S: By Basima Beyah
BC: A book about the Great Depression By- Basima Beyah
FC: The Great Depression
1: Questions: 1. What Caused the Great Depression? 2. How long did the Great Depression Last? 3. What was life like during the Great Depression? 4. Who was affected by the Great Depression? 5. How did the Great Depression end? These questions will all be answered in the following pages.
2: Down goes the stock market | Desperate attempts to make money | Long line: Wow!!! You all are going to be waiting for hours!!
3: What Caused the Great Depression? This is a question that involves many answers and the following contains the main causes: It all starts in the 1920s when stocks were going up. People had more money and life was just right, or so it appeared. When prices went up the business cost followed. This, of course, led to a point where businesses were having a hard time remaining profitable and competitive. The Stock Market crashed on October 29, 1929 on Black Tuesday. It was one of the major causes that lead to the Great Depression. Two months after the original crash in October, stockholders had lost more than $40 billion dollars. Even though the stock market began to regain some of its losses, by the end of 1930, it just was not enough and America certainly entered what is called the Great Depression. Economic trouble in Europe and other parts of the world was one of the main factors that brought down the U.S. economy. As the economy sank during the early 1930s, many observers, including President Hoover, blamed the U.S. depression on the state of global finances following World War I. The business cycle-the regular ups and downs in a free enterprise economy, was an inevitable part of the depression. Since the unemployed had no income, they were no longer capable of purchasing many products.
4: All through the 1930s over 9,000 banks went out of business. Bank deposits were uninsured, as a result, as banks failed people lost their savings. The surviving banks were more careful to give out loans. This lead to less production and less jobs, causing unemployment to grow higher and higher. | Bank Failures | Banks took your Daddy's money! | Have Faith!!!
5: #2 Loans The average man was not able to off his debts, so they easily borrowed more money causing more stress on banks. #3 Panic Panic steamed from the crash and forced people to pull their money out of banks. The panic only grew as more banks fell. This 12 year period lasting from 1929 to 1941 was devastating to most Americans. Americans would not fully recover until the US entered WWII and started creating new jobs. | There are also reasons why banks failed. #1 The McFadden Act of 1927 This act limited the size a bank can grow by forcing banks to stay within the state in which it began.
6: Drought conditions were also a cause of the Great Depression. The drought that took place in the Mississippi Valley in 1930 was on such levels that many could not even pay their taxes of other debts and had to sell their farms for no profit to themselves. | Many agricultural jobs were reduced because of this severe drought. Countries across the globe were affected. | Keep watering those plants!
7: How long did the Great Depression Last? The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s. Some economies started to recover from the effects of the Great Depression by the mid-1930s. However, in many countries th effects of the Great Depression lasted until the start of World War II.
8: What was life like during the Great Depression? Life in U.S. cities during the Great Depression was difficult. Many city-dwellers faced unemployment and poverty. Food was hard to come by, crowds of men fought over scraps of food left outside of restaurants. Hunger was so widespread that by 1932 one out f every five children in New York City suffered from malnutrition. Homelessness was also a serious urban problem during the depression. With no jobs and no income, many urban residents were not able to pay rent and were evicted from their homes. The homeless often gathered in shanty-towns--collections of makeshift shelters built out of packaging boxes, scrap lumber, corrugated iron, and other thrown away items. Life on the farm was also very difficult. The depression made it more and more difficult for urban residents to purchase farm products. The decrease of demand for farm products caused prices to drop. Farmers had more goods than they could sell and forced them to let crops rot in the fields and slaughter animals they could not afford to feed. They were also taken from their homes; they were foreclosed on by the banks because they couldn't keep up with their mortgage payments.
9: Poverty-stricken men and women waited in breadlines for bowls of soup and pieces f bread given out by charitable organizations.
10: Who was affected by the Great Depression? People all over the world were affected by the Great Depression because foreign consumers were unable to purchase American goods. The Americans suffered the hardest. In 1929 some 1.5 million Americans were unemployed. By 1933 the number had risen to about 15 million. In Chicago about 50% of the city's workforce was unemployed, while 80 percent of the workplace in Toledo, Ohio, were searching for jobs. Even those who were able to keep their jobs, wages dropped drastically---in some cases to as low as 10 cents an hour. African American, in particular, faced difficult times. African Americans were usually the first to go. | Waiting and Waiting and Waiting.........
11: People of all different background were affected by the great depression. Families suffered and had to do their best to help each other out. Some, sadly, fell apart because of all the strain. | People tried their best to get jobs. Women were also severely affected by the depression. they faced the daily challenges of putting whatever food they could get on the table and making clothes and shoes last for as long as they could. | crops failing....dry...dry...dry...rain please come!!!!
12: How did the Great Depression End? President Roosevelt was elected in 1932 and he tried his best to end the depression by proposing the "new deal". All of his efforts to end the depression by using the "New Deal" were not successful. On December 7, 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and the United States entered World War II. The war effort stimulated American industry and, as a result, effectively ended the Great Depression.
13: Walking down this long road in hope of finding somethin' better.