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.

African-Americans During the Great Depression (Pathfinder Magazine, 1939)

Written during the later years of the Great Depression, these columns summarize the sad lot of America’s Black population – their hardships, ambitions, leadership, and where they tended to live.

When the Depression struck, Negroes were the first to lose their jobs. Today, 1,500,000 colored adults are unemployed.


A 1938 article about the hardships of the Southern States during the Great Depression can be read here…


Click here to learn about the origins of the term Jim Crow.

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Starvation in the San Joaquin Valley (Pathfinder Magazine, 1937)

Renowned as an earthly paradise from whose rich soil the brilliant sun draws abundant crops of semi-tropical fruits, the Great Valley is today the state’s principal source of wealth. Last week, Californians were acutely conscious that the valley could also produce squalor, misery, disease and death…[The San Joaquin Valley] is host to 70,000 jobless, homeless families living in frightful squalor and privation….hopeless men and women sprawled in the sun as their ill-clad children played in the dirt.


Read about the the mood of the Great Depression and how it was reflected in the election of 1932 – click here…

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The Flaws of the NRA (Collier’s Magazine, 1933)

An excerpt from a longer article by Winston Churchill in which he praised the virtues of the Anglo-American alliance and the economic leadership forged by the two nations during the Depression. Four paragraphs are devoted to the confusion he experienced when stopping to consider some of President Roosevelt’s economic decisions and the roll played by his National Recovery Administration (NRA).


Like many presidents before and after him, FDR purchased many of his clothes from Brooks Brothers;
click here to read about the history of the store.

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The Forgotten Men and the NRA (Literary Digest, 1935)

A long program of suggested remedial legislation lies ahead of the 7,500 representatives of the people who gather this year in the halls of Congress and of all but four State Legislatures. The NRA (National Recovery Administration) will come under the closest scrutiny. As the old year waned, the NIRA (National Industrial Recovery Act)was being attacked and defended.

Click here to see a chart concerning the U.S. urban murder rate between the years 1926 – 1936.


In 1934, the NRA went to Hollywood and performed a task it was not legally obligated to do; click here to read about it…

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The End of the NRA (Pathfinder Magazine, 1937)

During the Spring of 1935 the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously proclaimed FDR’s National Recovery Administration and void – and the names of some 5,300 of its Washington, D.C. functionaries were immediately entered onto the unemployment list. All except one: Diana Rogovin; she was the sole survivor of the bureaucracy. To her fell the task of dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s as the great ship went down. She completed her last duty in February of 1937.

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The NRA Shows Its Teeth (Pathfinder Magazine, 1933)

The National Recovery Administration (1933 – 1935) was just one of the many alphabet agencies that the FDR administration created; his critics at the time, like the historians today, all believed that it was one of the well-meaning Federal efforts that simply prolonged the the Great Depression.


This is 1933 editorial addressed the various violation codes (there were 500 of them) and punishments that the Federal Government was prepared to dish out to all businesses wishing to defy any of the assorted labor laws and price-fixing measures that the NRA was designed to enforce.

From Amazon: Nine Honest Menstyle=border:none

The NRA Shows Its Teeth (Pathfinder Magazine, 1933) Read More »

The NRA Shows Its Teeth (Pathfinder Magazine, 1933)

The National Recovery Administration (1933 – 1935) was just one of the many alphabet agencies that the FDR administration created; his critics at the time, like the historians today, all believed that it was one of the well-meaning Federal efforts that simply prolonged the the Great Depression.


This is 1933 editorial addressed the various violation codes (there were 500 of them) and punishments that the Federal Government was prepared to dish out to all businesses wishing to defy any of the assorted labor laws and price-fixing measures that the NRA was designed to enforce.

From Amazon: Nine Honest Menstyle=border:none

The NRA Shows Its Teeth (Pathfinder Magazine, 1933) Read More »

FDR Takes On the Great Depression (The Literary Digest, 1933)

All the editorial writers quoted in this 1933 article agreed that FDR was the first U.S. President to ever have faced a genuine economic calamity as that which was created by the Great Depression:

Look at the picture flung into the face of Franklin Roosevelt:

Ships are tied up in harbors and their hulls are rotting; freight trains are idle; passenger trains are empty; 11,000,000 people are without work; business is at a standstill; the treasury building is bursting with gold, yet Congress wrestles with a deficit mounting into the billions, the result of wild and extravagant spending; granaries are overflowing with wheat and corn; cotton is a drag on the market, food crops are gigantic and unsalable, yet millions beg for food; mines are shut down; oil industries are engaged in cutthroat competition; farmers are desperate, taking the law into their own hands to prevent foreclosures; factories are idle; industry is paralyzed…

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