Faces Of Poverty In America

Faces of Poverty In the United States, the Great Depression started soon after the stock market crash of October 1929, which sent Wall Street into a panic and wiped out millions of investors. The Great Depression was the deepest and longest-lasting economic downturn in the history of the Western industrialized world. Over the next few years spending and investment stopped causing steep declines in industrial output and rising levels of unemployment as failing companies laid off workers. Times were tough, and by 1933, 13 to 15 million Americans were unemployed and nearly half of the country’s banks had failed. The Dust Bowl was the name given to the Great Plains area when devastated by drought during the 1930s. In the midst of the Great Depression, the states of Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, Colorado, and New Mexico experienced little
When drought struck between 1934 to 1937, the soil lacked grass as an anchor so winds picked up the topsoil and swirled it into dust clouds called, “black blizzards”. These reoccurring dust storms choked cattle and caused chaos driving most of the population west. Poverty, land foreclosures, and drought forced them out of Lower Plain states. Most of the dust bowlers went to agricultural rich states, such as California in search of work. Desperate, hungry, and homeless these migrant families set out on journeys to the unknown. Many loaded a few belongings into their beat-up, old, and raggedy vehicles with only enough money for gas and little food. The book, The Harvest Gypsies by John Steinbeck, played a significant role in the federal Resettlement Administration policies. Steinbeck’s descriptive articles were important because they reflected the reality of starving