Hey everyone, it's Mr. Drake. This video will be talking about the most uplifting topic, the Great Depression. Specifically, the initial reaction to it by the government. The Great Depression lasts about 10 years from when it started in 1929. This video will cover up through 1932 or so.
So basically, the worst years of the Depression and what the government endeavored to do about it at the time. So, uh... To start off, just for some context, how bad was the Great Depression?
The answer to that is pretty freaking bad. 1932 is usually considered the worst year of the Depression. It's when the most banks closed because they didn't have enough funds on hand to give money to the people who deposited their money, so they all lost it and all of that.
And the unemployment rate by 1932 had spiked to an estimated 25%. which is the highest it had been in United States history up to that point. And we have never hit 25% unemployment since.
For some context, during the Great Recession of the late 2000s, early 2010s, the unemployment rate got to about 13% to 15% at its absolute worst. At the beginning of the COVID pandemic in 2020, we were looking at maybe 17% to 20%, something like that. So the Great Depression, again, even. worse. And this leads to massive impacts on America's social fabric.
Homelessness becomes rampant because people could not afford their mortgages and they lost their homes. And if they were in the West, of course, they lost their farms. You began to see people living in tent cities all over the country, especially in large cities or shantytowns. Picture there on the top of one of those.
Those become known as Hoovervilles, which we'll talk about why later on in this video. Bread lines, soup kitchens become the most common way for a lot of people to get food. These were not funded by the federal government.
Sometimes state governments helped fund food distribution to the poor, but usually this was like private charities or churches, Salvation Army organizations like that. And by the mid-1930s, things were even worse in the Great Plains and in the western states because of the Dust Bowl. So you have the Great Depression coupled with basically a climate disaster, a massive drought with dust storms and all of that, which leads to a lot of farmers having to leave their land and head west in search of work and money and all of that. So, yes, the country, it seemed to a lot of people at this time, was basically falling apart.
Um, and impact on the families were huge, uh, as well. A lot of times men left their families to go look for work, um, and essentially became drifters, uh, you know, hobos, uh, as it were, you know, riding the rails, um, uh, sneaking on, you know, stowing away on trains, going across the country, trying to find any work where they can make a little bit of money and send it back to their families. Um, whole families became, you know, groups of migrants who were. traveling around looking for work. The picture there on the bottom is probably the most famous enduring image of the Great Depression.
It's called Migrant Mother, which is a picture taken in 1936 of a woman named Florence Thompson who was traveling west with her family in search of agricultural work. They were looking to work in lettuce fields. She had five or six kids, including a small child you can see there in the bottom. Right.
And just to show how hard the depression was on a lot of these people who endured it. If you look at that picture, I don't know what your first impression is of her age. But when this picture was taken, Florence Thompson was only 32 years old. And I know when I first saw this picture when I was in high school, I thought she was, you know, maybe their grandmother.
I mean, she looks so much, you know, so worn down, but but was relatively young. So just shows how rough it was. The birth rate in America plummets in the 30s because people couldn't afford to have kids.
They couldn't support them if they did have kids. The marriage rate goes down because men are traveling around looking for work and are not settling down with people. And so, yes, the impact on American society was terrific during this time. So what does the government do?
At first, not a lot. Um, Herbert Hoover is the president. Uh, he is the third in a line of three consecutive, very conservative, very pro business laissez faire. uh, small government Republicans, you know, started with Harding in the early twenties, then the Coolidge and then to Hart, uh, Hoover got elected in 1928. Um, was the depression Hoover's fault?
No, not really. Um, but, uh, you know, he, he kind of obviously was responsible for, um, the aftermath of it. Um, but he and a lot of other people, uh, in his party and in his government believed that eventually, invisible hand of capitalism would right the ship and they would get back to prosperity. By 1930-31, it was becoming pretty apparent that was not going to happen, that more measures needed to be taken. And so the government begins to take some kind of half-hearted measures to try to create jobs, to try to stimulate American business and all of that.
ends up not doing a whole lot of good in the end. In some cases, it makes things worse. For example, the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, which was passed in 1930, which passed tariff rates that were about as high as they had ever been in American history, other than maybe the tariff abominations from the Andrew Jackson era. This backfired because tariff rates on imports were so high that a lot of countries end up passing retaliatory tariffs to...
to jack up the cost of American goods overseas. So that essentially makes foreign trade go down even more and ends up making things even worse for American businesses because they couldn't sell their goods domestically because no one had any money and they couldn't sell them overseas either because the tariffs are too high. So it ends up actually being counterproductive. You begin to see some public works projects pop up.
