Fdr And The New Deal Essays - Great Depression In The United States

Fdr And The New Deal The Great Depression was a disastrous history that affected millions of people through out the entire United States. It began in 1929 and continued on, to some point, until 1939. People lost their jobs, and families lost their homes. The country was in total chaos. Some believed that America would never recover. There were several factors that contributed to the start of the Great Depression. One of them is the crash of the stock market. It was 1929, and Republican Herbert Hoover had just been recently elected. During the previous few years, the stock market had been steadily rising, and everyone wanted their piece of the profits. By this time, over 1.5 million people owned stock in different companies. People in every kind of financial situation owned stocks. It seemed that it was an easy way to make money, and most investors were getting rich. The stock market reached its all-time high on September 3,1929. This caused even more people to buy stock. In October of 1929, however, the stock prices slowly began to decrease. This did not bother the stockholders that much because they just figured that the stocks would go back up like they always did. Unfortunately, these predictions were terribly wrong. On the 29th of October known as the Black Tuesday was just the beginning of the great depression. Shareholders rushed to sell their stocks as quickly as possible, but they found no buyers. The 24th came to be known as Black Thursday. Five days later there was a Black Tuesday. That was when more than sixteen million stocks were sold at a great loss. One stock had dropped from one hundred dollars to only three dollars per share. The President and the bankers tried to assure people that there was not a crisis and that it was only a temporary situation, but they could not have been more wrong. When the stock market crashed, it destroyed the whole economy. The great depression started form-unbalanced distribution of income and wealth. The workers wage fallen in alarming rate. By early 30's factories shut down or slowed down by the crippling economy. As an average about 100,000 workers a week got fired in the first three years after the stock market crash. When all of these workers lost their jobs, they could hardly afford to buy food or clothing, therefore, many of the stores were not making enough money to survive either. This caused more people to be fired and more businesses to shut down. It was a continuous cycle that caused the economy to get worse and worse. The unemployed people desperately needed money, so they all rushed to the banks to take their savings out. Unfortunately, most banks had also been hit hard by the crash of the stock market. The banks, like the people, had bought large amounts of stocks when they were doing so well. When the stocks dropped, they could not afford to give their customers the savings account money which they demanded. The lucky people who still had their jobs were forced to take a substantial pay cut, the average of which was about fifteen percent. Most of them were still happy because they knew that they were way better off than those people who were without work. Breadlines and soup kitchens were established by the cities to help those who had been fired. Many of the unemployed were ashamed to have to accept handouts, but they had no choice. It was the only way for them to feed their families. Only six months after the crash of the stock market, more than four million Americans had lost their jobs. Many of these people could not pay their rent, so they were forced to evacuate their houses or apartments. Despite this terrible economic situation, President Hoover was still telling the citizens of the United States that the hard times would soon end, and that they had nothing to worry about. The new problem facing the homeless was finding a place where they could take shelter. These unfortunate people could not afford their old houses and apartments, but they could not just live on the streets either. So the homeless came up