Introduction
The Great Depression was a very bad time for the American people. Their were many leading factors that caused The Great Depression. One of the biggest was the stock market crash in 1929. Which was when everybody sold their stocks at once and there was not enough money to pay the people, so the stock market crashed. Many people lost their jobs and all of their property. Due to the lack of money and the growth of homeless people, Hoovervilles or shanty towns were formed for the homeless. All of the pressure was on the two presidents at the time to fix the problem. President Herbert Hoover was the president when the depression started and believed that the people should come together to solve the problem. While president Franklin Roosevelt was elected during the depression and believed that the government had to get more involved to help the people. He did this by coming up with the New Deal which was meant to help people get jobs and stimulate the economy, eventually getting America back on track and back to normal. This was successfully done in two stages, the fist hundred days and second hundred days. The depression ended around the year 1941, when WWII began.
Timeline of Major events
- 1929: Black Tuesday Stock market crashed. $16 billion lost in total, signaled the Great Depression
- 1930: Unemployment rates at 8.9%
- 1930: the dust bowl. A time when a dust storm raged from the Midwest to the Northeast and devastated farmers and their crops.
- 1931: Major banks collapse $200 million in deposits disappear, the banks customers where left with nothing
- 1932: Unemployment at 24.1%
- 1932: Roosevelt defeated Hoover by a landslide in the presidential election
- 1933: "radio priest" 30-45 million listeners tuned into hear Charles Coughlin's weekly broadcast over the radio
- 1933: Prohibition ends
- 1933: Roosevelt established the civil works administration to help unemployed workers through the winter
- 1935: Social Security Act established as a law
- 1936: Roosevelt re-elected for his second term in office
- 1939: Affordable fashion
- 1941: The United States enters World War Two
- 1941: manufacturing rates rose to 50% due to the war