The Great Depression
An economic crisis unlike any other.
The Great Depression
"Black Thursday" Stock Market Crash of 1929
Thursday, Oct 24, 1929, 08:00 AM
New York, NY
Failed Bank
People demonstrate outside of the Bank of the United States in 1931 after it failed.
Jobless Men Keep Going
An affected town turns others away.
Soup Kitchen
Men at a soup kitchen in Washington, D.C., 1936.
The Dust Bowl
These immense dust storms—given names such as "black blizzards" and "black rollers"—often reduced visibility to a few feet. Millions of acres of farmland were damaged, and hundreds of thousands of people were forced to leave their homes; many of these families (often known as "Okies", since so many came from Oklahoma) migrated to California and other states, where they found economic conditions little better during the Great Depression than those they had left.
Owning no land, many became migrant workers who traveled from farm to farm to pick fruit and other crops at starvation wages. Author John Steinbeck later wrote The Grapes of Wrath, which won the Pulitzer Prize, and Of Mice and Men, about such people.
Oklahoma Dust Storm
A dust storm in Oklahoma, 1936.
South Dakota Dust Storm
The aftermath of dust storms.
Texas Dust Storm
A dust storm in Texas, April 18, 1935.
Evicted Workers
Evicted sharecroppers on the side of the road, Parkin, Alabama, 1936.
Mother and Children
A mother and her children, Elm Grove, CA, 1936.
Homeless Family
A homeless family looking for work.
A Decade of Misery
By the middle of the 1930s, as the American people endured half a decade of misery with no end in sight, some began to flirt with much more radical alternatives to the liberal reformism of the New Deal. For perhaps the only time in our history, American capitalism broke down so badly, and for so long, that radically different ways of organizing society became not only thinkable, but for some, desperately desired.