The Great Depression Begins

1. The Great Depression Begins Life During the Depression

2. The Depression Worsens • -Living in Makeshift Villages • Homeless and unemployed Americans wander around the country, walking, hitchhiking, or, most often, “riding the rails.” Those who rode the rails were known as hobos. • Many people who lost their homes lived in make-shift tents formed from cardboard, blankets, newspapers, or whatever else people could find. These “neighborhoods” were called shantytowns and were nicknamed “Hooverville” after the president.

3. The Dust Bowl • In 1932 a terrible drought struck the Great Plains. Neither grass nor wheat would grow as the soil dried out. • A dust storm struck the area blackening the skies and delivering dust as far as the Atlantic Ocean. • Farmers who were already struggling from low crop prices, were devastated.

4. Escaping the depression • To help themselves from constantly worrying about the depression, Americans turned to entertainment to take their minds off their troubles. • Walt Disney produced the first feature-length animated film: • Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs • Scarlett O`Harra was a character in the four hour movie Gone With the Wind about a Georgia plantation owner during the Civil War who struggles to maintain her life. • Marlene Dietrich was a film star who fled to Hollywood to escape hardship in Europe • Many Americans listened to the radio which produced radio shows such as The Green Hornet, The Guiding Light (soap opera), and The Lone Ranger (about a hero who fought injustice in the old west with his side-kick and “faithful Indian companion” --Tonto)

5. The depression in art • John Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath—the story of an Oklahoma family who lost everything and flees to California to find a new life—which characterized what many Americans were going through at the time