Black Tuesday: The Cause Of The Great Depression

Elizabeth Warren, Senator of Massachusetts, described America’s economy as a boom an and bust economy leading up to the Great Depression. She explained because of the economy’s sporadic growth and decline that kept repeating, the outcomes of it were, “fortunes were wiped out, ordinary families were crushed under it.” The unfortunate event in U.S History caused many families across the country, particularly to the working class, to live in poverty due to the declining economy and employment instabilities. Franklin Roosevelt, the 32nd U.S President, created a series of programs called the “New Deal” that helped those who were in poverty in these dire times. The New Deal programs sparked a controversial topic of poverty being a problem of circumstances,

Some issues were the war in Europe that caused the American economy to weaken, the shifting economy that was built on heavy industry was changing into consumerism, and President Herbert Hoover’s philosophy of government should not interfere with the economy and fixing it were possible reasons why the economy was failing. The effects of the Great Depression impacted the American economy hard with the poor working class citizens being hit with most of the problems. Franklin Roosevelt took office between 1929 and 1933, and saw the economic freefall that impacted the nation economy, “farm prices, wages, exports, imports, gross national product … [There were] bank failures and farm disclosures skyrocketed” (Rural Poverty PDF, 208). The income for many families was reduced and farmers in the south and southwest region of the U.S met unprecedented ecological issues of dust storms and a massive drought. This caused the region to be called the Dust Bowl due to these ecological problems and made the farmland useless. With many farms being disclosed, families became homeless and jobless and were put in an unfortunate circumstance that they could not control and this lead to many children and teenagers of these displaced families to write to Eleanor Roosevelt for

Its original purpose before the Great Depression was to make reforms about the issue of child labor, but Franklin Roosevelt created Resettlement Administration (RA) to put barren lands into use and that administration would later become the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Roy Stryker oversaw the Historical Section of the FSA and he hired photographers to visually document the crisis the farmers in the Dust Bowl were having and to show the public in the city what other people in the U.S were facing. Many FSA photos shown the rural poverty these farmers having, an example would be Arthur Rothstein’s photo, “Farm Family from Cimarron County, Oklahoma” taken in 1936 (source 12). In Rothstein’s picture, it depicts a man with his two sons trying to reach for shelter. The background displays a dark murky scene that look like the family is in a dust storm. This is also evident as one of the younger son is covering their face as they approach the house. Their house is also small and looks like it is in disrepair with holes in the wall. The ground also like sand signifying this was once a fertile farmland that eroded because of extensive use of farming that make the land infertile. The family most likely stay here, even though they were living in poverty, because it was most likely their land they own and did not want to leave it. Another reason could be that even if they