American society during the Depression

Model answer

One way was the 'penny auction': when a bank auctioned a farm, neighbours scared off other bidders, bought everything for a few cents and gave it back to the family. Another was the farm strike: in 1932 the Farmers' Holiday Association urged farmers to keep their produce off the market, and some blocked roads and poured milk away to force prices up.

Model answer

One problem was the losses banks suffered in the Wall Street Crash. In the 1920s many banks had lent large sums to people buying shares on the margin, and some had invested their customers' savings in shares themselves. When share prices collapsed in October 1929, borrowers could not repay their loans, so banks lost huge amounts of money.

A second problem was runs on the banks. When people heard that banks were in trouble, they panicked and rushed to withdraw their savings. Banks did not keep enough cash to pay everyone at once, and savings were not insured, so a run could close a bank in days and spread panic to others nearby. More than 5,000 banks failed between 1929 and 1932, with about 2,300 failures in 1931 alone.

Model answer

African Americans were affected first by losing their jobs earlier and in greater numbers than white workers. In northern cities they were usually 'last hired, first fired', so when factories cut back, Black workers went first. By 1932 about half of Black workers in some northern cities were unemployed, a much higher rate than among white workers. Even jobs that white people had previously looked down on, such as domestic service, waiting and street cleaning, were now taken by unemployed white workers, and some white groups openly demanded that Black workers be sacked.

In the South, where most African Americans still lived, the Depression ruined farming families. The price of cotton fell from about 17 cents a pound in 1929 to about 6 cents in 1932, so Black sharecroppers and tenant farmers, who were already very poor and often in debt to landowners, could not earn a living, and many were evicted from the land they worked.

These hardships were made worse by discrimination in the help that was available. Some charities and local relief agencies gave Black families less than white families or refused to help them at all, so they relied on churches and community kitchens.

Finally, the Depression increased racial tension and violence. As competition for jobs grew, lynchings in the South rose in the early 1930s, and in the Scottsboro case of 1931 nine Black teenagers in Alabama were falsely accused of rape. Overall, the Depression hit African Americans harder than most groups because it added economic disaster to the discrimination they already faced.

Model answer

Farmers suffered badly during the Depression, and their suffering had begun earlier than anyone else's. Overproduction had kept prices low throughout the 1920s, and after 1929 they collapsed: wheat fell from about 1 dollar a bushel to under 40 cents in 1932, and cotton from about 17 cents a pound to about 6 cents. Farm income fell by about two-thirds, so many farmers could not repay the loans they had taken out in the 1920s, and banks foreclosed on their farms. Some families in Iowa burned corn for fuel because it was worth less than coal. Black sharecroppers in the South were among the poorest of all, and on the southern Plains the Dust Bowl added drought and dust storms, forcing hundreds of thousands to leave for California.

Industrial workers in the cities also suffered terribly. Unemployment rose from about 1.5 million in 1929 to about 12 million in 1932, about a quarter of the workforce, and it was even higher in heavy industries; car production, for example, fell from about 4.5 million to about 1.1 million. Those still in work faced wage cuts and short time. There was no federal unemployment benefit, and many families had lost their savings in bank failures, so losing a job meant eviction, life in a Hooverville, and hours in breadlines. In March 1932, four men were killed when police and company guards fired on the Ford Hunger March in Dearborn.

Overall, I think industrial workers in the cities suffered more severely in the early 1930s. Farmers suffered for longer, but most farm families could grow at least some of their own food and, unless foreclosed, still had somewhere to live. An unemployed city worker depended entirely on wages; once they stopped, he had no food, no rent money and, with charities overwhelmed, little help. That is why the breadlines and Hoovervilles were mainly urban. However, the worst-off farmers, such as evicted sharecroppers and Dust Bowl migrants, suffered as much as anyone, so suffering depended on circumstances as well as occupation.