The Great Depression And The Bay Area....

The Great Depression progressively got worse and then progressively got better. Coming in and out of the depression was not an over night thing, It included lots of planning and action. There were a few major causes of the Great Depression,. The United states had three consecutive conservative presidents in the 1920's Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover. They all believed in mechanization which in turn put thousands of people out of work, and the trickle down theory where the money that the rich spent was supposed to somehow make it’s way though the system to the poor.

The money never made it so the poor had to find some way to get money and that was through loans from the banks. The poor had no way of making money which made it close to impossible to pay back the loans plus the interest thus, beginning the ban and loan crisis. Banks were closing rapidly because of the money loss.

This led to the concentration of wealth the top two percent of the US owned sixty percent of the money and the rest of the people were poor. Mechanization caused massive over production which put the US in a strain because of it’s lack of consumers. So they cut production and raised prices which was still ineffective. With food being too expensive work, and housing was scarce the poor were forced to make housing.

With a combination of mechanization, conservative presidents, concentration of the wealth because of the trickle down theory, and higher taxes on the poor, the poor worked harder and steadily got poorer. Mexican Americans got deported during the depression because they felt that they were taking all the jobs.

Hoover’s response to the Depression was shaped his conservative Republican ideas. He thought that the poor were lazy and that the rich became rich because they worked hard. The believed in “Big Business”, and that the money would “trickle down” if the poor worked harder. He thought that the Depression would solve itself. He thought that big business would end the depression. So that’s why he didn’t take actions sooner in the Depression. Hoover waited too long to take action thus, resulting in him getting blamed for the Depression

Roosevelt, unlike the presidents before him took action in an attempt to end the depression. When Roosevelt took office in 1933, the country was in the middle of the Great Depression.