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Effects Of The Dust Bowl And The Dust Bowl

Decent Essays

Claire rubin
The Great Depression and Dust Bowl
The 1930s were a time of hardship for the citizens living in The United States. The Dust Bowl and The Great Depression brought on many substantial consequences that affected many family’s lives entirely. The Great Depression was mainly caused by the stock market crash of 1929. Banks lost all of their money, therefore people were not able to retrieve the money that they had deposited in the bank. The Dust Bowl was a decade long dust storm that brought up farmland and carried it with the winds of the storm. Before the Dust Bowl, the farms had stripped the farmland of the moisture by over using the land, and when the drought came the land became especially susceptible to the winds that came shortly thereafter. The Dust Bowl and the Great Depression made thousands of people in the U.S. unemployed, the typical family dynamic changed, and people lost homes. Firstly, poverty brought on by the Great Depression spread throughout the country and made unemployment increase significantly. The output of crops in the Midwest significantly decreased because of the winds and dirt deposits onto the crops of the Dust Bowl. In Text 4, Franklin Delano Roosevelt states, “a host of unemployed citizens face the grim problem of existence…. Our greatest primary task is to put people to work.” The quote represents the fact that unemployment in America was in such a bad spot where the government needed to step in and help the majority of the people who were not financially stable. Another cause why American economy crashed is because employers realized that people would do anything for work and work for just about anything, so their immediate response was to lower worker’s wages so the employers made more money. It says in Text 3, “The volume of manufactured goods dropped sharply, as did the national payroll. The response was to lay off workers, slash dividends, reduce inventories, cut remaining wages, forgo improvements and reduce production.” The quote depicts economic struggles workers dealt with throughout the Great Depression and Dust Bowl. Overall, unemployment gripped the workforce of America, making it the worst economic depression America has ever been in.
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