Life During the Great Depression

By: Khalid Hamada

IntroductionThe Great Depression

in USA began with the Wall Street Crash of October, 1929 and rapidly spread worldwide. The market crash marked the beginning of a decade of high unemployment, poverty, low profits, depression, decreasing farm incomes, and lost opportunities for economic growth.

Stock market crashAfter nearly a decade of happiness and richness, the

United States was thrown into misery on Tuesday, October 29, 1929, the day the stock market crashed and the official beginning of the Great Depression. As stock prices went down with no hope of recovery. Masses and masses of people tried to sell their stock, but no one was buying. The stock market, which had appeared to be the surest way to become rich, quickly became the path to bankruptcy.

The Stock Market Crash was just the beginning. Since many banks had also invested large portions of their clients' savings in the stock market, these banks were forced to close when the stock market crashed. Seeing a few banks close caused another panic across the country.

With little economic activity there was scant demand for new coinage. No nickels or dimes were minted in 1932–33, no quarter dollars in 1931 or 1933, no half dollars from 1930–32, and no silver dollars in the years 1929–33 .

Loss of Jobs Since companies have

lost all their money, employees left the companies and were left with no work.. This left them poor with no money, which caused them to live on roads since they couldn’t pay their house rents

Over one million families lost their farms between 1930 and 1934

We can see here that the production of different objects was decreasing due to the economical crash down and the great depression.

Housing273,000 families had been evicted from their

homes in 1932.Since they had no money, they were forced to

leave there house as said before, with left them living in roads and there were two million homeless people migrating around the country.

ClothingClothing stayed as it was as people kept

using their old clothes untill it got dirty and wripped which then caused a problem as people didn’t have the money to buy new clothes. It got to the point that flour sacks were used as clothes. This shows how the great depression had such a bad effect on people.

Bibliographyhttp://history1900s.about.com/od/1930s/p/gre

atdepression.htmhttp://www.kidskonnect.com/subjectindex/16-

educational/history/267-great-depression.html