The Great Depression
Big Crash In The Stock Market!
There is big news! The Stock Market Crashed! On September 3, 1929 the stocks hit a high! But there were some problems to go along with that new high! A lot of people knew that the stocks were going to come down so on October 29, 1929 known as black Tuesday the investors sold 16.4 million shares of stocks at prices much lower then they had bought them for little as a month earlier. This started the Great Depression. People started to lose their jobs and their homes and they couldn’t pay for a lot. So what started was people would demand that people pay their loans they had borrowed to buy stocks. When a lot of the people couldn’t pay their loans the banks started to run low on money, but the people were in fear that the banks were going to close so they went to the bank to go get the little money that they had left and take it from the bank so that it wouldn’t go missing. That made the banks starts to close. At the time the president was Herbert Hoover. He did not believe in handouts and a lot of people did not like them. He didn’t help the economy if anything he made it worse. So people started naming bad things something to do with his name. For example: low income neighborhoods with huts and homeless people were called Hoovervilles, and empty pockets turned out were called Hoover flags. As you can tell people didn’t really like him. That’s where FDR (Franklin Delano Roosevelt). He was inaugurated in 1933. His approach to the economy was a lot more different then Herbert Hoover. One of his famous sayings was “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”. He declared a bank holiday which was a temporary shut down of all banks, and promised that only the banks that were in good shape would be allowed to reopen. He promised 3 “R’s” Relief for the hungry and jobless. Recovery for agriculture and industry. Reform to change the way the economy workedd
Hardship is the least of our worries.
The hard times just keep getting worse. In 1936 9 million people were jobless. Breadlines started to come about. A breadline is when men, women and children would wait hours in extremely long lines for food. A lot of times they would fate from hunger while waiting for the good. Many people lost their homes and looked for shelter under bridges and overpasses. People lived in shacks made out of orange cars, or large piano boxes. Older children that couldn’t find jobs would runaway so they wouldn’t burden their families. They sneaked on trains, begged for food, and lived in camps along the railroad tracks. Most women were forced to give up their jobs to men, and sometimes women wouldn’t accept jobs so that men could work. At this point in time Eleanor Roosevelt helped a lot of poor Americans. She was FDR’s eyes and ears for when he started to get sick and could walk around or travel as much.