1935, but beer remained prohibited until 1989 (circumvented by mixing light beer and spirits).

In 1916, Norway prohibited distilled beverages, and in 1917 the prohibition was extended to also include fortified wine and beer. The wine and beer ban was lifted in 1923, and in 1927 the ban of distilled beverages was also lifted.

In 1919, Finland enacted prohibition, as one of the first acts after independence from the Russian Empire. Four previous attempts to institute prohibition in the early twentieth century had failed due to opposition from the tsar. After a development similar to the one in the United States during its prohibition, with large-scale smuggling and increasing violence and crime rates, public opinion turned against the prohibition, and after a national referendum where 70% voted for a repeal of the law, prohibition was abolished in early 1932.

Today, all Nordic countries except Denmark continue to have strict controls on the sale of alcohol, which is highly taxed (dutied) to the public. There are government monopolies in place for selling spirits, wine, and stronger beers in Norway ( Vinmonopolet), Finland ( Alko), Sweden ( Systembolaget), Iceland ( Vínbúðin), and the Faroe Islands ( Rúsdrekkasøla Landsins). Bars and restaurants may, however, import alcoholic beverages directly or through other companies.

Greenland, which is part of the Kingdom of Denmark, does not share its easier controls on the sale of alcohol. Greenland has (like Denmark) sales in food shops, but prices are typically high. Private import when travelling from Denmark is only allowed in small quantities.

In the Russian Empire, a limited version of a Dry Law was introduced in 1914. It continued through the turmoil of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Russian Civil War into the period of Soviet Russia and the Soviet Union until 1925.

Although the sale or consumption of commercial alcohol has never been prohibited by law in the United Kingdom, historically, various groups in the UK have campaigned for the prohibition of alcohol; including the Society of Friends (Quakers), The Methodist Church and other non-conformists, as well as temperance movements such as Band of Hope and temperance Chartist movements of the nineteenth century.

On 22 March 1917, during the First World War at a crowded meeting in the Queen's Hall in London (chaired by Alfred Booth) many influential people including Agnes Weston spoke, or letters from them were read out, against alcohol consumption, calling for prohibition; General Sir Reginald Hart wrote to the meeting that "Every experienced officer knew that practically all unhappiness and crime in the Army is due to drink". At the meeting, Lord Channing said that it was a pity that the whole Cabinet did not follow the example of King George V and Lord Kitchener when in 1914 those two spoke calling for complete prohibition for the duration of the war.

Edwin Scrymgeour served as Member of Parliament for Dundee between 15 November 1922 and 8 October 1931. He remains the only person to have ever been elected to the House of Commons on a prohibitionist ticket. In 1922, he defeated incumbent Liberal member Winston Churchill; winning the seat for the Scottish Prohibition Party, which he had founded in 1901, and for which he had stood for election successfully as a Dundee Burgh Councillor in 1905 and unsuccessfully as a parliamentary candidate between 1908 and 1922.

Indigenous peoples in Canada were subject to prohibitory alcohol laws under the of 1876. Sections of the Indian Act regarding liquor were not repealed for over a hundred years, until 1985.

An official, but non-binding, federal referendum on prohibition was held in 1898. Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier's government chose not to introduce a federal bill on prohibition, mindful of the strong antipathy in Quebec. As a result, Canadian prohibition was instead enacted through laws passed by the provinces during the first twenty years of the 20th century, especially during the 1910s. Canada did, however, enact a national prohibition from 1918 to 1920 as a temporary wartime measure. Much of the rum-running during prohibition took place in Windsor, Ontario. The provinces later repealed their prohibition laws, mostly during the 1920s, although some local municipalities remain dry.

Some communities in the Chiapas state of southern Mexico are under the control of the libertarian socialist Zapatista Army of National Liberation, and often ban alcohol as part of what was described as "a collective decision". This prohibition has been used by many villages as a way to decrease domestic violence[failed verification ] and has generally been favored by women. This prohibition, however, is not recognized by federal Mexican law as the Zapatista movement is strongly opposed by the federal government.

The sale and purchase of alcohol is prohibited on and the night before certain national holidays, such as Natalicio de Benito Juárez (birthdate of Benito Juárez) and Día de la Revolución, which are meant to be dry nationally. The same "dry law" applies to the days before presidential elections every six years.

Prohibition in the United States focused on the manufacture, transportation, and sale of alcoholic beverages; exceptions were made for medicinal and religious uses. Alcohol consumption was never illegal under federal law. Nationwide Prohibition did not begin in the United States until January 1920, when the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution went into effect. The 18th amendment was ratified in 1919, and was repealed in December 1933 with the ratification of the Twenty-first Amendment.

Concern over excessive alcohol consumption began during the American colonial era, when fines were imposed for drunken behavior and for selling liquor without a license. Protestant religious groups urged Americans to curb their drinking habits for moral and health reasons. By the 1840s the temperance movement was actively encouraging individuals to immediately stop drinking. However, the issue of slavery, and then the Civil War, overshadowed the temperance movement until the 1870s.

Prohibition was a major reform movement from the 1870s until the 1920s, when nationwide prohibition went into effect. The Women's Crusade of 1873 and the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), founded in 1874, were means through which certain women organized and demanded political action, well before they were granted the vote. The WCTU and the Prohibition Party were major players until the 20th century, when the Anti-Saloon League emerged as the movement's leader. By 1913, 9 states had statewide prohibition and 31 others had local option laws in effect. The League then turned their efforts toward attaining a constitutional amendment and grassroots support for nationwide prohibition.

A new constitutional amendment submitted by Congress in December 1917 prohibited "the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes". The amendment was ratified and became law on January 16, 1919. On October 28, 1919, Congress passed the National Prohibition Act, also known as the Volstead Act, which provided enabling legislation to implement the 18th Amendment. After a year's required delay, national prohibition began on January 16, 1920.

Initially, alcohol consumption nosedived to about 30% of its pre-Prohibition levels, but within a few years, the illicit market grew to roughly two-thirds. Illegal stills flourished in remote rural areas as well as city slums, and large quantities were smuggled from Canada. Bootlegging became a major business activity for organized crime groups, under leaders such as Al Capone in Chicago and Lucky Luciano in New York City.

Prohibition lost support during the Great Depression, from 1929. The repeal movement was initiated and financed by the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment, and Pauline Sabin, a wealthy Republican, founded the Women's Organization for National Prohibition Reform (WONPR). Repeal of Prohibition in the United States was accomplished with the ratification of the Twenty-first Amendment on December 5, 1933. Under its terms, states were allowed to set their own laws for the control of alcohol.

In Venezuela, twenty-four hours before every election, the government prohibits the sale and distribution of alcoholic beverages throughout the national territory, including the restriction to all dealers, liquor stores, supermarkets, restaurants, wineries, pubs, bars, public entertainment, clubs and any establishment that markets alcoholic beverages.

Since then, some state governments and local councils have enacted dry areas. This is where the purchase or consumption of alcohol is only permitted in licensed areas such as liquor stores, clubs, cafes, bars, hotels, restaurants, and also private homes. In public places such as streets, parks, and squares, consumption is not permitted, but carrying bottles that were purchased at licensed venues is allowed. Almost all dry areas are small defined districts within larger urban or rural communities.

More recently, alcohol has been prohibited in many remote Indigenous communities. Penalties for transporting alcohol into these "dry" communities are severe and can result in confiscation of any vehicles involved; in dry areas within the Northern Territory, all vehicles used to transport alcohol are seized.

