The Great Depression

Within two years of the 1929 stock market crash, economic depression was worldwide. In the United States, the drop in the gross national product (the amount of goods and services produced in a year) by 1933 sent that index lower than it had been in twenty years. Because of widespread poverty, the country's production capacity far outstripped the ability of consumers to buy. Factories closed, and young men wandered the country searching for work. Unemployment soared from a pre-crash rate of just over 3 percent to more than 25 percent in 1933. Farmers began dumping or holding back their products to protest the low prices they were receiving, which was not enough to cover the cost of growing the food.

The results for poor and middle-class Americans were disastrous. Many families lived in small shantytowns called Hoovervilles (after Herbert Hoover, the president at the time of the crash) on the...