Life During The Great Depression Essay

The Experience of Life During The Great Depression

Many Americans during the 1920s were living the American dream. They had homes, loving families and well-paying jobs. The country seemed prosperous, as businesses were thriving and everyone else seemed to be as well. Suddenly everything came crumbling down after the Stock Market Crash of 1929. The once prosperous America showing great economic growth became a shell of its former glory, and the years following became known as the Great Depression. Life for Americans during the Great Depression became a hard day-to-day struggle that many families had to undergo with much resilience or with much help in order to survive.

Firstly, many people struggled to provide for their families and stay employed. According to Lapansky-Werner, Roberts, Levy and Taylor (2010), unemployment and poverty threatened workers everywhere all over the nation during the Great Depression. As unemployment rates rose, those who still had jobs

In the movie Cinderella Man, Jim Braddock said that the line he was standing in that morning had run out of soup, and because of that, he could not eat anything prior to his fight. He was referring to a breadline, which was a line of people that would form outside of charities during the Great Depression, according to Edelson and Paradis (n.d.). Jim is a good example of someone has grown dependant on charities for food, as he couldn’t afford to feed himself and his family on his own. Many families like Jim’s depended entirely on soup kitchens and breadlines as their source of food during the depression and without them, they probably would have struggled to keep their homes and families fed. If charities weren’t present and helping as many people as they did during the depression, people most certainly would not have been able to survive the extreme poverty brought on by