Wonderful Life Themes

Imagine this. You wake up one morning in the year 1929, in your luxurious, pricey mansion. You then make your way downstairs to eat that nice big breakfast. Then you kiss your family good bye and head off to your fancy job. You come home that evening and suddenly you’re flat broke. Meaning all your money and life’s savings vanished. Unreal right? Well it was real for hundreds of families on October 29, 1929. The day the stock market crashed and when America’s confidence was challenged greatly.

People lost the ability to pay for things they once owned. People bought many things on margin in the years before the depression, they soon found this to be a rather unwise practice as they could no longer afford these purchases once the depression hit. Millions were out a job, and soon their homes followed; foreclosed on by the banks, the items they once purchased sold back. This left many families with little possessions and even fewer places to turn to and many ended up in shanty towns and Hoovervilles. There they lived out of cars and in makeshift tents like the family in picture 5. These places were overrun with undernourished people that rarely had their basic human needs

The stock market crash of 1929 sent the nation spiraling into a state of economic paralysis that became known as the Great Depression. As industries shrank and businesses collapsed or cut back, up to 25% of Americans were left unemployed. At the same time, the financial crisis destroyed the life savings of countless Americans (Modern American Poetry). Food, housing and other consumable goods were in short supply for most people (Zinn 282). This widespread state of poverty had serious social repercussions for the country.

In one scene, James was walking home from the docks and passed a newspaper that read "Unemployed hits record 15,000,000". About 25% of the American workforce was unemployed by the end of 1933, so this movie correctly shows the situation in the economy. In another scene, James was walking by stores where the lights were off and the windows were empty. This proves that these stores went out of business, which occurred during the Great Depression because the money that businesses spent on stocks was lost in the crash. In the scene where Mike and James were at a bar, they talked about how they lost their money on stocks in the crash, and how the government took away Mike's house. Many people invested in stocks, and the crash caused them to lose money, jobs, and homes from this. Given these points, the movie accurately presented the trough, but also the lives of

The stock market crash signaled the beginning of the great depression, the crash alone did not cause the great depression but it quickened it arrival. The source of income for this family living in Kansas was difficult because they have a Farm and due to the dust bowl, it ruined that which means no income for the family. The family is affected by the following factors of the great depression because now they can not afford to feed their children and themselves as well, have a clean environment for their children so they don't get sick, be able to promise their children that everything will be okay when in fact everything wasn't in that given time period because anything could've happened. The fact that their is a big amount of children in the family makes it far more difficult to get things done, and possibly travel to a better

The stock market crash, called Black Tuesday. Unequal distribution of wealth was a key factor during the time period as well. The day know as “Black Tuesday” was the day the stock market crashed. This led to the fall of stock prices, in fear, people sold their stocks and gathered the money they could. The people who didn’t, lost all of their stocks. Those who bought them on credit, they were now in debt. Investors lost a collective amount equal to the amount spent in WWI, that’s billions of dollars gone, approximately thirty-two billion dollars (32,000,000,000). As bad as the crash was, unequal distribution of wealth did not help. The rich saw an income increase of 70%, and the poor saw an increase of 9%. More than 70% of families earned less than $2500/year. Many of these families couldn't afford household products, such as the flood of overproduced goods. Only one out of ten families owned an electric refrigerator. One thing many people overlook when on the subject of the Great Depression is the president's influence on the situation. The two presidents during this time were Herbet Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Hoover was in office during the collapse of the economy, he didn’t believe in national relief, he believed in self-prevalence and self-help. His beliefs didn’t get the confidence of the people, in 1933, a fourth of working American’s were out of a job, that’s more than fifteen million people unemployed. Many people disliked Hoover, so when they needed to make a home out of paper, glass, tin, or whatever they could find, they named the towns constructed from these items “Hoovervilles”. They were found mostly on the outside of cities. Hoover's idea of self-reliance didn’t get him reelected, he lost to Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933. Roosevelt brought forward a new strategy to take on the economic problems, it was called the New Deal. The New Deal was a series of actions him and his

Americans living our time period today, 2010 have a lot of the same similarities as the Americans living in the period of 1934. One of the main similarities is the amount of spending. During 1934 Americans loved to buy things just like Americans due during this time today. Americans in 2010 are said to spend almost three times more then the people that lived five years ago, similar to the people who were a major cause of the Great Depression. Recently last March America faced another Stock Market crash; this one was not at all as severe as the one at the time of the Great Depression. This crash did in fact really hurt families all over our nation though similar to the Great Depression. Families are getting wrenched out of their homes because they cannot pay the bills. Businesses are having to fire an immense portion of there staff because the business cannot afford to pay that may employees. Just like the time of the Great

