The Human Cost of the Great Depression
During the middle of the 20th century, after the end of WWI the economic status of the United States of America seemed to be highly increasing, this period was called the economic boom. The United States saw themselves becoming the first industrial world power, producing more than 46% of the industrial wealth on earth. However, this country was over-producing, this did not go without any consequences. On 24 October 1929, known as the black Thursday, occurred the Wall Street crash, which was basically a major financial crash, which led to the Great Depression. The Great Depression was the longest and most severe depression ever experienced by the industrialized world, causing fundamental changes in the economy. Although it originated in the USA, the Great Depression spread in almost every country of the world. Its social and cultural effects were staggering, especially in the United States.
One of the first consequence of the Great Depression was the unemployment. In 1929 there were 1550 unemployed people in the United States but only two years later 8020 workers were jobless and this number was still rising reaching 13 000 in 193. Big city’s like Chicago were very hit by unemployment, many men wandered around the streets with big signs reducing themselves to sorts of machines only good to work asking for jobs with a big sign showing their past experience. In Chicago, only half the workers of 1927 in the manufacturing sector were still here in 1933 which meant a very large part of the jobs were destroyed in a very short period of time (4 years). Smaller ethnic populations like African American’s or Mexican’s were very hurt by unemployment because of segregation, leading to more dismissals of these populations. Indeed these populations were the first ones to be fired in the beginning of the crisis because of their origins. But the countryside was even more impacted by the crisis because the farmers’ lands and jobs were destroyed by what is commonly known as the dust bowl which was a series of dust storms hitting the state of Oklahoma. These farmers were the most hardly hit by the depression. After many years of intense farming they were homeless and had lost their job. This led the majority to migrate to California with the dream to find land a bit like Lennie and George in the very famous book of Steinbeck “Of mice and men”. Due to this huge affluence of workers for the very few jobs that remained, the workers’ wages were cut, and decreased with the economy, a major part of the salaries were cut, workers only had one third of the wages they had before the depression. This lack of financial resources for the workers led to another consequence of the Great Depression: extreme poverty and very bad life conditions for a big majority of persons living during the great depression.
During the Great Depression, many habitants of the United States of America had a poor quality of life due to many reasons. Firstly, the majority of the population was malnourished. In fact, we can see several children waiting to be served some soup. In the title, we learn that the soup is offered by a charity. This means that the children that we see in the image were probably hungry and in consequence malnourished. To support this point, a woman ’fed herself and her fourteen year old son on garbage.’ Normally, people don’t eat garbage unless they are starving, so this woman was desperate and certainly starving. Secondly, a lot of people didn’t have a correct accommodation and lived in self-made shelters. Indeed, according to the testimony of a witness, ‘By 1932 millions of Americans were living outside the normal rent-paying housing market.’ These people mostly lived in different Hoovervilles, which were places where people were living in self-made tents very close to each other. These areas are not quality housing for their inhabitants. All these bad conditions of life were due to unemployment and poverty. This disastrous lifestyle caused people to migrate to other areas that they thought would be better for business and for life conditions. However, a small minority of the population didn’t experience these horrible conditions. Effectively, ‘Many American dynastic families hold parties helped to escape the reality on the street’. These people who weren’t experiencing poverty or mediocre life conditions were of course the elite of the society. They had enough money to live comfortably; have a home and food. But also they were capable of hosting parties. These gigangantic inequalities were due to the Great Depression and to the fact that these families were already wealthy before the Depression. Indeed, these inequalities were existent before the Great Depression and the Depression reinforced them.
Hooverville - Seattle
One of the key features of this phase of economic disaster was what was called the Dust Bowl, which happened just after the beginning of the Great Depression. On one hand, severe damages were done to farms and fields all over the Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas plains by huge wind storms, they were commonly called the Dust Bowl. Livestock could not be fed anymore and was sold or left to die. Dust storms roiled through the Great Plains, creating huge, choking clouds that piled up in doorways and filtered into homes through closed windows. The damage done to the farming industry was a vast problem, people were faced with only the option to sell or to leave. On the other hand, these so-called ‘black blizzards’ also caused health damage, as a new illness called the ‘dust pneumonia’ appeared. The Dust Bowl left over 500 000 Americans homeless. Moreover, the working classes of the eastern states and what was called the Great Plains, were indebted, unemployed, and had so poor conditions of life they decided to migrate west to start a new life and flee the old one. Approximately 200,000 migrants moved to California, but it is estimated that 3 million had travelled to western states.
Migrants from Okhlaoma
In conclusion, the Great Depression had a harsh social effect in terms of economy and life. Indeed, most of the habitants of the United States were suffering because they couldn’t get a job, housing or even sometimes in extreme cases, food. However, a minority were still capable of living properly. The inequalities between these two types of people were enormous and were highly increased due to the depression.