The Impact of the Great Depression

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The Impact of the Great Depression

The stock market crash of 1929 sent the nation spiraling into a state of economic paralysis that became known as the Great Depression. As industries shrank and businesses collapsed or cut back, up to 25% of Americans were left unemployed. At the same time, the financial crisis destroyed the life savings of countless Americans (Modern American Poetry). Food, housing and other consumable goods were in short supply for most people (Zinn 282). This widespread state of poverty had serious social repercussions for the country.

America’s agricultural economy had already been suffering for a decade when nature conspired against the country to exacerbate the Great Depression. From 1931 through 1939, severe winds tore through the Dust Bowl – the region composed of the western parts of Kansas and Oklahoma, parts of New Mexico and Colorado, and the Texas panhandle. These winds stirred up the dust of a landscape already devastated by draught and continuous, exhaustive farming practices. These dust storms threatened people’s health and destroyed whole crops (MAP). Impoverished tenant farmers found themselves unable to keep their farms and were forced off their land. This affected everyone in the region, not just the farmers (MAP). Like in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, countless immigrants, broadly nicknamed and despised as “Okies,” flocked to California where they expected to find an abundance of jobs. They flooded the already saturated agricultural labor market, driving wages down as they competed for the few jobs available (Wikipedia). Thus the Dust Bowl migration magnified the problems of the Great Depression and placed a great deal of stress on California’s already troubled econ...

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...eas of American life, however, were not so easily healed; the Great Depression and its various social repercussions had forever changed society and the lives of countless Americans.

Works Cited

Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States. Teaching Edition. New York: The New Press, 1997.

“Great Depression in the United States.” Microsoft Encarta Online Encyclopedia 2004. http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761584403/Great_Depression_in_the_United_States.html, 1997-2004.

“Great Depression.” Wikipedia Online Encyclopedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_ depression, 2004.

Nelson, Cary. “The Great Depression.” An Online Journal and Multimedia Companion to Anthology of Modern American Poetry. http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/ depression/depression.htm. Department of English, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2002.

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