The Great Depression of the 30s(1)
We went through a severe finacial crisis in 2009, and it hasn’t recover well until this year. Somebody even forecast that the economic crash will come soon. That largely may be a rumor away from the real. But it is clear that we indeed face a slump of economy. I can’t imagine how we live if the great depression happen, because it was really cruel in the 1930s of the great depression for people in America. Now I am going to present kind of life scenes through nine articles each of which contains five photos.
The trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange just after the crash of 1929. On Black Tuesday, October twenty-ninth, the market collapsed. In a single day, sixteen million shares were traded–a record–and thirty billion dollars vanished into thin air. Westinghouse lost two thirds of its September value. DuPont dropped seventy points. The “Era of Get Rich Quick” was over. Jack Dempsey, America’s first millionaire athlete, lost $3 million. Cynical New York hotel clerks asked incoming guests, “You want a room for sleeping or jumping?”
Police stand guard outside the entrance to New York’s closed World Exchange Bank, March 20, 1931. Not only did bank failures wipe out people’s savings, they also undermined the ideology of thrift.
Unemployed men vying for jobs at the American Legion Employment Bureau in Los Angeles during the Great Depression.
World War I veterans block the steps of the Capital during the Bonus March, July 5, 1932 (Underwood and Underwood). In the summer of 1932, in the midst of the Great Depression, World War I veterans seeking early payment of a bonus scheduled for 1945 assembled in Washington to pressure Congress and the White House. Hoover resisted the demand for an early bonus. Veterans benefits took up 25% of the 1932 federal budget. Even so, as the Bonus Expeditionary Force swelled to 60,000 men, the president secretly ordered that its members be given tents, cots, army rations and medical care.
In July, the Senate rejected the bonus 62 to 18. Most of the protesters went home, aided by Hoover’s offer of free passage on the rails. Ten thousand remained behind, among them a hard core of Communists and other organizers. On the morning of July 28, forty protesters tried to reclaim an evacuated building in downtown Washington scheduled for demolition. The city’s police chief, Pellham Glassford, sympathetic to the marchers, was knocked down by a brick. Glassford’s assistant suffered a fractured skull. When rushed by a crowd, two other policemen opened fire. Two of the marchers were killed.
Bud Fields and his family. Alabama. 1935 or 1936. Photographer: Walker Evans.
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