For many years, referenda were held for individual towns or electorates, often coincident with general elections. The ballots determined whether these individual areas would be "dry" - that is, alcohol could not be purchased or consumed in public in these areas. One notable example was the southern city of Invercargill, which was dry from 1907 to 1943. People wanting alcohol usually travelled to places outside the city (such as the nearby township of Lorneville or the town of Winton) to drink in the local pubs or purchase alcohol to take back home. The last bastion of this 'dry' area remains in force in the form of a licensing trust that still to this day governs the sale of liquor in Invercargill. The city does not allow the sale of alcohol (beer and wine included) in supermarkets unlike the remainder of New Zealand, and all form of alcohol regardless of the sort can only be sold in bars and liquor stores.

1. ^ Richard J. Jensen, The winning of the Midwest: social and political conflict, 1888-1896 (1971) pp. 89-121 online

2. ^ Aileen Kraditor, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890-1920 (1965) pp. 12-37.

3. Simon Heap, "'We think prohibition is a farce': drinking in the alcohol-prohibited zone of colonial northern Nigeria." ^ International Journal of African Historical Studies 31.1 (1998): 23-51.online

4. ^ "Sri Lanka removes 63-year-old ban on alcohol for women". Daily Sabah. January 9, 2018. According to Mangala Samaraweera, the Sri Lankan government is amending the law that installed the ban 63 years ago.

5. ^ "Sri Lanka's president rejects move to allow women to buy alcohol". . January 14, 2018. He told a rally he had ordered the government to withdraw the reform, which would also have allowed women to work in bars without a permit.

6. ^ A. Christian Van Gorder (2010). Christianity in Persia and the Status of Non-muslims in Iran. Rowman & Littlefield. pp. 195-. ISBN 978-0-7391-3609-6.

7. "Saudi Arabia". Travel.state.gov. Archived from the original on 2013-12-11.

8. ^ "Alcoholic Beverage Control Act, B.E. 2551 (2008)" (Unofficial translation). Royal Gazette. 6 February 2008.

9. ^ Wuorinen, John H. (1932). "Finland's Prohibition Experiment". The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. 163: 216-226. doi:10.1177/000271623216300123. JSTOR 1017701. S2CID 143783269.

10. I.N. Vvedensky, ^ An Experience in Enforced Abstinence Archived 2008-12-21 at the Wayback Machine (1915), Moscow (Введенский И. Н. Опыт принудительной трезвости. М.: Издание Московского Столичного Попечительства о Народной Трезвости, 1915.) (in Russian)

11. Campbell, Robert A. (Winter 2008). "Making Sober Citizens: The Legacy of Indigenous Alcohol Regulation in Canada, 1777-1985". Journal of Canadian Studies. University of Toronto Press. 42 (1): 105-126. doi:10.3138/jcs.42.1.105. ISSN 1911-0251. S2CID 145221946.

12. ^ Bumsted, J.M. (2008). The Peoples of Canada: A Post-Confederation History, Third Edition. Oxford: University Press. pp. 218, 219.

13. ^ Maquis, Greg (2004). "Brewers and Distillers Paradise: American Views of Canadian Alcohol Policies". Canadian Review of American Studies. 34 (2): 136, 139.

14. ^ McGirr, Lisa (2015). The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State. W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 978-0393066951.

15. ^ Housley, Kathleen (Winter 1992). ""Yours for the Oppressed": The Life of Jehiel C. Beman". The Journal of Negro History. 77 (1): 17-29. doi:10.2307/3031524. JSTOR 3031524. S2CID 150066631.

16. ^ Lantzer, Jason S. (2014). Interpreting the Prohibition Era at Museums and Historic Sites. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. pp. 32-36. ISBN 9780759124332.

17. ^ Miron, Jeffrey A.; Zwiebel, Jeffrey (April 1991), Alcohol Consumption During Prohibition (NBER Working Paper No. 3675 (Also Reprint No. r1563)), The National Bureau of Economic Research, doi:10.3386/w3675, We estimate the consumption of alcohol during Prohibition using mortality, mental health and crime statistics. We find that alcohol consumption fell sharply at the beginning of Prohibition, to approximately 30 percent of its pre-Prohibition level. During the next several years, however, alcohol consumption increased sharply, to about 60-70 percent of its pre-prohibition level. The level of consumption was virtually the same immediately after Prohibition as during the latter part of Prohibition, although consumption increased to approximately its pre-Prohibition level during the subsequent decade.

18. ^ Kyvig, David E. (2000). Repealing National Prohibition (2nd ed.). The Kent State University Press. Chapter 8. ISBN 0-87338-672-8.

19. Pegram, Thomas R. (1998). Battling Demon Rum: The Struggle for a Dry America, 1800-1933. American Ways. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee. ISBN 978-1566632089.

20. ^ "Martin, Jill E., "The Greatest Evil:" Interpretations Of Indian Prohibition Laws, 1832-1953" (2003). Great Plains Quarterly, 2432".

21. ^ "En Gaceta decreto de "Ley Seca" para Semana Santa" [In Gaceta decree of "Dry Law" for Holy Week]. El Carabobeño (in Spanish). 30 March 2012. Archived from the original on 27 December 2013.

22. ^ Agencia Venezolana de Noticias (7 April 2017). "Expendio de bebidas alcohólicas estará suspendido los días 9, 13, 14 y 16 de abril" [Expenditure on alcoholic beverages will be suspended on 9, 13, 14 and 16 April]. El Diario El Carabobeño (in Spanish).

23. ^ Fitts, Michelle S.; Robertson, Jan; et al. (21 July 2017). "'Sly grog' and 'homebrew': a qualitative examination of illicit alcohol and some of its impacts on Indigenous communities with alcohol restrictions in regional and remote Queensland (Australia)". BMC Research Notes. 10 (1): 360. doi:10.1186/s13104-017-2691-9. PMC . PMID 28764774.

24. Greg Ryan, "Drink and the Historians: Sober Reflections on Alcohol in New Zealand 1840-1914," New Zealand Journal of History (April 2010) Vol. 44, No. 1

25. Richard Newman, "New Zealand's Vote for Prohibition in 1911", New Zealand Journal of History, April 1975, Vol. 9, Issue 1, pp. 52-71

Susanna Barrows, Robin Room, and Jeffrey Verhey (eds.), The Social History of Alcohol: Drinking and Culture in Modern Society (Berkeley, Calif: Alcohol Research Group, 1987).

Susanna Barrows and Robin Room (eds.), Drinking: Behavior and Belief in Modern History University of California Press, (1991).

Jack S. Blocker, David M. Fahey, and Ian R. Tyrrell eds. Alcohol and Temperance in Modern History: An International Encyclopedia 2 Vol. (2003).

Blocker Jr, JS (Feb 2006). "Did prohibition really work? Alcohol prohibition as a public health innovation". Am J Public Health. 96 (2): 233-43. doi:10.2105/ajph.2005.065409. PMC . PMID 16380559.

Ernest Cherrington, ed., Standard Encyclopaedia of the Alcohol Problem 6 volumes (1925-1930), comprehensive international coverage to late 1920s.

Farness, Kate, "One Half So Precious", Dodd, Mead, and Company, (1995).

Jessie Forsyth, Collected Writings of Jessie Forsyth 1847-1937: The Good Templars and Temperance Reform on Three Continents ed by David M. Fahey (1988).

Gefou-Madianou. Alcohol, Gender and Culture (European Association of Social Anthropologists) (1992).

Healy, Gene (2008). "Drug Prohibition". In Hamowy, Ronald (ed.). The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE; Cato Institute. pp. 128-29. doi:10.4135/9781412965811.n81. ISBN 978-1-4129-6580-4. LCCN 2008009151. OCLC 750831024.

