On July 8, 1932, the stock market fell to its lowest...
point during the Depression. The Great Crash, as it was known, had begun in the autumn of 1929, sparking a decade of economic stagnation known as the Great Depression. The market expanded rapidly during the 1920s, attracting many inexperienced investors. George Mehales, a Greek immigrant who owned a diner in Spartanburg, South Carolina, began buying stocks just before the crash. "One day," he recalled in a Federal Writers' Project interview,
one of my customers showed me how much money he was making in the market . . . It looked good to me, and I bit with what you folks call 'hook, line and sinker.' . . . The first day of October in 1929 made me feel like I was rich."George Mehales,"
Spartanburg, South Carolina,
R.V. Williams, interviewer,
December 1938.
American Life Histories, 1936-1940
By the end of the month, however, Mehales had lost everything, including his restaurant which he had to sell at a rock bottom price. "I was wiped . . . I considered killing myself, 'cause I had nothing left."
President Herbert Hoover's cautious response to the crises disappointed many, including WWI veterans who hoped to receive pension funds early. The day following his inauguration, President Franklin Roosevelt closed the nation's banks for four days in order to reorganize insolvent institutions and restore confidence in the financial system. W.W. Tarpley, a bank officer in Dublin, Georgia, remembered a run on his bank and the mob of people fearful of losing everything:
No one knows, unless they have experienced it, what it means to work in a place under such condition . . . people were losing their homes and some their savings of a lifetime. The saddest part of it was to see widows who probably had been left a little insurance and had put it all in the bank.W.W. Tarpley, "Recovery," Washington, D.C., January 5, 1940.
American Life Histories, 1936-1940
For Tarpley, who was forced to sell his belongings and leave his hometown to look for work, the Great Crash was only a minor setback. "I guess, in a way," he told an WPA interviewer in 1940, "the depression was a blessing in disguise for me. . . . Of course I felt like I was ruined at the time, but if the crash had not come, I might have still been down in that little South Georgia town working for a small salary."
In the Southern Great Plains, the already stagnant agricultural economy was devastated by both extreme drought and world depression. In 1932, the barren soil was so dry that high winds created dust storms. "Black blizzards" of dirt moved across the region obscuring the sun and settling in drifts. Unable to sustain themselves, farmers in Oklahoma, Texas, and southwestern Kansas abandoned homes in search of employment. The promise of a year-round growing season lured many "Okies" to California. Eventually, the federal government organized migratory labor camps to assure dust bowl refugees decent living conditions. In the camps, migrant workers reestablished communities based on their shared rural and largely Southern culture.
