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How Did The Great Depression Affect Families

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On October 29, 1929 there was a devastating stock market crash known as Black Tuesday that “sent millions of investors into panic and wiped them out” History.com Staff (2009). This stock market crash led the United States to the Great Depression, less than eight months into Herbert Hoover’s Presidency . The Great Depression is known to be the longest economic crisis in the United States history. The Depression had a big impact on Americans, especially those with families to take care of. A great deal of families had to migrate from their homes to find better living and working opportunities. Families were reshaped by the Depression because of the problems they had to deal with such as unemployment, becoming homeless, and deprivation.
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When there were so many bank failures, people would lose all their money and become poor overnight. After a while this resulted in so many families becoming homeless. Many teenagers would leave home because they saw their parents struggling to find jobs and having so many mouths to feed. Some teenagers would leave to look around for work to get cash to send their family back home. Teenagers would even run away and “more than a quarter million teenagers were living on the road in America, many criss-crossing the country by illegally hopping freight trains” Uys, Michael (1997, January) Riding the Rails. Not only did teenagers do this, but farmers as well. Farmers migrating from the Dust Bowl would use the same way to get from place to place or to get to a job they heard of from miles away. People who lived in the railroads were called hobos. Homeless people later started building shanty towns made up of “shacks of wood and scraps of metal” Wild, Chris n.d. These shanty towns were later known as Hooverville because “the government failed to provide relief and President Herbert Hoover was to blame” History.com Staff (2010). Later “Franklin D. Roosevelt came into office and came up with the New Deal recovery programs that eventually helped the United States come out of the Depression” History.com Staff (2010). The Hoovervilles were later torn down in the

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