THE GREAT DEPRESSION

• Prior to the Depression

• Increased prosperity in the 20’s.

• Speculative boom – essential industries show huge profits throughout the decade, causing more people to invest in stocks.

• Creation of economic “bubbles”• Now, we turn to TULIPS!

WHAT’S A BUBBLE? TULIPMANIA!

• Holland, 1637 – a single tulip bulb will sell for TEN TIMES the income of a skilled craftsman.

• Tulips become a coveted luxury item

• Speculators enter the market.

• Prices rise

• Tulip bubble collapses after a single auction goes awry – and possibly due to the bubonic plague.

• Lesson? Speculation and inflation of goods lead to enormous economic bubbles liable to burst.

CAUSES• No easy answer

• The Stock Market Crash of 1929

• NOT a cause / effect. More complicated.

• Rise in speculation

• Dow Jones increases in value tenfold.

• Market loses 11% on October 24 (Black Thursday); 13% on Black Monday; and on Black Tuesday, another 12%.

CAUSES (CONT.)• Rapid expansion – bubble building.

• Huge earning gap between richest and poorest.

• Middle-class Americans rely on credit for purchase.

• High tariffs isolate American goods from foreign markets.

RUGGED INDIVIDUALISM AND HOOVER

• When the war closed, the most vital of issues both in our own country and around the world was whether government should continue their wartime ownership and operation of many [instruments] of production and distribution. We were challenged with a... choice between the American system of rugged individualism and a European philosophy of diametrically opposed doctrines doctrines of paternalism and state socialism. The acceptance of these ideas would have meant the destruction of self-government through centralization... [and] the undermining of the individual initiative and enterprise through which our people have grown to unparalleled greatness.

• The greatness of America has grown out of a political and social system and a method of [a lack of governmental] control of economic forces distinctly its own our American system which has carried this great experiment in human welfare farther than ever before in history.... And I again repeat that the departure from our American system... will jeopardize the very liberty and freedom of our people, and will destroy equality of opportunity not only to ourselves, but to our children.

HOOVER’S RESPONSE

• Believed it was part of a passing recession.

• Created government agencies, aided cooperation between gov’t and business, and attempted to stabilize prices.

• Most importantly, argued for private charity and volunteerism.

• Refused to give direct federal aid to citizens, believing it would weaken morale.

• Objected to “socialist” institutions like welfare.

EFFECTS

• Almost half of the nation’s 25,000 banks fail.

• GDP cut in half – goes from $104 billion to $59 billion.

• Unemployment leaps from 3% in 1929 to 25% in 1934.

• Mass migration out of the cities and back to farms.

• Creation of “Hoovervilles” – massive transient communities reliant on soup kitchens.

THE DUST BOWL

• Concurrent with the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, a period of severe dust storms and drought, destroys the American heartland.

• New process of farming displaces grass essential to keeping the dirt in place.

• Huge numbers of people travel from the Midwest to California in search of work.

• Find that the Great Depression has decimated the economies of Western states.

• Between 1930 and 1940, 3.5 million people move out of the Plains states.

The western land, nervous under the beginning change. The Western States, nervous as horses before a thunder storm. The great owners, nervous, sensing a change, knowing nothing of the nature of the change. The great owners, striking at the immediate thing, the widening government, the growing labor unity; striking at new taxes, at plans; not knowing these things are results, not causes. Results, not causes; results, not causes. The causes lie deep and simply — the causes are a hunger in a stomach, multiplied a million times; a hunger in a single soul, hunger for joy and some security, multiplied a million times; muscles and mind aching to grow, to work, to create, multiplied a million times. The last clear definite function of man —muscles aching to work, minds aching to create beyond the single need —this is man. To build a wall, to build a house, a dam, and in the wall and house and dam to put something of Manself, and to Manself take back something of the wall, the house, the dam; to take hard muscles from the lifting, to take the clear lines and form from conceiving. For man, unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments.

This you may say of man — when theories change and crash, when schools, philosophies, when narrow dark alleys of thought, national, religious, economic, grow and disintegrate, man reaches, stumbles forward, painfully, mistakenly sometimes. Having stepped forward, he may slip back, but only half a step, never the full step back. This you may say and know it and know it. This you may know when the bombs plummet out of the black planes on the market place, when prisoners are stuck like pigs, when the crushed bodies drain filthily in the dust. You may know it in this way. If the step were not being taken, if the stumbling-forward ache were not alive, the bombs would not fall, the throats would not be cut. Fear the time when the bombs stop falling while the bombers live — for every bomb is proof that the spirit has not died. And fear the time when the strikes stop while the great owners live — for every little beaten strike is proof that the step is being taken. And this you can know — fear the time when Manself will not suffer and die for a concept, for this one quality is the foundation of Manself, and this one quality is man, distinctive in the universe.

FREE WRITE

• What would it take for you to leave home?

• What would you bring?

• Where would you go?

IMAGES OF THE DEPRESSION

• As you go around the room, check out each and every image placed on desks.

• Then, choose three. Answer the following questions about the image.

• What is the context of the image? Is it in a rural or urban setting?

• What do you believe is happening in the image?

• What does the image tell you about the Great Depression and/or Dust Bowl?

• What questions do you have about the image?

• Finally, why did you choose this image to write about?