Hoovervilles and Shanty Towns
The amount of shanty's in a hooverville
Due to the extreme financial downfalls of the 1930's, people lost everything. This included businesses, property, jobs, and their precious land. With more and more people becoming homeless they had no where to go so they made shanty towns. "A Hooverville was a derogatory term used to describe the ramshackle towns that were built and inhabited by millions of homeless and unemployed people in communities across the United States during the Great Depression"(Bonk and Carson). The people who loved in these so called owns were very poor and had nothing left. These houses are called shanty's. Hoovervilles were composed of houses made out of unwanted materials. The materials that the houses generally consisted of were scrap woods, old metal sheets, card board, and other scrap materials. Anything they could easily get their hands on, they would use to build their house. Their was a shocking amount of shanty's in a Hoovervilles. This was due to a limited amount of people that could actually afford a house. Also, their were men that went on the road to find work. These men are called hobos or homeless men. They generally looked for jobs on the road and hitched rides on cargo trains to move across the country.
Soup Kitchens and Bread lines
A food and breadline during the depression
As the depression continued to worsen and the economy slowed, people could not even afford to eat. So the government offered their services and opened up breadlines and soup kitchens. They are almost the same thing. Soup kitchens generally served soup for the people that could not afford to eat. This soup was watered down and the people were not given a lot of it. It did not fully feed people but during these tough times it was better then nothing. A bread line on the other hand is when bread is given to people to eat. Mostly this bread was stale and old. This is what people that could not afford food got from the government.
Dust Bowl
A city is about to be engulfed by this dust cloud.
The dust bowl further weakened the economy and hurt farmers during the depression. This was a time when many dust storms happened and the Midwest basically became one big cloud of dust. How it all started was that farmers had turned fields of grass into farmland. After planting crops, all of the nutrients were gone in the soil so it could not absorb water. Also, to compound things their was a series of droughts that damaged the soil even more and made the soil completely dry with practically no moisture in it. "While the damage was particularly severe in Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado, and Kansas, erosion occurred in all of the Great Plains states, from Texas to North Dakota and Montana, even into the Canadian Prairie Provinces"(Discovering Science). In these states in the thirties their were tremendous winds which carried the dust that had formed across the plains. This dust engulfed whole city's and blacked the sun out. Dust was up to twenty feet tall in some areas. This went on for a very long time over the 30's. Dust even went as far as New York City and went all the way up and down the East coast. This was how the Dust Bowl happened and affected the 1930's.