Dwight B. Heath, ed; International Handbook on Alcohol and Culture Greenwood Press, (1995).

Max Henius Modern liquor legislation and systems in Finland, Norway, Denmark and Sweden (1931).

Max Henius The error in the National prohibition act (1931).

Patricia Herlihy; The Alcoholic Empire: Vodka & Politics in Late Imperial Russia Oxford University Press, (2002).

Kobler, John. Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone. Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 1971.

Moore, Lucy. Anything Goes: A Biography of the Roaring Twenties. New York: Overlook Press, 1970.

Daniel Okrent. Last Call; The Rise and Fall of Prohibition. New York: Scribner, 2010.

Sulkunen, Irma. History of the Finnish Temperance Movement: Temperance As a Civic Religion (1991).

Tyrrell, Ian; Woman's World/Woman's Empire: The Woman's Christian Temperance Union in International Perspective, 1880-1930 U of North Carolina Press, (1991).

Mark Thornton, "Alcohol Prohibition was a Failure," Policy Analysis, Washington DC: Cato Institute, 1991.

Mark Thornton, The Economics of Prohibition, Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press, 1991.

White, Helene R. (ed.), Society, Culture and Drinking Patterns Reexamined, New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Center of Alcohol Studies, 1991.

White, Stephen.Russia Goes Dry: Alcohol, State and Society (1995).

Robert S. Walker and Samuel C. Patterson, OKlahoma Goes Wet: The Repeal of Prohibition (McGraw-Hill Book Co. Eagleton Institute Rutgers University 1960).

Samuel C. Patterson and Robert S. Walker, "The Political Attitudes of Oklahoma Newspapers Editors: The Prohibition Issue," The Southwestern Social Science Quarterly (1961).

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Prohibition is the act or practice of forbidding something by law; more particularly the term refers to the banning of the manufacture, storage (whether in barrels or in bottles), transportation, sale, possession, and consumption of alcoholic beverages. The word is also used to refer to a period of time during which such bans are enforced.

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The Dust Bowl was the name given to the drought-stricken southern plains region of the United States, which suffered severe dust storms during a drought in the 1930s. As high winds and choking dust swept the region from Texas to Nebraska, people and livestock were killed and crops failed across the entire region. The Dust Bowl intensified the crushing economic impacts of the Great Depression and drove many farming families on a desperate migration in search of work and better living conditions.
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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 nineteenth and early twentieth century settlers lived by the superstition "rain follows the plow." Emigrants, land speculators, politicians and even some scientists believed that homesteading and agriculture would permanently affect the climate of the semi-arid Great Plains region, making it more conducive to farming.

Manifest Destiny

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

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

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

When Was the Dust Bowl?

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

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

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

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

'Black Blizzards' Strike America

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

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

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

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

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

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

New Deal Programs

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

Okie Migration

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

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

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

Dust Bowl in Arts and Culture

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

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Liberty Enlightening the World (the Statue of Liberty) in New York Harbor was the first view of the United States for many immigrants during the mid-19th to the early 20th century. In this role, it signified new opportunities for becoming American, and evolved into a symbol of the American Dream.

The American Dream is the national ethos of the United States, that every person has the freedom and opportunity to succeed and attain a better life. The phrase was popularized by James Truslow Adams during the Great Depression in 1931, and has had different meanings over time. Originally, the emphasis was on democracy, liberty and equality, but more recently has been on achieving material wealth and upward mobility.

Adams defined it as "that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. [...] It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position".

The tenets of the American Dream originate from the Declaration of Independence, which states that " all men are created equal", and have an inalienable right to " life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness". The Preamble to the Constitution states similarly that the Constitution's purpose is to, in part, "secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity". It is said to be a set of ideals including representative democracy, rights, liberty, and equality, in which freedom is interpreted as the opportunity for individual prosperity and success, as well as the chance for upward social mobility for each according to ability and achievement through hard work in a capitalist society with many challenges but few formal barriers.[citation needed ]

Evidence indicates that in recent decades social mobility in the United States has declined, and income inequality has risen. Social mobility is lower in the US than in many European countries, especially the Nordic countries. Despite this, many Americans are likely to believe they have a better chance of social mobility than Europeans do. The US ranked 27th in the 2020 Global Social Mobility Index. A 2020 poll found 54% of American adults thought the American Dream was attainable for them, while 28% thought it was not. Black and Asian Americans, and younger generations were less likely to believe this than whites, Hispanics, native Americans and older generations. Women are more skeptical of achieving the American Dream than men are.

Belief in the American Dream is often inversely associated with rates of national disillusionment. Some critics have said that the dominant culture in America focuses on materialism and consumerism, or puts blame on the individual for failing to achieve success. Others have said that the labor movement is significant for delivering on the American Dream and building the middle class, yet in 2024 only 10% of American workers were members of a labor union, down from 20% in 1983. The American Dream has also been said to be tied to American exceptionalism, and does not acknowledge the hardships many Americans have faced in regards to American slavery, Native American genocide, Jim Crow laws and their legacies, as well as other examples of discriminatory violence.

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The meaning of the American Dream has changed over the course of history, and includes both personal components such as home ownership and upward mobility as well as a global vision for cultural hegemony and diplomacy.

18th century

Historically, the Dream originated in colonial mystique regarding frontier life. As John Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore, the colonial Governor of Virginia, noted in 1774, the Americans "for ever imagine the Lands further off are still better than those upon which they are already settled". He added that, "if they attained Paradise, they would move on if they heard of a better place farther west". The idea of the American Dream is ever evolving and changing. When the Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4, 1776, the founding fathers believed that this would ratify the role of government and society in the United States. Jim Cullen notability claims:

Ever since, the Declaration of Independence has functioned as the banner of the American Dream, one repeatedly waved by figures that included women's rights activists, populists, homosexuals, and anyone who has ever believed that happiness can not only be pursued, but attained. The U.S. Constitution, which marked the other bookend of the nation's creation, lacks the mythic resonances of the Declaration, though it takes little reflection to see that it is the backdrop, if not the foundation, for all American Dreams. Whatever their disagreements about its scope or character, most Americans would agree that their national government is legitimate insofar as it permits a level playing field of dreams. Many of us have doubts that the government does serve this function; few have doubts that it should.

19th century

Many well-educated Germans who fled the failed 1848 revolution found the United States more politically free than their homeland, which they believed to be a hierarchical and aristocratic society that determined the ceiling for their aspirations. One of them said:

The German emigrant comes into a country free from the despotism, privileged orders and monopolies, intolerable taxes, and constraints in matters of belief and conscience. Everyone can travel and settle wherever he pleases. No passport is demanded, no police mingles in his affairs or hinders his movements ... Fidelity and merit are the only sources of honor here. The rich stand on the same footing as the poor; the scholar is not a mug above the most humble mechanics; no German ought to be ashamed to pursue any occupation ... [In America] wealth and possession of real estate confer not the least political right on its owner above what the poorest citizen has. Nor are there nobility, privileged orders, or standing armies to weaken the physical and moral power of the people, nor are there swarms of public functionaries to devour in idleness credit for. Above all, there are no princes and corrupt courts representing the so-called divine 'right of birth'. In such a country the talents, energy and perseverance of a person ... have far greater opportunity to display than in monarchies.

The discovery of gold in California in 1849 brought in a hundred thousand men looking for their fortune overnight-and a few did find it. Thus was born the California Dream of instant success. Historian H. W. Brands noted that in the years after the Gold Rush, the California Dream spread across the nation:

The old American Dream ... was the dream of the Puritans, of Benjamin Franklin's "Poor Richard"... of men and women content to accumulate their modest fortunes a little at a time, year by year by year. The new dream was the dream of instant wealth, won in a twinkling by audacity and good luck. [This] golden dream ... became a prominent part of the American psyche only after Sutter's Mill.

