The Great Depression was caused by the stock market crashing it was the worst economic event in the history of the economic world the market crashed in 1929 and ended in 1939. So ten years of riots fights and homelessness. 12.9 million shares were traded on october 29th or black tuesday then another 16 million shares were traded after another wave of panic swept Wall Street. Over the next few years the consumer spending and investment declined failing companies laid off workers and in 1933 when the Great Depression was at its lowest point more than 15 million people were unemployed and nearly half the banks in the country was failing and closed down. Most americans forced to buy on credit fell into debt and the number of foreclosures and repossessions grew exponentially at an alarming rate.
On June 5th, 1933 the United States went off of something called the gold standard which is a monetary system in which currency is backed by gold, which made creditors able to demand payment in gold. The United States has been on the gold standard since 1879, except for an embargo on the gold exports due to World War I. Bank failures in the Great Depression sent panic threw most americans and made it to where they started hoarding the gold. On April 5th, 1933 president Roosevelt ordered that all gold coins and certificates worth more than $100 dollars be traded in for a different form of currency. This required all the people of the United States turn in gold products to the federal reserve by May 1st for an amount of $20.67 per ounce. By may 10th the U.S government had collected over $300 million dollars worth of gold coins and and $470 million worth of gold certificates. The government then placed gold at $35 dollars per ounce. This increased the federal reserve's balance sheets by 69% and allowed the federal reserve to further inflate the supply of the currency. The government held the price for the gold at $35 dollars an ounce until August 15th 1971, this is when president Richard Nixon announced that the United States would no longer convert dollars to gold at a set value. This made it to where the united states completely abandoned the gold standard. In 1974, President Gerald Ford signed papers to make people able to own gold bullion again.
The Dust Bowl also known as the Dirty 30s started in the 1930s and ended about a decade later but the damage to the economy lasted a lot longer. Severe drought blew threw the Midwestern and Southern in 1930, then in 1931 dust storms began and a series of droughts followed for years further damaging crop production and making the environmental disaster last longer by 1934. Aproximentlly 35 million acres of farmland was said to be useless for farming, while another 125 million acres of land started losing their topsoil, which would also make them useless for farming. During the Dust Bowl severe dust storms, often called the black blizzards, swept the plains and would often carry the dust as far east as Washington D.C and New York city and would often cover ships in the Atlantic ocean with a layer of dust. Large clouds of dust would darken the sky often and leave them darkened sometimes for days. At a time in many places the dust would fall like snow and people would have to use shovels to clear walkways, streets and just about everywhere else dust would make its way through cracks, even if the house was tightly sealed, and would make layers of dust on food, skin and furniture. Most but not all people developed dust pneumonia, which is an illness that people often would get by inhaling the dust particles over time, which would eventually cause difficulty breathing chest pain and death. The number of deaths are unknown but it is estimated to be in the hundreds or even thousands of deaths.
On May 11, 1934 a massive dust storm two miles high traveled 2,000 miles to the East Coast and made monuments visibility very low and hard to see even if you were close to them. But the worst dust storm happened on April 14, 1935. News reports called the event Black Sunday. A big thick wall of sand and dust started in Oklahoma somewhere and spread east. About 3 million tons of topsoil was estimated to have blown away from the Great Plains during Black Sunday. Rainfall returned to the area by the end of 1939 ending the Dust Bowl years.
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The economy is affected and population declined in the most damaged areas, where the agricultural value of the land failed to. Recover this lasted well into the 1950s. At this time it was a period of protests and hunger marches, poverty spread drastically, most people suffered quietly ashamed of their poverty. No matter how bad their situation were the Great Depression changed those in the generation that lived in it and survived to tell stories about it.
About 2.5 million people left the Dust Bowl states this includes Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma during the 1930s. This was labeled the largest migration in American history. Oklahoma lost about 440,000 people to migration most of them poor. Due to poverty traveled west looking for some sort of employment. 1935 to 1940 approximately 250,000 Oklahoma migrants moved to California and only a third of them lived in the state. The refugees of the dust bowl okies and the okies faced descrimanation hard labour and low wages, when the reached California. Some of them lived in shanty towns and or tents, that ran alongside irrigation ditches. Okie soon became a term meant to discourage someone and used to refer to all poor Dust Bowl migrants regardless of the state they originate from.
During the Great Depression with the U.S dealing with poverty and unemployment there was multiple opportunities for people to commit crimes. In the 1920s in Chicago alone there were over 1,300 gangs documented and Americans found more opportunities to commit crimes such as bootlegging, lonesharking robing banks and even murder. The crime bosses growing rich from the profit of bootlegged alcohol and other illegal things. They were aided by paying off corrupt police officers and politicians. This allowed them free rome of the city to do as they please with no repercussions from the police, and if people would say anything they didn’t like or agree with, they would kill them or beat them.
Along with crime rates rising the number of schools closing also rose and the education and intelligence of the people decreased because the schools were closing.
One group of people, who actually gained jobs during the Great Depression, were women. From 1930 to 1940 the number of employed women in the United States rose about 24% from 10.5 million to 13 million. 25% of the National Recovery Administration’s wages code set lower wages for women. Jobs available to women paid less but were more stable during the Great Depression. Some of the jobs included nursing, teaching and domestic work. In order to prevent women from going by other names to sidestep and lose their jobs the federal government also began making women with federal jobs to use their husbands names in 1933. Some women even went as far as marrying men without federal jobs in secret so that they wouldn’t lose their jobs. In the start of 1940 26 states had placed restrictions known as marriage bars on women's employment. Women were doing the same jobs men could do for less pay and who would pay the men to work, when women do the same amount of work for less money. The other people they would hire were the african americans for the same reason they hired women: they could do the same amount of work for less money, and why pay more money, when you can have the job done exactly the same for a much lower price than you would have to pay the white men to do the job. And still today females make less than males. For most women they make 81.4% of what men make doing the same job and it's worse for men and women of a different race.
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