How Did The Great Depression Affect The Economy In To Kill A Mockingbird

At the end of the 1920s, the United States bragged they were the largest economy in the world. Herbert Hoover was elected president and he predicted that the United States would soon see the day when poverty was eliminated. Unfortunately, the Stock Market Crash of 1929 sparked a chain of events that caused the United States to experience The Great Depression, the longest, deepest economic crisis of its history. It caused banks to close down and businesses to lose all their money, which led to massive layoffs. The novel, To Kill A Mockingbird, by Harper Lee, reflects these historical realities. The novel depicts the poverty and economic struggles that the people of rural Maycomb, Alabama experienced, which were exacerbated during the Great Depression. The poverty that the people experienced during the Great Depression was extremely severe. After the stock market crashed “Business houses closed their doors, factories shut down and banks failed… By 1932 approximately one out of every four Americans was unemployed” (“Depression”). By 1932 “unemployment had risen to between 12 and 15 million workers, or 25-30 percent of the work force” (“Depression”). The poverty was drastically affecting American lives, “By 1933 millions of

During the Great Depression “Farm prices in the United States dropped sharply through the whole of 1930” (Sennholz). Unfortunately for farmers “Agricultural prices had already been low during the 1920s, leaving farmers unable to spark any sort of recovery” (“The Great Depression”). Disastrously “American agriculture had been struggling as early as 1921, when commodity prices fell steadily from post-World War I highs” (Downs). The United States “stock market crash of October 1929 is often seen as the beginning of the Great Depression, in Alabama and elsewhere, the crash exacerbated an already existing decline in agriculture that had begun much earlier in the decade”