During the 18th century provided Americans with new sources of wealth and looking for new ways of travel. When looking at immigration in history, it is important to consider the different experiences of gender as much as race. There are often times tensions between economic and political agendas. By studying the global tensions and events outside of the United States, helps to form a broader viewpoint and perspective of the past. After 1776, the United States became a part of the global connections improving marketing opportunities. This paragraph highlights the complex relationships between global integration within American history:

These complicated transnational networks themselves are not the only story. Along with global integration went attempts to assert national distinctiveness amid growing global competition. Americans conceived of and responded to these pressures by striving to create national economic independence because they wanted to maintain political and social independence. Thus there was tension between the economic imperatives of global integration, and national political debates and economic agendas - such as the enhancement of national security through a strong industrial and financial base.

Historian Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893 advanced the frontier thesis, under which American democracy and the American Dream were formed by the American frontier. He stressed the process-the moving frontier line-and the impact it had on pioneers going through the process. He also stressed results; especially that American democracy was the primary result, along with egalitarianism, a lack of interest in high culture, and violence. "American democracy was born of no theorist's dream; it was not carried in the Susan Constant to Virginia, nor in the Mayflower to Plymouth. It came out of the American forest, and it gained new strength each time it touched a new frontier," said Turner.

In Turner's thesis, the American frontier established liberty by releasing Americans from European mindsets and eroding old, dysfunctional customs. The frontier had no need for standing armies, established churches, aristocrats or nobles, nor for landed gentry who controlled most of the land and charged heavy rents. Frontier land was free for the taking. Turner first announced his thesis in a paper entitled " The Significance of the Frontier in American History", delivered to the American Historical Association in 1893 in Chicago. He won wide acclaim among historians and intellectuals. Turner elaborated on the theme in his advanced history lectures and in a series of essays published over the next 25 years, published along with his initial paper as The Frontier in American History. Turner's emphasis on the importance of the frontier in shaping American character influenced the interpretation found in thousands of scholarly histories. By the time Turner died in 1932, 60% of the leading history departments in the U.S. were teaching courses in frontier history along Turnerian lines.

Americanization of California (1932) by Dean Cornwell

20th century

Freelance writer James Truslow Adams popularized the phrase "American Dream" in his 1931 book Epic of America:

But there has been also the American dream, that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position... The American dream, that has lured tens of millions of all nations to our shores in the past century has not been a dream of merely material plenty, though that has doubtlessly counted heavily. It has been much more than that. It has been a dream of being able to grow to fullest development as man and woman, unhampered by the barriers which had slowly been erected in the older civilizations, unrepressed by social orders which had developed for the benefit of classes rather than for the simple human being of any and every class.

Adams contended that extreme wealth inequality was among the worst enemies of the American Dream, and said that:

So long also as we are ourselves content with a mere extension of the material basis of existence, with the multiplying of our material possessions, it is absurd to think that the men who can utilize that public attitude for the gaining of infinite wealth and power for themselves will abandon both to become spiritual leaders of a democracy that despises spiritual things.

He also said that the American institution that best exemplified the American dream was the Library of Congress; he contrasted it with European libraries of the time, which restricted access to many of their works, and argued that the Library, as an institution funded by and meant to uphold democracy, was an example of democratic government's ability to uplift and equalize the people that it ruled over and was ruled by in order to "save itself" from a takeover by the elite. The Library also offered an opportunity for the whole nation to come together in thoughtful pursuit of a common good, which Adams claimed needed to be "carried out in all departments of our national life" in order to make the American Dream a reality.

Martin Luther King Jr., in his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" (1963), rooted the civil rights movement in the African-American quest for the American Dream:

We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands ... when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters they were in reality standing up for what is best in the American dream and for the most sacred values in our Judeo-Christian heritage, thereby bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the Founding Fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

Literature

The concept of the American Dream has been used in popular discourse, and scholars have traced its use in American literature ranging from the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, to Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), Willa Cather's , F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925), Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy (1925) and Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon (1977). Other writers who used the American Dream theme include Hunter S. Thompson, Edward Albee, John Steinbeck, Langston Hughes, and Giannina Braschi.

In 2006, Dr. Guiyou Huang from St. Thomas University in Florida wrote a paper regarding the American Dream as a recurring theme in the fiction of Asian Americans.

American ideals

Many American authors added American ideals to their work as a theme or other reoccurring idea, to get their point across. There are many ideals that appear in American literature such as that all people are equal, the United States is the land of opportunity, independence is valued, the American Dream is attainable, and everyone can succeed with hard work and determination. John Winthrop also wrote about this term called American exceptionalism. This ideology refers to the idea that Americans are, as a nation, elect.

European governments, worried that their best young people would leave for America, distributed posters like this to frighten them (this 1869 Swedish anti-emigration poster contrasts Per Svensson's dream of the American idyll (left) and the reality of his life in the wilderness (right), where he is menaced by a mountain lion, a big snake and wild Indians who are scalping and disembowelling someone).[41]

The American Dream has been credited with helping to build a cohesive American experience, but has also been blamed for inflated expectations. Some commentators have noted that despite deep-seated belief in the egalitarian American Dream, the modern American wealth structure still perpetuates racial and class inequalities between generations. One sociologist notes that advantage and disadvantage are not always connected to individual successes or failures, but often to prior position in a social group.

Since the 1920s, numerous authors, such as Sinclair Lewis in his 1922 novel , and F. Scott Fitzgerald, in his 1925 classic, The Great Gatsby, satirized or ridiculed materialism in the chase for the American dream. For example, Jay Gatsby's death mirrors the American Dream's demise, reflecting the pessimism of modern-day Americans. The American Dream is a main theme in the book by John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men. The two friends George and Lennie dream of their own piece of land with a ranch, so they can "live off the fatta the lan'" and just enjoy a better life. The book later shows that not everyone can achieve the American Dream, although it is possible to achieve for a few. A lot of people follow the American Dream to achieve a greater chance of becoming rich. Some posit that the ease of achieving the American Dream changes with technological advances, availability of infrastructure and information, government regulations, state of the economy, and with the evolving cultural values of American demographics.

In 1949, Arthur Miller wrote Death of a Salesman, in which the American Dream is a fruitless pursuit. Similarly, in 1971 Hunter S. Thompson depicted in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey Into the Heart of the American Dream a dark psychedelic reflection of the concept-successfully illustrated only in wasted pop-culture excess.

The novel Requiem for a Dream by Hubert Selby Jr. is an exploration of the pursuit of American success as it turns delirious and lethal, told through the ensuing tailspin of its main characters. George Carlin famously wrote the joke "it's called the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it". Carlin pointed to "the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions" as having a greater influence than an individual's choice. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and leftist activist Chris Hedges echos this sentiment in his 2012 book Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt:

The vaunted American dream, the idea that life will get better, that progress is inevitable if we obey the rules and work hard, that material prosperity is assured, has been replaced by a hard and bitter truth. The American dream, we now know, is a lie. We will all be sacrificed. The virus of corporate abuse-the perverted belief that only corporate profit matters-has spread to outsource our jobs, cut the budgets of our schools, close our libraries, and plague our communities with foreclosures and unemployment.

The American Dream, and the sometimes dark response to it, has been a long-standing theme in American film. Many counterculture films of the 1960s and 1970s ridiculed the traditional quest for the American Dream. For example, (1969), directed by Dennis Hopper, shows the characters making a pilgrimage in search of "the true America" in terms of the hippie movement, drug use, and communal lifestyles.

