The Great Depression (1929–41) that started with the stock market crash of October 29, 1929, affected almost every part of people's lives during the 1930s. The optimism of the 1920s slowly faded as various efforts to "fix" the economic downturn did not work. More and more people lost their jobs and could not find others. Americans suffered as they never had before. Record numbers of people were unemployed. Nearly one million people paraded in towns across the country in "hunger marches" in 1930. For the elderly who lost their life savings in the stock market crash and for those who had purchased on credit and now did not have jobs to support their payments, the 1930s were a disaster. Thousands of sharecroppers in the South—tenant farmers who bought on credit—were unable to pay their landlords and were thrown off their farms. Millions of children lost the...