In April 1940 Germany attacked Denmark and Norway. In May, Germany took Belgium and the Netherlands. In June, France fell to the conquering Germans. Japan had overrun China. In September, Italy joined Germany and Japan in an Axis treaty.
In 1940, unemployment was 14%, but people increasingly felt the Great Depression was in the rear view mirror. The war in Europe and Asia threatened to draw in the Americans, and the war department was spending huge amounts to increase military preparedness.
Many say 1940 was the year that ended the Depression.
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal platform created an incredible number of different federal agencies to carry out new policies and regulations. Almost all of these agencies had an acronym like the CCC, TVA, or HOLC. Therefore, these collectively came to be known as FDR’s “Alphabet Soup Agencies.”
Alphabet Soup Agencies – Students of History
The Alphabet Soup Agencies weren’t some abstract far-away concept. They directly touched people in their everyday lives. Tom Gallagher had jobs with several of the agencies. Mary Agnes and children worked with and benefited from these agencies.
By 1936, measures of the economy were back to their 1928 pre-Depression levels, except for unemployment.
Unemployment crept downward below 22% by year-end 1934, and still lower to 20% by December 1935. In 1936, it continued the downward trend to 17%. The New Deal programs were helping, and some segments of the economy were recovering.
Destitute pea pickers in California. Mother of seven children. Age thirty-two. Nipomo, California – 1936 – Dorothea Lange, photographer.
I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean- to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it. (From: Lange’s “The Assignment I’ll Never Forget: Migrant Mother,” Popular Photography, Feb. 1960).
It’s hard for us to imagine the impact of the Great Depression on our ancestors’ communities. In Sedalia, Missouri, the Depression caused job losses, which caused housing and food emergencies.
Things were made worse by a multi-year drought that affected farmers and the food supply.
It’s just as hard to imagine the scope of the New Deal relief efforts in those communities. “Relief” wasn’t some abstract concept in faraway cities. It included food, money, and jobs for people in Sedalia and Pettis County.
Bread line – Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial – Washington, D.C.
Things were still terrible, but there were glimmers of hope in 1933. The inflation rate turned positive at 1%, and GDP growth turned slightly positive by summer. But 2 million Americans were homeless. Industrial production was half of its 1929 high.
Unemployment was at its highest yet – 25%.
Unemployed men outside a soup kitchen opened in Chicago by Al Capone
Family Nibbles 