Life During the Depression The Depression Worsens Living in Makeshift Villages Homeless and unemployed Americans wander around the country walking hitchhiking or most often riding the rails ID: 679240
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Slide1
The Great Depression Begins
Life During the DepressionSlide2
The Depression Worsens
-Living in Makeshift Villages
Homeless and unemployed Americans wander around the country, walking, hitchhiking, or, most often, “riding the rails.” Those who rode the rails were known as hobos.Many people who lost their homes lived in make-shift tents formed from cardboard, blankets, newspapers, or whatever else people could find. These “neighborhoods” were called shantytowns and were nicknamed “Hooverville” after the president.Slide3
The Dust Bowl
In 1932 a terrible drought struck the Great Plains. Neither grass nor wheat would grow as the soil dried out.
A dust storm struck the area blackening the skies and delivering dust as far as the Atlantic Ocean.
Farmers who were already struggling from low crop prices, were devastated.Slide4
Escaping the depression
To help themselves from constantly worrying about the depression, Americans turned to entertainment to take their minds off their troubles.
Walt Disney produced the first feature-length animated film:
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs Scarlett O`Harra was a character in the four hour movie Gone With the Wind about a Georgia plantation owner during the Civil War who struggles to maintain her life. Marlene Dietrich was a film star who fled to Hollywood to escape hardship in Europe Many Americans listened to the radio which produced radio shows such as The Green Hornet, The Guiding Light
(soap opera), and The Lone Ranger (about a hero who fought injustice in the old west with his side-kick and “faithful Indian companion” --Tonto)Slide5
The depression in art
John Steinbeck
wrote
The Grapes of Wrath—the story of an Oklahoma family who lost everything and flees to California to find a new life—which characterized what many Americans were going through at the time