Political leaders

Scholars have explored the American Dream theme in the careers of numerous political leaders, including Henry Kissinger, Hillary Clinton, Benjamin Franklin, and Abraham Lincoln. The theme has been used for many local leaders as well, such as José Antonio Navarro, the Tejano leader (1795-1871), who served in the legislatures of Coahuila y Texas, the Republic of Texas, and the State of Texas.

In 2006 U.S. Senator Barack Obama wrote a memoir, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream. It was this interpretation of the American Dream for a young black man that helped establish his statewide and national reputations. The exact meaning of the Dream became a minor partisan political issue in the 2008 and 2012 elections.

Political conflicts, to some degree, have been ameliorated by the shared values of all parties in the expectation that the American Dream will resolve many difficulties and conflicts.

Public opinion

The ethos today implies an opportunity for Americans to achieve prosperity through hard work. According to the Dream, this includes the opportunity for one's children to grow up and receive a good education and career without artificial barriers. It is the opportunity to make individual choices without the prior restrictions that limited people according to their class, caste, religion, race, or ethnicity. Immigrants to the United States sponsored ethnic newspapers in their own language; the editors typically promoted the American Dream. Lawrence Samuel argues:

For many in both the working class and the middle class, upward mobility has served as the heart and soul of the American Dream, the prospect of "betterment" and to "improve one's lot" for oneself and one's children much of what this country is all about. "Work hard, save a little, send the kids to college so they can do better than you did, and retire happily to a warmer climate" has been the script we have all been handed.

A key element of the American Dream is promoting opportunity for one's children, Johnson interviewing parents says, "This was one of the most salient features of the interview data: parents-regardless of background-relied heavily on the American Dream to understand the possibilities for children, especially their own children". Rank et al. argue, "The hopes and optimism that Americans possess pertain not only to their own lives, but to their children's lives as well. A fundamental aspect of the American Dream has always been the expectation that the next generation should do better than the previous generation."

"A lot of Americans think the U.S. has more social mobility than other western industrialized countries. This [study using medians instead of averages] makes it abundantly clear that we have less. Your circumstances at birth-specifically, what your parents do for a living-are an even bigger factor in how far you get in life than we had previously realized. Generations of Americans considered the United States to be a land of opportunity. This research raises some sobering questions about that image."

Michael Hout, Professor of Sociology at New York University, 2018
Hanson and Zogby (2010) report on numerous public opinion polls that since the 1980s have explored the meaning of the concept for Americans, and their expectations for its future. In these polls, a majority of Americans consistently reported that for their family, the American Dream is more about spiritual happiness than material goods. Majorities state that working hard is the most important element for getting ahead. However, an increasing minority stated that hard work and determination does not guarantee success.

In 2010, most Americans predicted that achieving the Dream with fair means would become increasingly difficult for future generations. They were increasingly pessimistic about the opportunity for the working class to get ahead; on the other hand, they were increasingly optimistic about the opportunities available to poor people and to new immigrants. Furthermore, most supported programs to make special efforts to help minorities get ahead.

In a 2013 poll by YouGov, 41% of responders said it is impossible for most to achieve the American Dream, while 38% said it is still possible. Most Americans perceive a college education as the ticket to the American Dream. Some recent[when? ] observers warn that soaring student loan debt crisis and shortages of good jobs may undermine this ticket. The point was illustrated in The Fallen American Dream, a documentary film that details the concept of the American Dream from its historical origins to its current perception. A 2020 poll found 54% of American adults thought the American Dream was attainable for them, 28% believed it was not, and 9% rejected the idea of the American Dream entirely. Younger generations were less likely to believe this than their older counterparts, and black and Asian Americans less likely than whites, Hispanics and native Americans.

Wealth inequality in the United States increased from 1989 to 2013.[69]

Research published in 2013 shows that the U.S. provides, alongside the United Kingdom and Spain, the least economic mobility of any of 13 rich democratic countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Prior research suggested that the United States shows roughly average levels of occupational upward mobility and shows lower rates of income mobility than comparable societies.

Jo Blanden et al. report, "the idea of the U.S. as 'the land of opportunity' persists; and clearly seems misplaced." According to these studies, "by international standards, the United States has an unusually low level of intergenerational mobility: our parents' income is highly predictive of our incomes as adults. Intergenerational mobility in the United States is lower than in France, Germany, Sweden, Canada, Finland, Norway and Denmark. Research in 2006 found that among high-income countries for which comparable estimates are available, only the United Kingdom had a lower rate of mobility than the United States." Economist Isabel Sawhill concluded that "this challenges the notion of America as the land of opportunity".

Several public figures and commentators, from David Frum to Richard G. Wilkinson, have said that the American Dream is better realized in Denmark, which is ranked as having the highest social mobility in the OECD. In the U.S., 50% of a father's income position is inherited by his son. In contrast, the amount in Norway or Canada is less than 20%. Moreover, in the U.S. 8% of children raised in the bottom 20% of the climbed to the top 20% as adult, while the figure in Denmark is nearly double at 15%. In 2015, economist Joseph Stiglitz stated, "Maybe we should be calling the American Dream the Scandinavian Dream."

A 2023 paper written by academics at Bocconi University, the Rockwool Foundation, and Stockholm University found that "Intergenerational poverty in the U.S. is four times stronger than in Denmark and Germany, and twice as strong as in Australia and the UK," and that an American child who grows up in poverty has "a 43 percentage point higher mean poverty exposure during early adulthood (relative to an adult with no child poverty exposure)," the highest of the five countries and exceeding the next highest by over 20 percentage points. The researchers found that "the persistence of poverty is strongly connected to tax rates and what they call transfer insurance effects, which can be considered as akin to a social safety net," and that the "U.S. is the archetype of a liberal and residualist welfare state, featuring stratified access to higher education and employment, strong earnings returns to higher education, and a comparatively weak welfare state to insure against risks in adulthood," as well as that "exposure to childhood poverty is particularly severe in the US."

A 2017 study stated that the UK, Canada, and Denmark all offered a greater chance of social mobility. Black families were stated to be disadvantaged relative to white families when it comes to both upward mobility from the bottom and downward mobility from the top according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, with social mobility nationwide appearing to have declined since 1980. Social mobility can also vary widely geographically according to a 2014 paper, with the Southeast and lower East North Central states ranking near the bottom.

In the United States, home ownership is sometimes used as a proxy for achieving the promised prosperity; home ownership has been a status symbol separating the middle classes from the poor.

Sometimes the American Dream is identified with success in sports or how working class immigrants seek to join the American way of life.

According to a 2020 American Journal of Political Science study, Americans become less likely to believe in the attainability of the American dream as income inequality increases. A 2022 study in the same journal found that exposure to "rags-to-riches" narratives in entertainment make Americans more likely to believe in upward mobility.

According to a 2023 private opinion survey of American people by a Boston-based organization, Populace, the American Dream has shifted its narrative from fame and wealth to personal factors such as secure retirement, financial independence, parenthood and finding fulfillment in their work.

Four American Dreams

Ownby (1999) identifies four American Dreams that the new consumer culture of the early 20th century addressed:

The "Dream of Abundance", offering a cornucopia of material goods to all Americans, making them proud to be the richest society on earth.

The "Dream of a Democracy of Goods", whereby everyone had access to the same products regardless of race, gender, ethnicity, or class, thereby challenging the aristocratic norms of the rest of the world where only the rich or well-connected were granted access to luxury.

The "Dream of Freedom of Choice", with its ever-expanding variety of good allowed people to fashion their own particular lifestyle.

