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Tuesday, December 9, 2014
The Unemployed During the Great Depression
During the Great Depression as we all know, many families were left out on the streets. But how many People were left Unemployed? During the worst year of the Depression it was as high as 25.1% of Americans who were left jobless. That’s a little over a quarter of the whole population having no income to feed their families and having enough for housing in an already tough situation of an economy which need no new employees. Although there was a push to have new jobs by Hoover, he insisted that local government was responsible for caring for the unemployed citizens living in clusters of makeshift unsanitary homes nicknamed “Hoovervilles”. As seen in the picture “Jobless men go home” by the Chamber of Commerce shows just how much help these people were receiving. Now this doesn’t mean they were getting no help at all as there were soup kitchens and breadlines, but not as much help as they should have gotten. It was hard enough to even wish to land a job, let alone one that pays well enough to get them out of their situation as a new home cost almost 3 times more than the average annual pay for Americans already employed. Many children were suffering from Malnutrition, for the obvious reason of their family not being able to afford food. Some unemployed teens were ashamed of burdening their families for having no job, so many decided to roam around America hitching rides on trains in a desperate search for employment. Many men women and children had to undergo though this though era to survive the Great Depression, many without help form their families or help from the government which sometimes would refuse to help because they couldn't help everybody.
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ReplyDeleteI read this article after reading this post and I am wondering whether or not Hoover would've had a chance at being reelected if he had not relied so much on local governments to fix their economies and had made more of an attempt to help his people?
ReplyDeleteI think you are right; if he had been actually getting America results like the New Deal did, he might have been reelected. Most Americans, though, blamed Hoover for the Depression as they ironically called the places they lived in Hoovervilles. Since they had this mindset, whatever he did might have not been enough to get reelected.
DeleteReally interesting post. To think that teenagers had to just leave their families because they were too much of a financial burden for their parents is heart breaking. Also in the picture is that sign posted outside of a town? If so, was it even possible to wander into a job in a different state? Your mention of Hooverville made me think of a recent article in the Mercury News. Officials in San Jose just cleared out a large homeless encampment near Coyote Creek. It was one of the largest in the Country and it had become a health hazard and drew complaints from the adjacent normal neighborhood. Even though we have no way near the scale of problems people faced in the Great Depression, we shouldn't forget that joblessness and homelessness is still a problem today.
ReplyDeleteYou bring up a lot of interesting points in your post, Jesus. The part about teenagers really got me thinking about the times for kids just like us during the Depression. I did some research and found some great sources discussing the lives of children and young adults during this time period. Here are some intriguing things I found:
ReplyDeleteMore often, a boy left the home to roam around the country, not the girl. Many people became accustomed to the sight of a homeless boy (or girl disguised as a boy) on the streets and countryside.
Sometimes, teenagers traveled in tribes of 10 to 12 people.
Some kids liked the thrill of catching a train and riding on top of the box cars through the Great Plain, and did so often for transportation and for adventure.
Source:
http://erroluys.com/RidingtheRails.htm
This is a very interesting post! Great Job! I researched more about how people would jump on trains for transportation and I found that there were many different reason for doing so. Most people used the trains to head for open jobs, some for adventure, and some just to search for a job. If there was news of an open job, there would be huge crowds of people who would travel cross-country for the job, even if there was only one position open. Although the information was not always completely trustworthy, if people had an opportunity to get a job, they would take it.
ReplyDeleteThis post is very interesting on how exactly the Great Depression affected the people of the United States. It leads me to wonder how a Great Depression like event would affect our country today. It's possible that if we were hit with yet another recession of this magnitude, that teenagers across the country would be put to work as well.
ReplyDeleteThanks Jesus, your post was really helpful in understanding the struggles Americans faced during the depression. I thought some pictures might help supplement your post. Dorothea Lange is the photographer who took the famous "Migrant Mother" photo along with many others. She started out running a successful portrait studio, but during the 30s she began photographing the effects of the depression she saw in the San Francisco neighborhood where she lived. Lange proceeded to travel extensively with her husband, who wrote reports to go with her photographs documenting the rural hardship they encountered. Check out her gallery: http://www.historyplace.com/unitedstates/lange/
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