For example, the Hoover Dam, which was a... built, uh, West in, uh, beginning in 1931. Um, it was called the Hoover Dam by, um, uh, the government. Uh, that name was taken away, uh, from it, uh, during the, during the Roosevelt administration, but it was renamed the Hoover Dam, uh, after, uh, Roosevelt died in the late 1940s.
Um, but again, there aren't a lot of examples of things like the Hoover Dam. It's not like during the, uh, Roosevelt presidency where you begin to have large-scale public works projects across the country. We'll talk more about that if you're one of my students in the coming days and weeks. But that was seen as a way to create some hydroelectric power out west in areas that didn't have a lot of electricity. And also, again, creating jobs building a giant concrete dam on the Colorado River.
The Reconstruction Finance Corporation was an organization that was founded in 1932 to provide money to businesses and to banks to kind of bail them out and keep them afloat. That organization actually existed into the 1950s. It was abolished by Dwight Eisenhower in 1957 or so. But again, doesn't do a ton of good. Does keep some bank going, keep some banks from failing, but it does not do anything to really pull America out of the lurch that it was in during that worst phase of the...
of the Great Depression. So Hoover's actual downfall comes in the summer of 1932. FDR, Franklin Roosevelt, who was the governor of New York, had been nominated by the Democrats. He was promising what he called a New Deal for the American people.
He didn't exactly specify what that was, but he made mention of public works projects, regulation of business and financial industry and stuff like that. And so, you know, Herbert Hoover probably didn't stand much of a chance in 1932. He was being blamed for the Depression. You know, they called the shantytowns Hoovervilles.
People with their pockets turned out, like empty pockets that are inside out, were called Hooverflags. And again, the Great Depression, you know, probably not really Hoover's fault. He was only president for a few months when it started. But he certainly was left holding the bag when everything started and took the blame for it.
The final nail in Hoover's coffin happens in the summer of 1932 in Washington, D.C. with the riot of the Bonus Army. So a little bit of background here. Back before World War II, before the GI Bill and veterans benefits and stuff like that, the U.S. government would pay bonuses to veterans of war, going as far back as the American Revolution.
The bonus... for World War I veterans, which was passed in 1924, basically said that all World War I veterans, or as they were called then, World War veterans, would get a dollar for every day they were in the army. domestically and $1.25 for every day they served overseas up to $625, which doesn't seem like a lot, but adjusted for inflation, it's about $10,000. It's not a paltry sum. It's not too bad.
And during the Depression, that money would have been pretty handy. The catch was that when it was passed in 1924, it was part of the law that the bonus would not be paid out until 1945. And the World War I veterans and veterans of foreign wars and American Legion and all those organizations began pushing for the bonus to be paid early to help the veterans who were, you know, starving, unemployed as a result of the Depression. And so a lot of these World War veterans start traveling to Washington, D.C.
to lobby congressmen and I guess the president to, you know, authorize early payment of the bonuses. And. They set up Hoovervilles, basically shantytowns and tent cities along the river in Washington. They occupied some empty buildings, became squatters more or less. And after they'd been there for a few weeks, Hoover authorized the army, led by Douglas MacArthur, who would end up being a pretty significant general during World War II in Korea, to remove the squatters.
from the city. And this was taken to an extreme by MacArthur and his subordinates, and they essentially just rolled on these bonus marchers. And they, you know, it was not a pretty look. There was film of this that was broadcast in movie theaters, like newsreels around the country, but you've got like the army and DC police attacking World War veterans who were starving and just wanted money, right? burned down their tent cities, two veterans ended up being killed, many, many, many more injured, right?
It was a disaster. I mean, just from a public relations standpoint for Hoover, it looked terrible. It was said that FDR saw footage of this and looked at his aides and said, looks like I'm going to be elected. Because from that point, it was just, you know, there's no way that Hoover was going to recover from this.
And you see there, the Electoral College map of 1932, where FDR sweeps into office, wins the popular vote by 17%, and he wins all but six states in the Electoral College. A little bit of a postscript to FDR being elected, he doesn't take office until March of 1933. This was before the 20th Amendment, so the lame duck period was longer. And during this time, Hoover kept proposing new ways to try to stimulate the economy or support banks and industries and stuff like that. And FDR wouldn't do it because he didn't want to be tied to Hoover. Basically at this point, you know, Hoover was toxic and FDR didn't want anything to do with him.
And so FDR wouldn't support anything Hoover tried to do and leads to a lot of animosity. And during that period, the depression ends up getting even worse. And so by the time FDR takes the oath of office on March 4th, 1933, things are really, really bad.
And it's going to take a large effort on the part of the government to kind of, again, pull the country out of this. All right, that will do it. Feel free to leave comments or questions down below.
And let me know if you're one of my students if you have any questions. Cheers.