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THE MAKING OF A NATION - January 24, 2002: Great Depression
By David Jarmul
VOICE ONE:
THE MAKING OF A NATION -- a program in Special English by the Voice of America.
(THEME)
The stock market crash of Nineteen-Twenty-Nine marked the beginning of the worst economic crisis in
American history. Millions of people lost their jobs. Thousands lost their homes. During the next several years, a
large part of the richest nation on Earth learned what it meant to be poor.
Hard times found their way into every area, group, and job. Workers struggled as factories closed. Farmers, hit
with falling prices and natural disasters, were forced to give up their farms. Businessmen lost their stores and
sometimes their homes. It was a severe economic crisis -- a depression.
VOICE TWO:
Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck, one of America's greatest writers, described the depression this way: "It was
a terrible, troubled time. I can't think of any ten years in history when so much happened in so many directions.
Violent change took place. Our country was shaped, our lives changed, our government rebuilt." Said John
Steinbeck: "When the stock market fell, the factories, mines, and steelworks closed. And then no one could buy
anything. Not even food."
VOICE ONE:
An unemployed auto worker in the manufacturing city of Detroit described the situation
this way:
"Before daylight, we were on the way to the Chevrolet factory to look for work. The
police were already there, waving us away
from the office. They were saying, 'Nothing doing! No jobs! No jobs!' So now we were
walking slowly through the falling snow to the employment office for the Dodge auto
company. A big, well-fed man in a heavy overcoat stood at the door. 'No! No!' he said.
There was no work."
Depression refugees
from Oklahoma, now in
California
(Photo - Dorothea
Lange/Library of Congress)
One Texas farmer lost his farm and moved his family to California to look for work.
"We can't send the children to school," he said, "because they have no clothes."
VOICE TWO:
The economic crisis began with the stock market crash in October, Nineteen-Twenty-Nine. For the first year, the
economy fell very slowly. But it dropped sharply in Nineteen-Thirty-One and Nineteen-Thirty-Two. And by the
end of Nineteen-Thirty-Two, the economy collapsed almost completely.
The gross national product is the total of all goods and services produced. During the three
years following the stock market crash, the American gross national product dropped by
almost half. The wealth of the average American dropped to a level lower than it had been
twenty-five years earlier.
All the gains of the Nineteen-Twenties were washed away.
Unemployment rose sharply. The number of workers looking for a job jumped from three
percent to more than twenty -five percent in just four years. One of every three or four workers
Selling apples
near the U.S.
was looking for a job in Nineteen-Thirty-Two. Capitol, 1930
VOICE ONE:
Those employment numbers did not include farmers. The men and women who grew the nation's food suffered
terribly during the Great Depression.
This was especially true in the southwestern states of Oklahoma and Texas. Farmers there were losing money
because of falling prices for their crops. Then natural disaster struck. Year after year, little or no rain fell. The
ground dried up. And then the wind blew away the earth in huge clouds of dust.
"All that dust made some of the farmers leave," one Oklahoma farmer remembered later. "But my family stayed.
We fought to live. Despite all the dust and the wind, we were planting seeds. But we got no crops. We had five
crop failures in five years."
VOICE TWO:
Falling production. Rising unemployment. Men begging in the streets. But there was more to the Great
Depression. At that time, the federal government did not guarantee the money that people put in banks. When
people could not repay loans, banks began to close.
In Nineteen-Twenty-Nine, six-hundred fifty-nine banks with total holdings of two-hundred-million dollars went
out of business. The next year, two times that number failed. And the year after that, almost twice that number of
banks went out of business. Millions of persons lost all their savings. They had no money left.
VOICE ONE:
The depression caused serious public health problems. Hospitals across the country were filled with sick people
whose main illness was a lack of food. The health department in New York City found that one of every five of
the city's children did not get enough food. Ninety-nine percent of the children attending a school in a coal-
mining area reportedly were underweight. In some places, people died of hunger.
The quality of housing also fell. Families were forced to crowd into small houses or apartments to share costs.
Many people had no homes at all. They slept on public streets, buses, or trains. One official in Chicago reported
in Nineteen-Thirty-One that several hundred women without homes were sleeping in city parks. In a number of
cities, people without homes built their houses from whatever materials they could find. They used empty boxes
or pieces of metal to build shelters in open areas.
VOICE TWO:
People called these areas of little temporary houses "Hoovervilles." They blamed President Hoover for their
situation. So, too, did the men forced to sleep in public parks at night. They covered themselves with pieces of
paper. And they called the paper "Hoover blankets." People without money in their pants called their empty
pockets "Hoover flags."
People blamed President Hoover because they thought he was not doing enough to help them. Hoover did take
several actions to try to improve the economy. But he resisted proposals for the federal government to provide aid
in a major way. And he refused to let the government spend more money than it earned.
Hoover told the nation: "Economic depression cannot be cured by legislative action or executive decision."
Many conservative Americans agreed with him. But not the millions of Americans who were hungry and tired of
looking for a job. They accused Hoover of not caring about the common citizen. One congressman from Alabama
said: "In the White House, we have a man more interested in the money of the rich than in the stomachs of the
poor."
VOICE ONE:
On and on the Great Depression continued. Of course, some Americans were lucky. They kept their jobs. And
they had enough money to enjoy the lower prices of most goods. Many people shared their earnings with friends
in need.
"We joined our money when we had some," remembered John Steinbeck. "It seems strange to say that we rarely
had a job," Steinbeck wrote years later. "There just weren't any jobs. But we didn't have to steal much. Farmers
and fruit growers in the nearby countryside could not sell their crops. They gave us all the food and fruit we
could carry home.
VOICE TWO:
Other Americans reacted to the crisis by leading protests against the economic policies of the Hoover
administration. In Nineteen-Thirty-Two, a large group of former soldiers gathered in Washington to demand
help. More than eight-thousand of them built the nation's largest Hooverville near the White House. Federal
troops finally removed them by force and burned their little shelters.
Next week, we will look at how the Great Depression of the Nineteen-Thirties affected other countries.
(THEME)
VOICE ONE:
You have been listening to THE MAKING OF A NATION -- a program in Special English by the Voice of
America. Your narrators have been Harry Monroe and Warren Scheer. Our program was written by David
Jarmul. The Voice of America invites you to listen again next week to THE MAKING OF A NATION.
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