August 2015 was not a happy month for Wall Street when the Dow Jones fell 1300 points over a three-day period sparking significant media attention and economic anxiety. While U.S. politicians work to determine the cause, effect, and preventative measures needed to prevent a new recession, today serves as an important reminder for one of the hardest and most influential decades in American history.
October 29th, 1929, coined Black Tuesday, was the most devastating day in the Wall Street Crash of 1929, which to this day is the worst stock market crash in United States history.
View of crowds of people on Wall Street during the stock market crash, known as Black Tuesday, New York, New York, October 29, 1929.
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The Wall Street Crash of 1929 saw a loss of over $25 billion – or the equivalent of $319 billion in dollar value today.
The Crash marked the start of a decade long economic depression which has become famously known as The Great Depression.
City council man, Mr. Barlow, and Treasury Secretary, Mr. Jil Martin, burning 100,000 dollars of "scrip money" (after the banks' closure), April 1933, United States, National archives. Washington.
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As employers began to lay off workers to meet financial demands, the national average unemployment rate jumped from just 3% to 25%.
Employment office full of men looking for work, c.1930, United States, National archives. Washington.
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Robley D. Stevens, 30-year-old victim of the Depression, wears a sign that reads: "I am for sale. I must have work or starve," while standing on a sidewalk in Baltimore, Md., in Aug. 1931.
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Fred Bell, a one-time millionaire and now unemployed, sells apples at his stand on a busy street corner in San Francisco, Ca., on March 7, 1931 during the Great Depression. Bell, known as "Champagne Fred" in the earlier days, has nothing left of his share of the Theresa Bell fortune as a result of the stock market crash in 1929.
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Birth rate fell as families held off from raising additional children and women entered the labor force.
Unemployed women learning typewriting in a house for employment in Berlin in the Thirties.
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Arthur Rothstein photograph of a migrant female worker picking cranberries, Burlington County, New Jersey, 1938 during the American Great Depression.
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Meanwhile in the Mid-U.S., agricultural industries suffered as drought and poor farming methods caused uncontrollable dust storms which destroyed farmlands. This period became known as The Dust Bowl.
Postcard showing an approaching dust storm somewhere in the midwest, ca.1930s.
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View of the roof of a house, which has been buried by a dust drift from a Dust Bowl storm in Dallas, South Dakota.
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Three girls modelling various dustbowl masks to be worn in areas where the amount of dust in the air causes breathing difficulties, circa 1935.
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Map of California showing proposed rural rehabilitation camps.
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Arthur Rothstein photograph of a migrant female worker picking cranberries, Burlington County, New Jersey, 1938 during the American Great Depression.
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Housing for migrant fruit workers in a tourist and trailer camp near Belle Glade, Florida.
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Arthur Rothstein photograph of the son of a cotton sharecropper, Lauderdale County, Mississippi, 1935
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Migrant workers typically resorted to living out of vehicles or in tented camps.
The only home of a depression-routed family of nine from Iowa.
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Perhaps the most iconic and symbolic image of the time period is this photo of Florence Owens Thompson, Migrant Mother.
Destitute pea pickers in California. Mother of seven children. Age thirty-two. Nipomo, California.
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This is the Sleeping quarters of the municipal lodging house at the foot of 26th Street and East River in New York City on Nov. 27, 1931 during the Great Depression.
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Gertrude Haessler, 38, put up a battle with police in Washington, Nov. 24, 1932, when they tried to arrest her for creating a disturbance along with others, near the White House on Thanksgiving Day. She was one of four adults and a half dozen children who were taken into custody when they tried to force an entrance to the White House to present a petition to the president. No one was injured, but Haessler was escorted away by two officers by picking her up bodily.
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As the homeless population escalated uncontrollably, shantytowns known as Hoovervilles, named after then-president Herbert Hoover, began popping up near urban areas.
Central Park Hooverville with Central Park West in the background.
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The Dust Bowl forced countless workers out of the midwest in search of agricultural work in more prosperous areas.
Vegetable workers, migrants, waiting after work to be paid. Near Homestead, Florida.
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The Great Depression was not limited to the U.S. alone–economic depression was simultaneously being experienced in all of the industrialized Western world.
Ouse, Tasmania. The Pearce family at their house at the height of the Depression.
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January 1932: Clutching her handbag a homeless, elderly woman huddles on a doorstep in London, a sack by her side.
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Despite relief efforts during the Hoover administration, the reforms needed to completely resolve these economic hardships did not arrive until Franklin D. Roosevelt's presidency in 1934.
President Herbert Hoover signs the unemployment and drought relief bills providing a total of $161,000,000 for providing work for the jobless and seed fertilizer and, possibly, food for farmers of the drought area, Dec. 20, 1930. The unemployment bill creates an emergency fund of $116,000,000 to be expended on the construction of federal buildings, road and waterways. The $45,000,000 carried in the drought relief bill is for loans to farmers.
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A woman who has been injured in an unemployment demonstration during the Depression in Bristol.
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Thousands of unemployed workers, who marched from Pennsylvania to Washington, D.C., are gathered in front of the Capitol to ask the Congress and the U.S. President for aid, in January 1932, during the Great Depression in the United States.
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A mother and children rest as they and over 40 men, women and children camp out at City Hall in St. Louis, Mo., April 29, 1936. When a St. Louis alderman took no action to increase relief appropriations, protesters descended upon City Hall and threatened to stay "'til hell freezes over or we get relief." They started their second day in the building today.
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In this Feb. 13, 1932, file photo a long line of men wait along Broadway for their ration of a sandwich and a cup of coffee in Times Square, New York City during the Great Depression.
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