The Great Depression in the U.S history was a time where there was very little jobs and some money. Banks had very little money so most people couldn’t get money out. It was a hard time in U.S history for people when this was going on. The stock market crash a horrible time for people when they had some money and very little jobs. Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to help by creating The New Deal. The great dustbowl affected farmers and the change in farming affected the economy. In the novel To Kill a Mockingbird, the author Harper Lee illustrates The Great Depression was a worldwide economic slump of the 1930’s.

In 1912, the stock market took one of the biggest crashes ever. Document four shows how all stock markets were hit, including the wealthy ones. Bank failure, buying on the margin, and underconsumption, just to name a few, are all economic causes of this. Due to this, everyone lost their money no matter who they were or how they managed their money. The people who did not go through the depression were very judgemental during during this time period. This is explained by the political cartoon in document three. This impacted society because people who had their own money in the bank though they were protected, but it hit them just as bad as it hit everyone else. The dust bowl was another impact on society during the Great

The United States during the 1920’s were some of the best and fun years there were. Everybody always went to parties, invested in stocks, made money, and spent it as quickly as they got it. In 1929, the stock market crashed which ultimately turned the roaring twenties into the Great Depression. The effects of the Great Depression was a rocket high in the number of unemployment. People went from riches to rags, and started losing trust in banks which destroyed the economy and pushed the business cycle into a new phase worse than anybody had ever seen or experienced. The “business cycle” was a template for how most economists and politicians explained the economy and gave it reasoning.

The Great Depression was a major effect on the economy, and it affected the supply and demand of the United States. Before the Great Depression hit, people were building a large amount of things,and once the Great Depression hit people had all of the supplies with nobody to buy them. Businesses went out of business, and people lost their jobs because their employer could no longer afford to pay them. Some homeless people, known as ‘hobos’, would gather together and make homes of whatever scraps they could find. Soon, so many people lost their houses and were resorted to living in “Hoovervilles”, Hoovervilles were a interpretation of regular towns, that were just made of scraps that they were able to find. The prices for farm grown food were low, so the farmers thought if they planted more food that they would make their money back. Doing that only made the prices drop even more due to farmers having such a large supply, and not enough

This is when the people began to realize that their economy was in shambles. At this point, people essentially started to lose everything. They only money that they had was what was in their pockets. Following the stock market crash a domino effect occurred in which people became unemployed and were deep in poverty. Due to the bank being supported by the stock market, it was inevitable that the Great Depression would occur since it affected every aspect of the

After a while, many businesses went bankrupt, leaving business owners with bills that went unpaid. Luckily, after World War I ended, America had become one of the world’s leading creditors. By this time, Americans, with full confidence of being prosperous forever, were increasingly investing in stocks. Unexpectedly, in the days of 29 October 1929 the stock market had crashed. Banks that had invested heavily on stock market and real estate now had lost most of their money. There is only little money left in the country by now; the period of Great Depression had arrived

Throughout history, one of the most well known events that not only affected America, but the whole world, was the Stock Market Crash of 1929. Occurring on Black Tuesday, the crash brought depression and devastation. Though not every American felt the impact of the stock market crash, others lost everything. In Of Mice and Men, George and Lennie were two men who were struggling to make ends meet, so they needed to find a steady job that could hold them over until the depression lifted and Stock Market rose again. George and Lennie lost everything during the Great Depression including their vision of the American Dream, their money, and each other.

What caused the financial crisis to happen? The origin of the crisis, the film argues, can be traced back to the 1980s, when the process of deregulation was eagerly implemented under the Reagan Era. Prior to the emergence of Reaganomics, the financial industry was tightly regulated following the Great Depression. Most of the banks were local and were prohibited from speculating customers’ deposits (brought by the Glass-Steagall Act), while the investment banks were modest and private. However, everything changed after 1980, when Ronald Reagan became president and the U.S economy entered a thirty-year phase of deregulation. Financial institutions, which included commercial and investment banks then embarked on the process of maximizing profit by making risky investments with the depositors’ money. By the end of the decade, saving and loans companies went bankrupt, causing tax payers to lose more than one hundred billion dollars. However, the government did not implement any reform and deregulation continued to take place under the Clinton