US History, April 15 • Entry Task: Take out your notes from

yesterday (next slide). • Announcements:

– Oops! ½ of the notes are missing a word. …Including FACTS

– Website has the 1920s presentation, adding today’s also

– You will also need a book again today! Starts on page 685.

Analyze the photo “Migrant Mother”, by Dorothea Lange (use 3 examples to analyze).

pea pickers camp, Nipomo, CA (1936)

"Migrant Mother" - Dorothea Lange Florence Owens Thompson and her children pictured in February or March of 1936 in Nipomo, California.

“I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions…I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the..

.. surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean- to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it.” (From: Popular Photography, Feb. 1960).

• Lange sent pictures to San Francisco News and Resettlement Administration – the pea picker camp received 20,000 pounds of food

43 years later

Police stand guard outside the entrance to New York's closed World Exchange Bank, March 20, 1931

1929:600 banks closed. In 1933, over 5,000 banks failed – 11,000/25,000 total •Many people lost their life savings – around $7 billion wiped out. •Example: Caldwell & Company (South)

During a bank run, a bank must quickly liquidate loans and sell its assets (often at rock-bottom prices) to come up with the necessary cash. Why is hoarding $ bad?

Unemployed men vying for jobs at the American Legion Employment Bureau in Los Angeles during the Great Depression.

• One of 700 apple vendors in Detroit

Unemployed workers in front of a shack with Christmas tree, East 12th Street, New York City. December 1937

Man in hobo jungle killing turtle to make soup, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Sept. 1939.

Hard Times

Unemployment · By the early 1930’s, approximately 25% of the nation was unemployed. 1929 – avg salary: $750 (Ford paid $1,300) Agriculture avg: $273

Field Workers Crop prices fell by approximately 60%

African Americans/Latinos “last hired, first fired”

African Americans • Unemployment = higher

(50%) • Wages = lower • Increased racial violence (24 lynchings in just 1933)

Latinos •Mexicans in southwest targeted •Deportation •Late 1930’s hundreds of thousands of people of Mexican descent left America

Families in Crisis · How did the GD affect families?

“Those days you did everything to save a penny….My next door neighbor and I used to shop together. You could get two pounds of hamburger for a quarter, so we’d buy two pounds and split it-then one week she’d pay the extra penny and the next week I’d pay.” -Jeane Westin

Evicted family with belongings on street, December 14, 1929.

Mortgage Foreclosures

• Some people came together as a result…

· These shantytowns were known as Hoovervilles.

Seattle, Washington

Homelessness

Central Park, New York City

“Hooverville," New York City, December 8 1930 [Sign on shack reads: "House of Unemployed"]

Presenter

Presentation Notes

Part of an impoverished family of nine on a New Mexico highway. Depression refugees from Iowa. Left Iowa in 1932 because of father's ill health. Father an auto mechanic laborer, painter by trade, tubercular. Family has been on relief in Arizona but refused entry on relief roles in Iowa to which state they wish to return. Nine children including a sick four-month-old baby. No money at all. About to sell their belongings and trailer for money to buy food. "We don't want to go where we'll be a nuisance to anybody." Children of migrant workers typically had no way to attend school. By the end of 1930 some 3 million children had abandoned school. Thousands of schools had closed or were operating on reduced hours. At least 200,000 children took to the roads on their own.  Summer 1936. Photographer: Dorothea Lange.

• Perhaps 2.5 million people abandoned their homes in the South and the Great Plains during the Great Depression and went on the road.

Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? (1932)

They used to tell me I was building a dream And so I followed the mob. When there was earth to plow or guns to bear, I was always there, right on the job. They used to tell me I was building a dream With peace and glory ahead -- Why should I be standing in line, just waiting for bread?

Once I built a railroad, I made it run, Made it race against time. Once I built a railroad, now it's done -- Brother, can you spare a dime? Once I built a tower, up to the sun, brick and rivet and lime. Once I built a tower, now it's done -- Brother, can you spare a dime?

Hoover Takes Action • At first, President Hoover was against offering direct government relief.

• Instead, he asked private charities, such as the YMCA, to help.

Christmas Day Breadlines in New York City, 1931

• Soup

Kitchens and Bread Lines

“Two or three blocks along Time Square, you’d see these men, silent, shuffling along in a line….I’d see that flat, opaque, expressionless look which spelled, for me, human disaster. Men…who had lost their jobs, lost their homes, lost their families…They were destroyed men.”

-Herman Shumlin (quoted in Hard Times)

http://bp3.blogger.com/_Mq5qyAsSNIQ/RqYl2zXAGaI/AAAAAAAABxc/kn2JLLsckSE/s1600-h/great+depression+soup+line.jpg

Beginning of “Hoboes”

(As many as 300,000 )

• Hitched rides on railroad boxcars

• Slept under bridges • Homeless shelters

• Small Farmers Already

In Debt

• Food/ Commodity Prices Fell

• 1929-1932 400,000 Farmers Foreclosed On

• Tenant Farming

• Drought + Overgrazing Lead To Dust Storms

The Dust Bowl

Migration West “Okies” and “Arkies”

• Hoover eventually set up public works programs, where the government hired people to construct schools, dams and highways. Ex.) Hoover Dam •June 1930 – Congress approved the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which raised taxes on imported items (goal: buy American-made)

• Result: International trade fell by around 50% overall – “Beggar thy neighbor” (stiff competition for trade)

The Hoover Dam

Des Moines Register, April 5, 1930

• Hoover also approved the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), which loaned money to railroads, banks, and insurance companies.

•Federal Home Loan Bank Act was approved to help construction and reduce foreclosures

• Hoover believed in “rugged individualism” – every man should fend for himself

•Household income drops 35% during HH’s presidency

• In 1932, over 20,000 jobless veterans protested in Washington, D.C. demanding immediate payment.

• World War I veterans were due to be paid a bonus in 1945.

The Bonus Army

Handpainted sign on Bonus Army truck states: "We Done a Good Job in France, Now You Do a Good Job in America"

http://prorev.com/bonusarmy.jpg

Tanks and cavalry prepare to evacuate the Bonus Army (July 28, 1932)

The United States Army burned this and similar camps to the ground after routing the many thousands of protestors that were camped out in the national capital with tanks, tear gas, and troops of armed soldiers. (July 28, 1932)

• In clashes with police, four veterans were killed.

* How do you think people reacted to these events?

• Hoover ordered General Douglas MacArthur to clear out the veterans using cavalry, tanks, tear gas and machine guns. Major George S. Patton and Dwight D. Eisenhower helped to carry out the orders.