THE EFFECTS OF THE GREAT

DEPRESSION
Year 11 ATAR

A DEPRESSED NATION, 1932 - 33

A depressed nation is not unlike a depressed person!

Morale was low, and faith had been lost in the nations leadership.
People who were greatly affected included:
The unemployed.
The homeless (and those who were at risk of eviction).
Banks who battled to keep reserves as people took out their savings.
Manufacturerswho now has very few customers.
Farmers.

WHO WAS AFFECTED?

People in the cities.

People in the rural areas.
Migrants.
Were there others?

A DEPRESSED NATION

In February 1933In the Blue Ridge, miners smashed company store

windows and storekeepers were given the choice of handing out food or
having it seized. Unemployed workers in Detroit invaded self-service
groceries in groups, filled their baskets, and left without paying. In Iowa,
leagues of the unemployed enlisted jobless gas and light workers to tap
gas and electricity lines. In Des Moines, workers boarded streetcars in
groups of ten or twenty and told the cowed conductors to charge the
fares to the mayor. In Chicago, a group of fifty-five was charged with
dismantling an entire four-storey building and carrying it away brick by
brick.
American Historian, William E. Leuchtenburg describes the Winter of
Despair.

A DEPRESSED NATION

The American people, unfamiliar with suffering , with none of that long
history of catastrophe and calamity behind it which makes the experience
of European nations, is outraged and baffled by misfortune. Depression
blocks its view: it cannot see round it. Misled in the onset by leaders who
assured it, in every soothing term and tone, that reverse was to last but a
little whileThe defeatism that has been so lamentably evidenced in
Congress is not peculiar to Congressmen, any more than is the crude
individualism of their reaction. It lies alike a pall over the spirit of the
nationto that restoration of confidence for which everybody pleads,
which everybody sees as necessary. But how to break it nobody knows.
British Labour Party Activist, Mary Agnes Hamilton.

THE NEW DEAL

By 1932, Americans were
alarmed about the future.
Prosperity Economic
uncertainty.
Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected
president, and implemented a
new programme in response
The New Deal (regulates the
financial structure, introduces
social and welfare benefits,
provides support for workers in
new ways.
The short and long term impact
of the New Deal as well as how
effective it was is still hotly
debated.