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.
Unlike the CCC, WPA, CWA, or DRA, you can type FCA.gov into a search engine and actually make contact with one of FDR’s multiple alphabet agencies. This 1937 article will tell you why it came into being – but it won’t tell you why the agency wasn’t done away with during any of the decades of plenty that followed.
Economist Robert R. Doane (1889 – 1961) presented numerous charts and figures amassed between 1929 through 1932 to argue that America was still a wealthy nation despite the destruction wrought by the Great Depression:
In 1929 the United States held 44.6 percent of the total wealth of the world. In 1932 that proportion has increased to almost 50 percent. We still have half the banking-power of the world. We still have half the income. In all of the items of economic importance and efficiency, the United States still stands supreme.
This article reported on a phenomenon that is common in our own day as well as the era of the Great Depression. It exists in any locale that fosters a lousy environment for business – for when the entrepreneurial classes loose their daring for investing in commercial ventures and when bankers refuse to loan money for fear that they will never be paid back, it leads to the creation of what is called dormant capital – money that should be working, but isn’t.
There is now piled up in banks some $46,000,000,000. As opposed to $39,000,000,000 at the low point of 1933, and the idle capital is on the increase. World trade has virtually broken down.
As one editorial makes clear, FDR had a tough time freeing up private capital for investments, click here to read it.
Men’s attire was more sensitive to depression than women’s, for even the most elemental sense of chivalry recognized the superior importance of fashion for wife and daughter.
More articles on 1930s fashion can be read here…
In order for FDR’s Federal Government to layout their planned economy they had to be able to forecast the future trends in unemployment, and with that in mind it was deemed suitable that a committee be convened to study the matter. The board of brainiacs called themselves the National Resources Committee and their study was boundless and all encompassing. This article summarizes the findings of one of the organization subcommittees; their 450,000-word report was titled Technological Trends and National Policy, Including the Social Implications of of New Inventions. The head of this subcommittee was the famed sociology professor William F. Ogburn, and as the title implied, the report studied the blessing and the curse that is the nature of technological innovation.
It must have been very difficult to maintain a sunny disposition back in the Thirties! No doubt, residents of the Great Depression would often have to make their own good news. For example, that same month in 1932 when this article appeared it was also announced that for the first time in the nation’s history alien emigration from the United States during the last fiscal year exceeded immigration [to the United States], figures being 103,295 and 35,576 respectively – there! For those people who disliked hearing foreign accents on the streets, there was a glimmer of hope – and that’s what this article was all about: finding hope.
An article about FDR’s scheme to create an American Utopia purchased with high taxation. The article closes with an amusing poem about the tyranny of taxation.
In the Summer of 1938 the New Deal administration turned its attention to the Southern States in an effort to solve the poverty that had long afflicted the region and was especially keen during the Great Depression:
The War Between the States freed the slaves, but it did not free the South. Old plantations were broken up. Pressed to meet mortgages, farmers leased part of their farms to tenants. Cheap [African-American] labor remained and children were pressed into service on the Southern fields. Cotton and low labor costs stayed in the South.
Read about FDR’s African-American advisers here…
During the summer of 1937 the U.S. Census Bureau released the data that was compiled by it’s business department concerning the payrolls dolled out by the nation’s wealthiest industries in 1935. The information gleaned from these payrolls indicated which were the five richest counties in the country based on personal income. These small municipalities could be found in two Eastern states, two Mid-Western states and one Western state.
Jump ahead to our own time and you’ll learn how much the game has changed: today the top five wealthiest counties in the United States are all located in the Maryland and Virginia Suburbs that lie just outside the District of Columbia!