The "Dream of Novelty", in which ever-changing fashions, new models, and unexpected new products broadened the consumer experience in terms of purchasing skills and awareness of the market, and challenged the conservatism of traditional society, culture, and politics.

Ownby acknowledges that the American Dreams of the new consumer culture radiated out from the major cities, but notes that they quickly penetrated the most rural and most isolated areas, such as rural Mississippi. With the arrival of affordable automobiles such as the Ford Model T in the 1910s, consumers in rural America were no longer forced to only buy from local general stores with their limited merchandise and high prices, and could instead visit cheaper, better-stocked shops in towns and cities. Ownby demonstrates that poor black Mississippians shared in the new consumer culture, and it motivated the more ambitious to move to Memphis or Chicago.

Other parts of the world

The aspirations of the "American Dream" in the broad sense of upward mobility have been systematically spread to other nations since the 1890s as American missionaries and businessmen consciously sought to spread the Dream, says Rosenberg. Looking at American business, religious missionaries, philanthropies, Hollywood, labor unions and U.S. government agencies, she says they saw their mission not in catering to foreign elites but instead reaching the world's masses in a democratic fashion: "They linked mass production, mass marketing, and technological improvement to an enlightened democratic spirit ... In the emerging litany of the American dream what historian Daniel Boorstin later termed a 'democracy of things' would disprove both Malthus's predictions of scarcity and Marx's of class conflict." It was, she says "a vision of global social progress". Rosenberg calls the overseas version of the American Dream "liberal-developmentalism" and identified five critical components:

(1) belief that other nations could and should replicate America's own developmental experience; (2) faith in private free enterprise; (3) support for free or open access for trade and investment; (4) promotion of free flow of information and culture; and (5) growing acceptance of [U.S.] governmental activity to protect private enterprise and to stimulate and regulate American participation in international economic and cultural exchange.

Knights and McCabe argued American management gurus have taken the lead in exporting the ideas: "By the latter half of the twentieth century they were truly global and through them the American Dream continues to be transmitted, repackaged and sold by an infantry of consultants and academics backed up by an artillery of books and videos".

Germany and Italy

In West Germany after World War II, says Reiner Pommerin, "the most intense motive was the longing for a better life, more or less identical with the American dream, which also became a German dream". Cassamagnaghi argues that to women in Italy after 1945, films and magazine stories about American life offered an American Dream. New York City especially represented a sort of utopia where every sort of dream and desire could become true. Italian women saw a model for their own emancipation from second class status in their patriarchal society.

The American dream regarding home ownership had little resonance before the 1980s. In the 1980s, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher worked to create a similar dream, by selling public-housing units to their tenants. Her Conservative Party called for more home ownership: "HOMES OF OUR OWN: To most people ownership means first and foremost a home of their own ... We should like in time to improve on existing legislation with a realistic grants scheme to assist first-time buyers of cheaper homes." Guest calls this Thatcher's approach to the American Dream. Knights and McCabe argue that "a reflection and reinforcement of the American Dream has been the emphasis on individualism as extolled by Margaret Thatcher and epitomized by the 'enterprise' culture."

Since the fall of communism in the Soviet Union in 1991, the American Dream has fascinated Russians. The first post-Communist leader Boris Yeltsin embraced the "American way" and teamed up with Harvard University free market economists Jeffrey Sachs and Robert Allison to give Russia economic shock therapy in the 1990s. The newly independent Russian media idealized America and endorsed shock therapy for the economy. In 2008 Russian President Dmitry Medvedev lamented the fact that 77% of Russia's 142 million people live "cooped up" in apartment buildings. In 2010 his administration announced a plan for widespread home ownership: "Call it the Russian Dream", said Alexander Braverman, the Director of the Federal Fund for the Promotion of Housing Construction Development. In 2010, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, worried about his nation's very low birth rate, said he hoped home ownership would inspire Russians "to have more babies".

Shanghai in 2019

The Chinese Dream describes a set of ideals in the People's Republic of China. It is used by journalists, government officials and activists to describe the aspiration of individual self-improvement in Chinese society. Although the phrase has been used previously by Western journalists and scholars, a translation of a New York Times article written by the American journalist Thomas Friedman, "China Needs Its Own Dream", has been credited with popularizing the concept in China. He attributes the term to Peggy Liu and the environmental NGO JUCCCE's China Dream project, which defines the Chinese Dream as sustainable development. In 2013, China's new paramount leader Xi Jinping began promoting the phrase as a slogan, leading to its widespread use in the Chinese media.

The concept of the Chinese Dream is very similar to the idea of the American Dream. It stresses entrepreneurship and glorifies a generation of self-made men and women in post- reform China, such as rural immigrants who moved to the urban centers and improved their living standards and social life. The Chinese Dream can be interpreted as the collective consciousness of Chinese people during the era of social transformation and economic progress. The idea was put forward by Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping on November 29, 2012. The government hoped to revitalize China, while promoting innovation and technology to boost the international prestige of China. In this light, the Chinese Dream, like the American Dream, is a nationalistic concept as well, providing a vision of a sort of Chinese exceptionalism.

According to Ellen Brown, writing in 2019, over 90% of Chinese families own their own homes, giving the country one of the highest rates of home ownership in the world.

References

Further reading

Adams, James Truslow. (1931). The Epic of America (Little, Brown, and Co. 1931)

Brueggemann, John. Rich, Free, and Miserable: The Failure of Success in America (Rowman & Littlefield; 2010) 233 pages; links discontent among middle-class Americans to the extension of market thinking into every aspect of life.

Chomsky, Noam. Requiem for the American Dream: The 10 Principles of Concentration of Wealth & Power. Seven Stories Press, 2017. ISBN 978-1609807368

Chua, Chen Lok. "Two Chinese Versions of the American Dream: The Golden Mountain in Lin Yutang and Maxine Hong Kingston", MELUS Vol. 8, No. 4, The Ethnic American Dream (Winter, 1981), pp. 61-70 in JSTOR

Churchwell, Sarah. Behold, America: The Entangled History of 'America First' and 'the American Dream' (2018). 368 pp. online review

Cullen, Jim. The American dream: a short history of an idea that shaped a nation, Oxford University Press US, 2004. ISBN 0195173252

Hanson, Sandra L., and John Zogby, "The Polls - Trends", Public Opinion Quarterly, Sept 2010, Vol. 74, Issue 3, pp. 570-584

Hanson, Sandra L. and John Kenneth White, ed. The American Dream in the 21st Century (Temple University Press; 2011); 168 pages; essays by sociologists and other scholars how on the American Dream relates to politics, religion, race, gender, and generation.

Hopper, Kenneth, and William Hopper. The Puritan Gift: Reclaiming the American Dream Amidst Global Financial Chaos (2009), argues the Dream was devised by British entrepreneurs who build the American economy

Johnson, Heather Beth. The American dream and the power of wealth: choosing schools and inheriting inequality in the land of opportunity, CRC Press, 2006. ISBN 0415952395

Levinson, Julie. The American Success Myth on Film (Palgrave Macmillan; 2012) 220 pages

Lieu, Nhi T. The American Dream in Vietnamese (U. of Minnesota Press, 2011) 186 pages ISBN 978-0816665709

Ownby, Ted. American Dreams in Mississippi: Consumers, Poverty, and Culture 1830-1998 (University of North Carolina Press, 1999)

Samuel, Lawrence R. The American Dream: A Cultural History (Syracuse University Press; 2012) 241 pages; identifies six distinct eras since the phrase was coined in 1931.

External links

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The American Dream is the national ethos of the United States, that every person has the freedom and opportunity to succeed and attain a better life. The phrase was popularized by James Truslow Adams during the Great Depression in 1931, and has had different meanings over time.

