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The Great Depression: The Great Crash of 1929 and its fallout

Even today, the causes of the Great Depression are hotly debated by historians. Yet certain facts about the era cannot be denied. During the so-called 'Roaring 20s' more than half of the nation lived at or below the poverty line. This was during an era where there were few available social support structures to help individuals who were struggling or destitute (Johnson 1997: 661). Demand for consumer goods was not keeping pace with supply. Fewer and fewer people had the monetary resources to buy the fruits of rampant over-production. Consumer debt was also at a record high. American banks had lent recklessly during the 2920s, and the international economy was in a fragile state, due to the poor economic health of the European powers ("The Great Depression, the Great Depression Causes," 2011).

Despite the controversy regarding what systemic factor was most to blame for the Great Depression, it seems difficult to deny that a lack of government regulation of the economy caused an imbalance of wealth between the haves and the have-nots of America during the Wall Street boom. Much of the wealth of the 'haves' was based upon paper, or money being used to make money, rather than actual assets. A lack of government intervention caused poverty to increase and financial speculation to spiral out of control. Government inaction also exacerbated the agricultural crisis in the Midwest. In the nation's heartland, poor soil conservation methods and a lack of government oversight of agriculture had resulted in the natural disaster of the Dust Bowl -- a natural disaster that did not have to happen.

Speculation in stocks was the main, immediate reason for the crash, and once again the government did not intervene, even while the crisis unfolded. At the time, the stock market was virtually unregulated. Investors, small and large, had gotten in the habit of buying stocks on credit or 'on margin,' with "the only requirement that they put 10% down. In other words, they could buy $100 worth of stock for a $10 investment, and if that stock went up by a mere 10%, they'd doubled their investment" ("The Great Depression, the Great Depression Causes," 2011). Unsurprisingly, there was a great incentive to engage speculation, and prices for relatively worthless stock grew artificially high.

On the days leading up to the Great Crash, the dangers of a lack of government regulation became particularly manifest. On Friday, "horrified brokers watched the selling orders accumulate. It wasn't a flood; it was a deluge. Everybody wanted to sell -- the man with five shares and the man with ten thousand" (Leonard 1944). By Monday, Wall Street had "lit up like a Christmas tree. Restaurants, barber shops, and speakeasies were open and doing a roaring business. Messenger boys and runners raced through the streets whooping and singing at the tops of their lungs. Slum children invaded the district to play with balls of ticker tape" (Leonard 1944). This eyewitness account underlines the fact that crash did not happen in one night -- yet on the weekend between the selling off of stock on Friday and Monday, the government did nothing. By Tuesday, the debacle was complete: "In the first half hour 3,259,800 shares were traded, almost a full day's work for the laboring machinery of the Exchange" (Leonard 1944).

In 1929, countless fortunes were lost on Wall Street. In 1930, a crash of a different kind had hit the Midwest. The prairies had been depleted by years of inefficient farming, by homesteaders unaware of the fact that the grass they were stripping from the land had held the soil in place. In 1932, 14 dust storms occurred; in 1938, this figure had more than doubled and by 1934, "the massive drought impacted 27 states severely and affected more than 75% of the country. It was the worst drought in U.S. history" ("Disasters: The 1930s," U.S. History, 2011). According to John Steinbeck, author of the Grapes of Wrath, a novel written as eyewitness testimony of the Dust Bowl, farmers were driven to leave their homes and "streamed over the mountains, hungry and restless -- restless as ants, scurrying to find work to do -- to lift, to push, to pull, to pick, to cut -- anything, any burden to bear, for food" ("Disasters: The 1930s," U.S. History, 2011).

Only after aggressive government intervention did the Dust Bowl conditions improve. The government, even before the drought was broken in 1939, was able to reduce soil erosion by 65% through the actions of the Civilian Conservation Corps, which planted 200 million trees to "break the wind, hold water in the soil, and hold the soil itself in place" ("Disasters: The 1930s," U.S. History, 2011). Farmers received instruction by the government on "soil conservation and anti-erosion techniques, including crop rotation, strip farming, contour plowing, terracing and other beneficial farming practices" ("Disasters: The 1930s," U.S. History, 2011). For the first time, the government took an interest not simply in preserving some of its land from development in the form of national parks, but gave counsel to farmers how to use the land.

The gap between the 'haves' and the 'have-nots,' already wide even before the Great Depression, grew into a chasm in the years after the Great Crash. While few people were unaffected by the Depression, the poor suffered the most "Unemployment rose from a shocking 5 million in 1930 to an almost unbelievable 13 million by the end of 1932" ("Life during the Great Depression," All about History, 2011). Increasingly, there were calls for the Hoover Administration to treat the Depression's causes and provide some relief. The Hoover Administration's most vocal critic was that of John Maynard Keynes, a British economist who had advocated a radical reworking of conventional economic theory.