The Great Depression

Find archive articles on the Great Depression from the 1930’s. Our site has great information from old magazine and newspaper articles on the Great Depression.

President Hoover’s Farewell Address (Literary Digest, 1933)

With FDR waiting in the wings, eagerly anticipating the start of his administration, the outgoing president, Herbert Hoover (1874 – 1964), made his farewell address to the cash-strapped nation:

Warning against the ‘rapid degeneration into economic war which threatens to engulf the world’ the President said that ‘the imperative call to the world today is to prevent that war.’ The gold standard, he said ‘is the need of the world,’ for only by the early reëstablishment of that standard can the barriers to trade be reduced.’


Read about the Great Depression and the U.S. auto industry during the last year of the Hoover presidency…

President Hoover’s Farewell Address (Literary Digest, 1933) Read More »

Private Charity During The Great Depression (New Outlook Magazine, 1932)

The obligation for giving this year does not fall on the shoulders of the rich and powerful business concerns alone! It is an obligation which rests upon all who are gainfully employed…They should give, not because it is good policy, but because they have at heart the preservation of the human interests of the country.


– so wrote Newton D. Baker in this editorial from 1932 in which he promoted the effectiveness of the private charity that he was chairing: the Committee for Welfare Relief Mobilization. When President Hoover stepped-up and advocated for public donations to private charity organizations America answered the call in various forms.

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Women on the Relief Rolls (New Outlook Magazine, 1935)

It is illuminating to realize that more persons are receiving relief in the United States than there are individuals in such well-known countries as Romania (18,000,000), Mexico (16,500,000), Czechoslovakia (14,800,000) and Yugoslavia (14,000,000); over twice as many as Belgium (8,000,000) and Holland (7,920,000); about three times as many as in Sweden (6,140,000) and to cut theses comparisons short – almost seven times as many in all of Norway (2,800,000)… Clearly, it is not in the least inaccurate to speak of the relief population of the United States as a great nation within a nation… Women and children comprise as much as two thirds of the relief population.

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Farmers in Flight (Pathfinder Magazine, 1937)

A report from the regional directors of the Resettlement Administration (an arm of the FDR’s Department of Agriculture) stated that:


15,000 farmers have moved out of the Dakotas, Western Kansas and Eastern Montana, leaving soil which because a aridity or exhaustion could not yield any crop… [Having moved to the states of the Pacific Northwestern] Some of them are squatting in shacks and makeshift dwellings made of tree branches, stray boards [and] strips of tin.

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Social Washington During the Depression (Literary Digest, 1937)

Washington Society, long shackled, kicked the lid off last week, swung into the most dazzling season it has had since the Depression spawned bread lines, and knocked the wealthy back on their heels.

Money is spinning again; hostesses are plotting major campaigns; diamonds and pearls are coming out for renewed display; caviar and terrapin reign supreme once more…


Click here to read about American high society during the Depression years.

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I936 Saw A Wee-Bit of Prosperity (Pathfinder Magazine, 1937)

This article sums up the income data that was collected by the U.S. Department of Commerce and published in June of 1937. The report stated that

The national income increased in 1936 by a larger amount, absolutely and relatively, than in 1935. Income produced rose to 63.8 billion dollars, an increase of 8.8 billion dollars, an increase over the 1935 total.


A chart has been provided.


Click here to read about the economic disaster that 1937 was

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False Hope for 1937 (Pathfinder Magazine, 1937)

Perhaps it was the practice of magazine editors during the Great Depression to instruct their reporters to find hope where none existed; that must have been the case for this article. The unnamed journalist who wrote this slender column reported on a few rare cases involving real jobs with real salaries being offered to recent graduates; the reporter wished to believe that this was a sign that the end was nigh – but these few jobs were flukes. The author saw economic growth where there really wasn’t any at all, however he certainly made the case for its existence. The title link posted above leads to a passage from FDR’s Folly: How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depressionstyle=border:none by Jim Powell that explains the true situation that existed in 1937, when unemployment stood at 20 percent by Summer.

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