The Great Depression

• There was no national welfare state in the USA (people who lost their jobs had to rely on whatever little help was available from the government)
• A welfare state is a state where the government provides welfare benefits, (such as education, health care, and unemployment payments) to its population free at the point of use, although they are paid for by general taxation
• In some locations during the Great Depression, unemployment rates were over 50%
• Unemployed people queued outside businesses hoping to be given work (When people lost their jobs, they could not feed themselves and their families)
• The support system for the unemployed was quickly overwhelmed, especially in places with high unemployment
• Why did people lose their homes during the Great Depression?

  They could no longer afford to pay their mortgage (a type of loan used to pay for a property) or rent
• Queues of people outside charity soup kitchens waiting to be fed were called breadlines
• Recent immigrants and African Americans were often the first to lose their jobs , and were often the last people that businesses would consider hiring , due to racial prejudice
• Some people dealt with losing their homes by building temporary places to live in public parks - These temporary places had no sanitation and grew into unofficial towns and villages
• Women at that time mostly worked as servants but lost their jobs during the Great Depression as people could no longer afford to pay them
• The people who lived in Hoovervilles developed a sense of community and looked after each other
• The temporary places that people people built for themselves to live in were often made of tents , cardboard boxes and corrugated iron sheets
• Hoovervilles were a name for shanty towns , which were large settlements consisting of very poor-quality housing , built during the Great Depression
• People who lived in Hoovervilles blamed President Hoover for not doing enough to help them
• It is estimated that 2 million Americans travelled across the country (on foot, in cars or on the railroad) looking for work and somewhere to live. Most of them were men but some were women or children. They were referred to as hobos
• What were hobos?

  Workers who travelled around the country looking for work
• The US government had promised to pay a bonus to war veterans who had fought in World War One - This bonus was due to be paid in 1945, but some people thought that it should be paid early
• In March 1932 a group of between 20,000 and 40,000 unemployed war veterans and their families marched to Washington on the Bonus March, demanding that their bonuses be paid early
• Roughly 15,000 veterans chose to stay in a Hooverville built outside the Capitol Building, the meeting place of the United States Congress
• Congress refused to pay the bonus but offered to pay for the bonus marchers to get back home - Police were sent in to break up the marchers’ camp - but the marchers fought back to try to prevent this
• President Hoover sent in troops with tear gas and tanks to remove the marchers and their Hooverville - This made President Hoover even more unpopular - It looked as if he did not care about people’s suffering due to the problems caused by the Great Depression
• Modernisation of farming during the 1920s

  Including the use of new fertilisers and farm machinery, had led to overproduction
• Some unemployed farmers travelled the countryside looking for work
• The economic downturn that the USA experienced after 1929 affected the American people in a number of ways
• Many farmers had bought shares or taken out bank loans to pay for the modernisation of their farms
• The US government tried to help America recover from this downturn in various ways
• As a result, many farmers went bankrupt and had to sell off their land, or it was taken from them by their bank when they could not pay their debts
• Prices farmers could get for their produce began to fall due to overproduction
• When the Wall Street Crash happened, the value of farmers' shares was reduced and the bank closures left them with huge debts
• As prices for farm produce fell, sharecroppers found it more and more difficult to pay their rent and still have some produce left to sell for themselves
• African American farmers were usually sharecroppers, which meant they paid their rent with the value of a share of the crops that they grew
• Farms were often bought up by large industrial farming businesses, and many farm owners now found themselves employed as poorly paid farm labourers
• Landowners also paid sharecroppers less for their produce in order to force them off their land
• The Okies were farmers from the state of Oklahoma who had lost their farms
• Okies became a general name given to any rural workers who migrated across the USA to California looking for work
• Downers paid farmers less for their produce


  To force them off their land
• Okies


  • Farmers from Oklahoma who had lost their farms and migrated to California looking for work
• During the Great Depression, there was an environmental disaster in the farming land of the Midwestern states
• Characteristics of shanty towns

  • Spontaneous settlement, illegal occupation, lack of basic infrastructure (water, sewage, electricity, rubbish collection)
• People included in the general name "Okies"


  • Arkies, people from Midwestern states (e.g. Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska), people from New Mexico and Texas