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Clyde Carr

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During the Great Depression, which began in 1929 and lasted approximately a decade, shantytowns appeared across the U.S. as unemployed people were evicted from their homes. As the Depression worsened in the 1930s, causing severe hardships for millions of Americans, many looked to the federal government for assistance. When the government failed to provide relief, President Herbert Hoover (1874-1964) was blamed for the intolerable economic and social conditions, and the shantytowns that cropped up across the nation, primarily on the outskirts of major cities, became known as Hoovervilles. The highly unpopular Hoover, a Republican, was defeated in the 1932 presidential election by Democrat Franklin Roosevelt (1882-1945), whose New Deal recovery programs eventually helped lift the U.S. out of the Depression. In the early 1940s, most remaining Hoovervilles were torn down.

The Great Depression Sets In

The Great Depression was the most severe and enduring economic collapse of the 20th century, and included abrupt declines in the supply and demand of goods and services along with a meteoric rise in unemployment. 1933 is generally regarded as the worst year of the Depression: One-quarter of America's workers-more than 15 million people-was out of work.

Did you know? As America's housing and economic crisis worsened through 2009, homelessness was on the rise. Encampments and shantytowns often referred to as tent cities--with similarities to Hoovervilles--began appearing in parts of California, Arizona, Tennessee, Florida, Washington and other states.

Multiple factors led to the Great Depression, including the U.S. stock market crash in October 1929 and the widespread failure of the American banking system, both of which helped destroy society's confidence in the nation's economy. Additionally, although the 1920s, also known as the Roaring Twenties, had been a decade of prosperity, income levels varied widely and numerous Americans lived beyond their means. Credit was extended to many so that they could enjoy the new inventions of the day, such as washing machines, refrigerators and automobiles.

As the optimism of the 1920s gave way to fear and desperation, Americans looked to the federal government for relief. However, the country's 31st president, Herbert Hoover, who took office in March 1929, believed that self-reliance and self-help, not government intervention, were the best means to meet citizens' needs. In his estimation, prosperity would return if people would simply help one another. And although private philanthropy increased during the early 1930s, the amounts given were not enough to make a significant impact. Many Americans in need believed the resolution to their problems lay in government assistance, but Hoover resisted such a response throughout his presidency.

The Rise of Hoovervilles

As the Depression worsened and millions of urban and rural families lost their jobs and depleted their savings, they also lost their homes. Desperate for shelter, homeless citizens built shantytowns in and around cities across the nation. These camps came to be called Hoovervilles, after the president. Democratic National Committee publicity director and longtime newspaper reporter Charles Michelson (1868-1948) is credited with coining the term, which first appeared in print in 1930.

Hooverville shanties were constructed of cardboard, tar paper, glass, lumber, tin and whatever other materials people could salvage. Unemployed masons used cast-off stone and bricks and in some cases built structures that stood 20 feet high. Most shanties, however, were distinctly less glamorous: Cardboard-box homes did not last long, and most dwellings were in a constant state of being rebuilt. Some homes were not buildings at all, but deep holes dug in the ground with makeshift roofs laid over them to keep out inclement weather. Some of the homeless found shelter inside empty conduits and water mains.

Life in a Hooverville

No two Hoovervilles were quite alike, and the camps varied in population and size. Some were as small as a few hundred people while others, in bigger metropolitan areas such as Washington, D.C., and New York City, boasted thousands of inhabitants. St. Louis, Missouri, was home to one of the country's largest and longest-standing Hoovervilles.

Whenever possible, Hoovervilles were built near rivers for the convenience of a water source. For example, in New York City, encampments sprang up along the Hudson and East rivers. Some Hoovervilles were dotted with vegetable gardens, and some individual shacks contained furniture a family had managed to carry away upon eviction from their former home. However, Hoovervilles were typically grim and unsanitary. They posed health risks to their inhabitants as well as to those living nearby, but there was little that local governments or health agencies could do. Hooverville residents had nowhere else to go, and public sympathy, for the most part, was with them. Even when Hoovervilles were raided by order of parks departments or other authorities, the men who carried out the raids often expressed regret and guilt for their actions. More often than not, Hoovervilles were tolerated.

Most Hoovervilles operated in an informal, unorganized way, but the bigger ones would sometimes put forward spokespersons to serve as a liaison between the camp and the larger community. St. Louis' Hooverville, built in 1930, had its own unofficial mayor, churches and social institutions. This Hooverville thrived because it was funded by private donations. It maintained itself as a free-standing community until 1936, when it was razed.

Although a common factor among Hooverville residents was unemployment, inhabitants took any work that became available, often laboring at such backbreaking, sporadic jobs as fruit picking or packing. Writer John Steinbeck (1902-68) featured a family who lived in a California Hooverville and sought farm work in his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "The Grapes of Wrath," which was first published in 1939.

Hoover Out, Roosevelt In

In addition to the term "Hooverville," President Hoover's name was used derisively in other ways during the Great Depression. For example, newspapers used to shield the homeless from the cold were called "Hoover blankets," while empty pants pockets pulled inside out-demonstrating no coins in one's pockets-were "Hoover flags." When soles wore out of shoes, the cardboard used to replace them was dubbed "Hoover leather," and cars pulled by horses because gas was an unaffordable luxury were called "Hoover wagons."

Tensions between destitute citizens and the Hoover administration climaxed in the spring of 1932 when thousands of World War I veterans and their families and friends set up a Hooverville on the banks of the Anacostia River in Washington, D.C. In June, many of them marched to the Capitol to request early payment of the government bonuses they had been promised-money that would have alleviated the financial problems of many families. The government refused to pay, citing Depression-era budgetary restrictions. When most of the veterans refused to leave their shacks, Hoover sent in U.S. Army Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur (1880-1964) to evict the so-called Bonus Army. MacArthur's troops set fire to the Hooverville and drove the group from the city with bayonets and tear gas. Hoover later claimed that MacArthur had used excessive force, but his words meant little to most of those affected.

Hoover also received criticism for signing, in June 1930, the controversial Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act, which imposed a high tariff on foreign goods in an effort to prevent them from competing with U.S.-made products on the domestic market. However, some countries retaliated by raising their tariffs, and international trade was hampered. Between 1929 and 1932, the value of world trade declined by more than half.

By 1932, Hoover was so unpopular that he had no realistic hope of being re-elected, and Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945) of New York won that year's presidential election in November by a landslide. Roosevelt's recovery program known as the New Deal eventually reduced unemployment, regulated banking and helped turn the ailing economy around with public works projects and other economic programs. By the early 1940s, many Hoovervilles had been torn down.

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During the Great Depression, which began in 1929 and lasted approximately a decade, shantytowns appeared across the U.S. as unemployed people were evicted from their homes. As the Depression worsened in the 1930s, causing severe hardships for millions of Americans, many looked to the federal government for assistance.

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Logan Jipson

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Table of Contents

1. What Caused the 1929 Stock Market Crash?

2. Black Tuesday

3. Effects of the 1929 Stock Market Crash: The Great Depression

The Stock Market Crash of 1929 occurred on October 29, 1929, when Wall Street investors traded some 16 million shares on the New York Stock Exchange in a single day. Billions of dollars were lost, wiping out thousands of investors. In the aftermath of that event, sometimes called "Black Tuesday," America and the rest of the industrialized world spiraled downward into the Great Depression, the deepest and longest-lasting economic downturn in the history of the Western industrialized world up to that time.

What Caused the 1929 Stock Market Crash?

