Hard Times: The Great Depression

Charlie Chaplin in City Lights (1931)

"Destitute Pea Pickers in California." Nipomo, California, February 1936. Photograph by Dorothea Lange.

"Migratory family traveling across the desert in search of work..." Dorothea Lange.

Farmer and sons walking in the face of a dust storm. Cimarron County, Oklahoma, April 1936. Photograph by Arthur Rothstein.

“Toward Los Angeles, California”Dorothea Lange (1937)

Russell Lee, “The Faro Caudill family eating dinner in their dugout” Pie Town, New Mexico, October 1940

Russell Lee, “Jack Whinery, homesteader, and his family”, Pie Town, NM, October 1940

Russell Lee, “Garden adjacent to the dugout home of Jack Whinery, homesteader” Pie Town, NM, September1940

Causes of the Great Depression

• Structural weaknesses of the banking system?

• Unequal distribution of wealth?• Changing nature of economy?• Fiscal orthodoxy?• Economic nationalism?• Fall in money supply?

“We in America today are nearer to

the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the

history of any land.”

Herbert Hoover(1928)

http://teachpol.tcnj.edu/amer_pol_hist/thumbnail342.html

Bonus Army March (1932)

Hoovervilles

Squatters’ shacks along the Willamette River in Portland, Oregon.Arthur Rothstein (1936)

1928 Presidential Election

1932 Presidential Election

FDR’s First Inaugural Address, 1933

The New Dealers• Henry Wallace• Harold Ickes • Francis Perkins• Harry Hopkins• Raymond Moley• Rexford Tugwell• William Woodin• Lewis Douglas

Eleanor Roosevelt

The New Deal Coalition

• Southern Whites• African Americans • Organised Labour• Midwestern

farmers