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1930-1940 Essay

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1930-1940

The 1930s brought a very turbulent time to the United States. As a result of the Stock Market Crash of 1929, the nation was experiencing a severe depression. There were hard class divisions dividing the nation. People were either extremely rich or extremely poor. The middle class simply did not exist (Bondi 97). On March 4, 1933 Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office with the promise of hope and relief for struggling Americans. Roosevelt followed up his promise for help with the New Deal, his plan to combat the depression. The New Deal involved the three R’s: relief, recovery and reform. It included measures concerning banking, securities, industry, and agriculture (Bondi 97).

Roosevelt won reelection in 1936 and the economy …show more content…

This led to World War II which began on September 3, 1939 when Great Britain and France declared war on Germany (Bondi 22). Also in the 1930s, the Hindenburg exploded in the air killing thirty-six passengers. The Hindenburg was a blimp that provided trans-Atlantic air service between Germany and America. The explosion was a great blow to the prestige of the Nazi regime (Kirshon 676).

In the 1930s, Surrealism developed in art with an emphasis on content and free form (Brittanica). As a part of the surrealist movement, Salvador Dali painted "Persistence of Memory. However, Dali was expelled from Europe’s Surrealists for his support of Franco in the Spanish civil war (Burne 996). In the United States, art was depicting regions. Regionalism was an artistic or literary style that was tied to American landscape. Painters such as Grant Wood and John Stuart Curry painted the landscape while writers such as Steinbeck and Farrell wrote about specific regions in their works (Bondi 44). Depression Modernism also developed in the United States. This movement brought gleaming black glass, black Vitrolite, chrome, Micarta, and peach-tinted mirrors (Grief 1). According to the author, "Streamlining became the vogue-in furniture and clothing, clocks, and typewriters, toasters, and vacuum cleaners, but especially in houses, public buildings, airplanes, railway trains, and automobiles"(Greif 193). Russell Wright was an artist that took part in this unique movement

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