The Crash and Effects-Part 2

Slide 1: The Consequences of the Wall Street Crash

Slide 2: Towns Not Much Better Off • Unemployment everywhere – 1932 Cleveland: 50%, Toledo 80% – Parks @ nights filled w/ homeless • Thank you Mr. Hoover – Every town had bread & soup lines – Every town had a ‘Hooverville’ (ramshackle huts for homeless/migrants) – Families searched garbage dumps for food – Example: 1931 NYC 238 people admitted to hospital suffering from starvation. Forty-five died – ‘No one is starving.’ • Herbert Hoover responding to dreary economic news

Slide 3: Unemployment in the USA, 1929-33 30 24.9 23.6 25 20 15.9 15 Percent Unemployed 8.7 10 5.2 5 0 1929 1930 1931 1932 1933

Slide 11: Focus Task: What were the human consequences of the Crash? • You have been asked to prepare an exhibition of photos which compares the life of Americans during the boom times of the 1920s with the depressed years of the 1930s. Choose two pictures from the 1920s and two from the 1930s which you think present the greatest contrast. – Explain your choice. – Do you think everyone suffered equally from the Depression? Explain your answer by referring to your notes.

Slide 12: Fin

Slide 13: PSDs for The great Depression • During the last three months I have visited … some 20 states of this wonderfully rich and beautiful country. A number of Montana citizens told me of thousands of bushels of wheat left in the fields uncut on account of its low price that hardly paid for the harvesting. In Oregon I saw thousands of bushels of apples rotting in the orchards. At the same time there are millions of children who, on account of the poverty of their parents, will not eat one apple this winter … I saw men picking for meat scraps in the garbage cans of the cities of New York and Chicago. One man said that he had killed 3,000 sheep this fall and thrown them down the canyon because it cost $1.10 to ship a sheep and then he would get less than a dollar for it … The farmers are being pauperized [made poor] by the poverty of industrial populations and the industrial populations are being pauperized by the poverty of the farmers. Neither has the money to buy the product of the other; hence we have overproduction and under-consumption at the same time. – Evidence of Oscar Ameringer to a US government committee in 1932

Slide 14: PSDs for The Great Depression • Last summer, in the hot weather, when the smell was sickening and the flies were thick, there were a hundred people a day coming to the dumps … a widow who used to do housework and laundry, but now had no work at all, fed herself and her fourteen-year-old son on garbage. Before she picked up the meat she would always take off her glasses so that she couldn’t see the maggots. – From New Republic magazine, February 1933 • There is not an unemployed man in the country that hasn’t contributed to the wealth of every millionaire in America. The working classes didn’t bring this on, it was the big boys … We’ve got more wheat, more corn, more food, more cotton, more money in the banks, more everything in the world than any other nation that ever lived ever had, yet we are starving to death. We are the first nation in the history of the world to go to the poorhouse in an automobile – Will Rogers, an American writer, 1931. Rogers had a regular humorous column in an American magazine which was popular with ordinary people

Slide 15: PSDs for the Wall Street Crash • Counting the cost to rich Americans: – The Vanderbilt family lost $40 million – Rockefeller lost 80% of his wealth – but he still had 40 million left – The British politician Winston Churchill lost $500,000 – The singer Fanny Brice lost $500,000 – Groucho and Harpo Marx (two of the Marx Brothers comedy team) lost $240,000 each • Major losers in the crash