Life during...

THE GREAT DEPRESSION

RHEA ABRAMS

October 1929
Boom! The crash of the stock market. This is where The Great Depression begins...

The Effects of The Crash:

Banks invested heavily in the market and therefore failed.
Depositors lost their savings.
Companies began to have slow production or go out of business.

Three years into the depression, some 13 million Americans were out of work. Out of this
large number, even more Americans were living in agony. Most believed that this was the
collapse of historic, economic, political, and social order.

The Dust Bowl & The American Farmer

The Dust Bowl

More and more people moved to the Great Plains in the early 1900s. By
1930 the population was: 5.6 million ; Ranches and farms increased.
Crop failure: Farmers werent rotating crops to allow the topsoil to recover.
Droughts took away water from crops, dust storms carried away fertile
topsoil, and dust blizzards buried tractors and farm equipment.

The Domino Effect: Farmers and Banks

Farmers were unable to pay their mortgages of their taxes, so they lost
their land to the bank.
Banks often had difficulty selling or renting the worthless farms
An example of this was the Joad
family of Oklahoma. They were
kicked off the land by the bank and
planned on heading to California
for work. As you can imagine, on a
long journey, they faced a number
of trials. When they arrived in
California, work was scarce.