Stock Market Crash of 1929

During the 1920s, the U.S. stock market underwent rapid expansion, reaching its peak in August 1929 after a period of wild speculation in the Roaring Twenties. By then, production had already declined and unemployment had risen, leaving stocks in great excess of their real value.

Among the other causes of the stock market crash of 1929 were low wages, the proliferation of debt, a struggling agricultural sector and an excess of large bank loans that could not be liquidated.

Did you know? The New York Stock Exchange was founded in 1817, although its origins date back to 1792 when a group of stockbrokers and merchants signed an agreement under a buttonwood tree on Wall Street.

Black Tuesday

Stock prices began to decline in September and early October 1929, and on October 18 a big drop in stock prices began. Panic soon set in, and on October 24, Black Thursday, a record 12,894,650 shares were traded. Investment companies and leading bankers attempted to stabilize the market by buying up great blocks of stock, producing a moderate rally on Friday.

On Monday, however, the storm broke anew, and the market went into free fall. Black Monday was followed by Black Tuesday-October 29, 1929-during which stock prices collapsed completely and 16,410,030 shares were traded on the New York Stock Exchange in a single day. Billions of dollars were lost, wiping out thousands of investors, and stock tickers ran hours behind because the machinery could not handle the tremendous volume of trading.

Effects of the 1929 Stock Market Crash: The Great Depression

After October 29, 1929, stock prices had nowhere to go but up, so there was considerable recovery during succeeding weeks. Overall, however, prices continued to drop as the United States slumped into the Great Depression, and by 1932 stocks were worth only about 20 percent of their value in the summer of 1929.

The stock market crash of 1929 was not the sole cause of the Great Depression, but it did act to accelerate the global economic collapse which it was also a symptom. Stock prices continued to drop through 1932 when the Dow Jones Industrial Average-a widely-used benchmark for blue-chip stocks in the United States-closed at 41.22, its lowest value of the 20th century, 89 percent below its peak.

By 1933, nearly half of America's banks had failed, and unemployment was approaching 15 million people or 30 percent of the U.S. workforce. The Dow Jones Industrial Average would not return to its pre-1929 heights until November of 1954, about 25 years later.

African Americans were particularly hard hit, as they were the " last hired, first fired." Women during the Great Depression fared slightly better, as traditionally female jobs of the era like teaching and nursing were more insulated than those dependent on fluctuating markets.

Life for the average family during the Great Depression was difficult. Storms and a severe drought in the Southern Plains ruined crops, causing the area to be nicknamed the Dust Bowl. "Okies," as fleeing residents were called, moved to big cities looking for work.

Did you know? The Great Depression helped bring an end to Prohibition. Politicians believed legalizing the consumption of alcohol could help create jobs and stimulate the economy.

The relief and reform measures in the New Deal programs enacted by the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt helped lessen the worst effects of the Great Depression; however, the U.S. economy would not fully turn around until after 1939, when World War II revitalized American industry.

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Stock Market Crash: 1929 & Black Tuesday | HISTORY

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The Stock Market Crash of 1929 ushered in the Great Depression, as some 16 million shares were traded on Black Tuesday, Oct. 29, 1929, wiping out many investors.

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Clyde Carr

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Jameson Peters

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Jessica Johnson

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Esther susen

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Jessica Johnson

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Synopsis

During the Great Depression, Dorothea Lange photographed the unemployed men who wandered the streets. Her photographs of migrant workers were often presented with captions featuring the words of the workers themselves. Lange's first exhibition, held in 1934, established her reputation as a skilled documentary photographer. In 1940, she received the Guggenheim Fellowship.

Early Years

One of the preeminent and pioneering documentary photographers of the 20th century, Dorothea Lange was born Dorothea Nutzhorn on May 26, 1895, in Hoboken, New Jersey. Her father, Heinrich Nutzhorn, was a lawyer, and her mother, Johanna, stayed at home to raise Dorothea and her brother, Martin.

When she was 7, Dorothea contracted polio, which left her right leg and foot noticeably weakened. Later, however, she'd feel almost appreciative of the effects the illness had on her life. "[It] was the most important thing that happened to me, and formed me, guided me, instructed me, helped me and humiliated me," she said.

Just before Dorothea reached her teen years, her parents divorced. Dorothea grew to blame the separation on her father and eventually dropped his surname and took her mother's maiden name, Lange, as her own.

Art and literature were big parts of Lange's upbringing. Her parents were both strong advocates for her education, and exposure to creative works filled her childhood.

Following high school, she attended the New York Training School for Teachers in 1913. Lange, who'd never shown much interest in academics, decided to pursue photography as a profession after a stint working in a NYC photo studio. She went on to study the art form at Columbia University, and then, over the next several years, cut her teeth as an apprentice, working for several different photographers, including Arnold Genthe, a leading portrait photographer. In 1917, she also studied with Clarence Hudson White at his prestigious school of photography.

By 1918, Lange was living in San Francisco and soon running a successful portrait studio. With her husband, muralist Maynard Dixon, she had two sons and settled into the comfortable middle-class life she'd known as a child.

Change of Focus

Lange's first real taste of documentary photography came in the 1920s when she traveled around the Southwest with Dixon, mostly photographing Native Americans. With the onslaught of the Great Depression in the 1930s, she trained her camera on what she started to see in her own San Francisco neighborhoods: labor strikes and breadlines.

In the early 1930s, Lange, mired in an unhappy marriage, met Paul Taylor, a university professor and labor economist. Their attraction was immediate, and by 1935, both had left their respective spouses to be with each other.

Over the next five years, the couple traveled extensively together, documenting the rural hardship they encountered for the Farm Security Administration, established by the U.S. Agriculture Department. Taylor wrote reports, and Lange photographed the people they met. This body of work included Lange's most well-known portrait, "Migrant Mother," an iconic image from this period that gently and beautifully captured the hardship and pain of what so many Americans were experiencing. The work now hangs in the Library of Congress.

As Taylor would later note, Lange's access to the inner lives of these struggling Americans was the result of patience and careful consideration of the people she photographed. "Her method of work," Taylor later said, "was often to just saunter up to the people and look around, and then when she saw something that she wanted to photograph, to quietly take her camera, look at it, and if she saw that they objected, why, she would close it up and not take a photograph, or perhaps she would wait until... they were used to her."

In 1940, Lange became the first woman awarded a Guggenheim fellowship.

Final Years

Following America's entrance into World War II, Lange was hired by the Office of War Information (OWI) to photograph the internment of Japanese Americans. In 1945, she was employed again by the OWI, this time to document the San Francisco conference that created the United Nations.

While she battled increasing health problems over the last two decades of her life, Lange stayed active. She co-founded Aperture, a small publishing house that produces a periodical and high-end photography books. She took on assignments for Life magazine, traveling through Utah, Ireland and Death Valley. She also accompanied her husband on his work-related assignments in Pakistan, Korea and Vietnam, among other places, documenting what she saw along the way.

Lange passed away from esophageal cancer in October 1965.

While Lange sometimes grew frustrated that her work didn't always provoke society to correct the injustices she documented, her photography has endured and greatly influenced generations of documentary photographers.

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During the Great Depression, Dorothea Lange photographed the unemployed men who wandered the streets. Her photographs of migrant workers were often presented with captions featuring the words of the workers themselves. Lange's first exhibition, held in 1934, established her reputation as a skilled documentary photographer. In 1940, she received the Guggenheim Fellowship.

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Dakota Wotton

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http://www.greatcreditcontraction.com Fractional reserve banking is the banking practice in which banks keep only a fraction of their deposits in reserve (as cash and other highly liquid assets) and lend out the remainder while maintaining the simultaneous obligation to redeem all these deposits upon demand.