America During The Great Depression

Javier Naranjo
Fall
Professor Martin
AMH2020
The Great Depression: ???????
The Great Depression devastated an economy that was fighting to make its way back to the top, after a war that crippled the economy. The economy was booming, the jazz age started, and women became more liberated then ever. Americans were busy buying cars, appliances, and putting their money into the stock market. This was done with credit, businesses were booming, they made huge gains from 65 percent from the mechanization of manufacturing, the average worker’s wages had only increased 8 percent (PBS, 1). People during this time were not aware of the irreparable consequences of making purchases with their credit. People were satisfied with this new materialistic
People starved, lost their homes, or they lost their farms, most of them becoming wandering homeless people. The economy recovered slowly, by the time that World War II began, the economy was doing better but not enough to go through another war. People believe the Great Depression was a way of learning how to handle economic thinking, the depression helped shape our economy now and how it's handled. The president during this time, President Herbert Hoover, saw the depression as passing incident that America can easily overcome. Hoover even stated that it would end in about 60 days (PBS, 1). He believed that no help should be given to the people in poverty. Hoover was blamed for being the cause of the Great Depression, he was made of fun, his name was disrespected all over America. Franklin D. Roosevelt took fast action in trying to save the economy and pull it out of the depression. He declared a four day bank holiday, congress passed the Emergency Banking Relief Act. Congress passed it in attempts to help stabilize the bank system. He created the New Deal, it was meant to rid the country of the depression and get back to a booming
They had no jobs and with the price of almost everything they need to survive, life was not sustainable during this time period. Self-employment is common in depressed labor markets. Workers in these markets often try to manage out a livelihood in independent income-producing activities, becoming entrepreneurs in response to a pressing need to find a substitute for wage/salary employment (Light & Rosenstein,, 213). During the Great Depression, the national rate of self-employment was directly correlated with the mass unemployment of business cycle downswings (Steinmetz & Wright, 1989). When one of them went down or up, the other will follow shortly after. The self employed businesses that were around at the this time were small shops or stores. Self employment was one option that workers had, another was the unemployed workers taking temporary jobs as public-sector workers (Boyd, 122). They had to do this as a way of compensating for the hard parts of being unemployed. Having the temporary jobs would provide them with barely enough income to survive. Social Security was given to the elderly by the government, they need some way of taking care of the elderly, so social security was created. Unemployed workers were given compensation. The federal government started projects that both benefited the society and the workers who did not have a job at