The Great Depression

Today is probably one of this hardest things I’ve ever had to face in my life. I found out that the bank that I had put all my life savings in is completely empty they have nothing left, ten years I’ve had my money is this bank and now there is nothing left. I started today off like any other I woke up , fed the kids and went to work. I got off work and was on the way to bank to get some money out, when I arrived and asked to withdraw some money they said they had nothing for me to get out. Out of frustration I asked my account is empty? and they answered” no the whole entire bank is empty , we have nothing for nobody.”. So I went home to talk to my wife to break the news , by the time I got there . She was already in tears , saying ” its over , our life is over!!”. Then I asked what do you mean? she answered” all banks have nothing , we are going through something they are call The Great Depression”. When we sat down to eat supper everyone was quiet there was not a sound, and I asked ” why are y’all so quiet?”
, they replied ” we have nothing daddy , we are going to lose everything”, “plus we are scared”. All I could do is tear up . After supper we went to bed , I couldn’t sleep.

The next day woke up we ate breakfast, and I left for work. When I arrived to work , all my coworkers were outside the door the doors were locked, I asked “what are we doing outside?” and they answered ” we have no job anymore , they closed the factory” . I left from work went straight home and got to my wife I told her ” I’m trying to be strong but I think its over for us”, “what do we do now?”. Then I sat in the house all day and slept I couldn’t think of anything better to do. After about two days everyone had lost there jobs and some were homeless . Most people thought our lives were over because most of us had no money because the banks handed out all the money to people threw loans and now no one can pay them back.

When most people ran out of money during the great depression they lost everything, including their homes.

Most people who lost their homes had nothing, they had no where to live, so most of the people would go around looking for places to live. That’s when the big company started giving the homeless palates and card board to help them start something, to have just a little shelter. After a few people started this everyone started catching on to what they were doing and started building their own homes/ somewhere to live. After all this was done that had basically started a little community, this communities were usually located near big buildings or companies, they would be in the middle of two buildings to have more protection from weather and other things . The communities got the name hoovervilles, they got there names from the people blaming Herbert Hoover for not doing anything to help the people during their hardships. Hoovervilles were peoples homes for nearly a decade until the government come through and started tearing these builds down . Even though things were hard people did what they had to do and the hoovervilles came in handy for the people during this time.

The Dust Bowl was probably one of the hardest thing that the people had to do to deal with during the depression, I would have to say the Dust Bowl made things harder than what they already were. People leaved three years during the depression having to worry about waking up every morning , having to see , eat and drank nothing but sand/ dirt. Women in my opinion probably had it worse during this time , they spent their days doing nothing but cleaning the house just to have to wake up the next day and have to clean the whole house all over again . This terrible thing was cause by three major things; the drought , overgrazing and lack of crop rotations . The lack of rotation wouldn’t have that much of a toll on the people if they would have got just a little bit of rain, yes the overgrazing made it where the topsoil was exposed more but the drought is what made things harder to deal with. People went to bed with nothing in them but when they woke up in the morning the only clean part on their beds is were their heads laid. This high winds during the drought is what caused all this loose topsoil to come up in the air , these unusual high winds made what the people called “black blizzards”, the reason it got this name is the clouds would cover the skys and nothing could be seen even during the middle of the day. The street lights were on at 12:00 in the afternoon because of the black blizzards and how dark they were.

Probably one of the most effective and helpful things anyone could’ve done during the depression was the “fireside chats” that Franklin D. Roosevelt did on Sunday afternoon. He did this to help the people in their hardships and to let them know that he actually did care about what they were going through and that he is trying his hardest to help the people. FDR tried his hardest to help the people get through what they were going through this was probably one of the things that made him so popular with people. Fireside chats became a really big hit during this time and it was played on the radio during this time, a radio was a very common thing back in the day almost 90% of americans households had a radio . They got these just so that they could listen to FDR and his fireside chats. It was like the soap oprah of the 1900s, people looked forward to these fireside chats during the week. I think that people back then really appreciated the things that FDR did and attempted to do and this gave the people hope that one day that they could get their lives back and this lightened things for the people.