Black Tuesday And The Great Depression

On October 29th, 1929 the stock market crashed in the United States. This day was known as Black Tuesday, the day which signaled the beginning of the Great Depression. In the most tragic day in the American nation’s stock market history with major wipe outs in market, the values and prices of stocks plummeted due to shareholders liquidation of stocks which had to be sold at any price necessary (New York Times of October 30, 1929). By the year 1933, a quarter of American families, who were heavily dependent on their jobs, were unemployed. Unemployment levels had reached an unprecedented high level, adding hardship to the lives of the American people. Many people at that time were forced out of their homes and onto the streets as they lost their jobs or were forced to work at jobs which barely allowed them to provide food, much less payments on a house.
Millions of people moved into what were commonly referred to as “Shanty towns” or “Hooverville’s”, as the president at the time was Herbert Hoover, who was not popular amongst the American people and was widely blamed for the start of the depression. City streets filled with breadlines, soup kitchen lines, people looking for food, and then the unemployment lines kept growing out the door and into the streets. The American men would leave their families to travel and look for employment in the farm lands across the countries in order to provide for their families. In some cases they would not come into contact with their family in months. This fractured the structure of family lives. The American people became quickly frustrated with the little to no improvement of the situation and the effort which President Hoover was putting into the relief of the economic situation.
Come 1932 t...

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...ad now fully become a part of the war effort.
With the idea of isolationism long gone with the attack on Pearl Harbor, America quickly began to rise back to its feet still suffering from the Great Depression. The countries economy rose as well as the steel industry, companies such as Ford who closed their Rouge plant in Detroit which promised many jobs during the Great Depression responded to war production by creating jobs for thousands of Americans. With the building of naval ships, tanks and planes the economy of the United States began to notice a rapidly increasing economy. As seen in the chart below, American unemployment rates fell drastically from the years 1940 to 1945 which marked the end of the war. According to Robert S. McElvaine “The buildup of 1940-41 did more to relive American industry and reduce unemployment than had any New Deal Program” (320).