How did the southerners react to the Great Depression? What exactly happen there during the Great Depression?
Friday, July 30th, 2010 at
3:03 pm
Im doing a report about the Great Depression in the south. Can you tel, me exactly what happened in the south during the great depression?
Thank you!
Tagged with: great depression
Filed under: QA
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At the very beginning, with the stock market crash of October, 1929, a lot of middle class and poor people were not as hard hit, if they did not own stocks. Wealthy and upper middle class people were hit right away if they had a lot of money in the stock market.Often they lost their savings because they invested everything in stocks.
But a lot of the south was rural, agricultural, and within a year or so, crops were not being sold because the people who would buy them were out of work. A lot of stores closed, a lot of businesses ‘went under’ and could not buy things in order to sell them. The people in the South were often more poor than in the North and once the depression hit hard, the men went trying to find jobs in cities, often not able to, because factories were closing, etc. Really the South was no different from the rest of the country, except, like parts of the midwest there were a lot of people who lived in rural areas.It was really only after we got into World War II and there were factories and bases opening in the South that the economy had any hope.
I don’t know if Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, etc. were hit by the "Dust Bowl" drought which was during the time of the Depression. Texas, considered part of the South, was very hard hit by the Dust Bowl Drought, as were many midwestern and western states. During that time there were huge dust storms on the Plains and areas went for years in some cases without rain.