No Money and a Lot of Dust: The Great Depression and the Dust Bowl

            Imagine your life right now, in present day America. You might have heard your parents or other adults talk about how much unemployment there is, or how little good jobs there are. You might have even been told that money is tight and you can’t have that horse you wanted because it’s too expensive.

            Already, you can relate a little to the people during the 1930s. They too, didn’t have a lot of money and couldn’t afford things like cars, toys and sometimes even certain types of food.

            Add a lot of dust and no crops in the Midwestern states, and you’ve got yourself the Great Depression and Dust Bowl.

            From 1929 into the early 1940’s, money was tight and lots of men lost their jobs. If you read books about some of the kids growing up in those times, they remember wearing clothes made from chicken feed sacks and making their own toys out of whatever they found. Though it was awful how so many people were poor and without jobs, the Great Depression was also a time where families grew closer together and learned to stick through anything, no matter what.

A little boy holding a sign in front of a company, hoping to get his dad a job.

            What caused people to become so poor? Why wasn’t there a lot of money? Why was it called the Great Depression?

            For starters, let me give you a crash course on economics.

            Now before you turn your nose up at the thought, I’ll be the first to tell you that economics are an important part of learning history. As we learned in Panning for Trouble, where the Deputy tried to take Marin’s and my gold claim, money can be the root of all kinds of evil. And money is what fuels the economy.

            It began at the end of WWI. (Back then it was known as the Great War, WWII hadn’t happened yet so why would they call it WWI until the second one came along? Unless someone told them it was coming... Anyways back to the subject!) The United States emerged from the war as the biggest economic power in the world. We were well off and everyone had an extra dollar or two in their pocket. That’s because during the war the government had inflated money, which means they printed a lot of it to finance the expenses of the war. Now there was a lot of money around, so everyone had more than before.

            The banks came up with this great idea. Why not loan people money on this thing called credit and have them pay it back with interest? That way the banks could make more money and the people could buy what they wanted sooner.

            So that’s exactly what happened-during the “Roaring Twenties” people could loan money from the bank, buy a house or car and pay the bank back slowly when they could afford it. This went well for a while, until the stock market became the “in” thing to invest in. I won’t get into stocks, it’s really complicated and doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. Let’s just say that you buy something like, oh, we’ll say cheeseballs. So you buy part of a share into a company making cheeseballs, and suddenly cheeseballs are what everyone eats. Because you paid the company to make cheeseballs they pay you back interest and you make more than you put into the business, because the Cheeseball Company is making a lot of money.

A newspaper that proclaims the great crash known as Black Thursday.

            That’s what a lot of people were doing, buying into things until prices soared. But, as the saying goes, “what comes up must come down.”

            And it did. To this day its known as Black Thursday, when the entire stock market came crashing down on October 29^th, 1929.

A week later all of the United States felt the effect of the crash. Banks that had invested the money people had put into their accounts closed-they lost everything in the stock market. People who’d bought things like cars and houses on credit suddenly couldn’t pay for it anymore, and companies closed. Men were out of the job and some families became homeless. It was a vicious cycle of several key factors: credit, stocks and debt.

            On top of all that a drought began in Arkansas in 1930. Pretty soon the dry winds and desert-like conditions spread to parts of Texas, Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico and even Colorado. They all began to experience horrific dust storms and no rain. Now the farmers were out of the job. Without rain they couldn’t grow food. And they couldn’t pay the rent.

            Hundreds of farming families left the areas affected by the Dust Bowl and headed to California, where it was heard that there was plenty of jobs in the “Golden State.” (Sound like another time period we just studied? Hmm…) What they found instead was a lot of sun and not as many jobs as they hoped.

            All over the United States families were affected by the Depression and Dust Bowl. What were they to do? How would they find jobs? Where would they raise their children? Parents were plagued by these questions and more as they struggled to raise their families. The children, on the other hand, only recall all the fun they had when they were younger. For a family night they might sit around the radio and listen to the Shadow or Lone Ranger, thrilled by the adventures of their favorite heroes. The kids amused themselves by creating games, from playing cowboys and Indians to creating toys out of wood and rocks. It was the parents that had the hardest time during the Depression, they did their best to shelter their children from the worries.

            That isn’t to say all families were sheltered, some kids watched as their fathers left to find work. Men would jump on trains and travel the USA to find jobs, earning the title hobos. Sometimes tragedy struck, when a train jumper might miss his mark and fall to his death. Mothers were left widowed and children were left fatherless. In all honesty it was an uncertain time for America.

            Believe it or not, the Depression also had a global affect, the entire world was suffering from unemployment and decrease of income. This actually led to the rising of dictators like Adolf Hitler, who got elected to be chancellor in Germany because he promised to end the Depression. As we all know, this would lead to greater consequences in the years to come.

Dust billowing towards the farms in the Midwest.

            How did America get out of this Depression? What was the turning point that got them back under their feet and men with jobs again?

            A couple of factors played into that. Though you might hear it was because of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, that wasn’t entirely true. It helped, but it didn’t end the Depression.

            When President Roosevelt was elected (more commonly known as FDR) he got to work creating government projects that gave men jobs. They then put these guys to work on projects like building the Grand Coulee Dam, highways and interstates as well as tree logging and forest clearing. The New Deal also provided money for the elderly, the disabled and children as well as paid farmers not to grow too many crops so that there would be enough jobs for everyone. Though there’s a lot of speculation as to if these choices were good long term, they did a good job helping at the time getting America out of the hole it had fallen into.

            The second big factor that got America out of the Great Depression was, sadly, WWII. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, soldiers were drafted, factories began producing planes and war materials and rationing brought the prices up again. The largest war on earth was to help get a lot of countries out of the bad economy they’d created for themselves.

            Though the Depression and Dust Bowl were a trying time on millions of people, they did help knit a closer relationship between families as they worked together to get out of the financial situations they found themselves in. That within itself without the trials is what helps us remember it today.

            Here’s something about the Depression and Dust Bowl you may not know!

            Have you ever sang the song This Land? You know, “This land is your land, this land is my land, from California, to the New York Island.” Yeah, that song. It was written by a guy named Woody Guthrie, who saw firsthand the trials and devastation families faced as they struggled to keep their children fed and find a place to live. You may have known that, but how many of you knew that Woody Guthrie was asked by the US Government to write a song about the Grand Coulee Dam? Well, he was, and he did write it! You can listen to the song, Grand Coulee Dam, here at this link. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vLZOKshJPs

Today in History:

           

            Join us next week when we give you some good ol’ historical fiction stories to read on the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. And believe us, there’s a lot of them!