1929 The Great Depression Part 1

between 1921 and 1929 the image conveyed by the United States was of a population living in the best possible society despite the prohibition and the rise of gangsterism the industrial growth of the main economic power had never been so strong before unashamed even what a contrast with the previous decade marked by the great war the political and financial authorities drummed out the same message about confidence durable prosperity and well-being toward the end of the decade the economic boom turned to general euphoria the Roaring Twenties were also the days of the first Miss America elections the first Oscar ceremonies the first musicals all set to a jazz background to call the 1920s the period before the Depression to call that the age of jazz the age of prosperity the Roaring Twenties was to distort the picture so it was not a you might say a boom in which everybody was enjoying prosperity it was people at the top work but most American most Americans were not doing well at all we hit a new stage of affluence suddenly most American families owned an automobile only ten years before they didn't they owned electric washing machines electric refrigerators electric record players the talkies talk sound movies started in 1927 so it looked like a new age I think people were warning it couldn't last but for the most part America believed maybe there would be a little pullback a slowdown but we were in a new economy the 1920s marks the beginning of the automobile moving to the center of American culture and it meant that even working-class people were eager to buy a car sassy K kusudama Sano upon the open regime a sample salary Naveen virtue noise a little tea I could be between dejan petrovic etc Dhokla citizen in taxi in satin tones yo la cosa más own mess y zu e ffect emo como si a div lapel credi credit becomes something that people can rely on credit for consumer purchases like buying a Model T Ford or buying a car comes in as a phenomenon in 1919 there were six million automobiles in the US ten years later twenty seven million one for every five Americans consumer culture blossoms in America installment credit buying blossoms in America it's the age of the flapper of bootleg gin of jazz it's also a period of enormous excitement about the stock market where all kinds of ordinary people not just the stock market professionals who always participated in Wall Street but ordinary folk began to see Wall Street as a place to play to grow rich quickly a place that was largely risk free and therefore the 20s in America is a period in which Wall Street for the first time in its history is associated with play culture with getting drunk with sexual abandon with consumer delights Wall Street becomes a part of that larger way of life you America discovered a passion for stock exchange dabbling in five years stock market prices were multiplied by four the Dow Jones index went from 100 to nearly 400 such a rise seems incomprehensible enormous in view of the actual economic situation dazzled and fascinated by the promise of easy money on the new york stock exchange or Wall Street as it is known Americans turned out their pockets in 1929 two billion dollars were invested on the stock market more people than ever before were buying stocks this was really the first time in American history that the stock market sort of moved to the center of the culture the prosperity is so great and so widespread and so sustained going on for many years in a row that the average citizen who would never otherwise think of starting a business who would never otherwise think of getting into the stock market actually considers doing so LeBoeuf Nadeau you said Chris you said that women are too moon affects a telenovela el dorado a liminal FST share Don Loris economy dawned on a boo schematic as you know people particularly Americans have always been trying to get rich fast the difference is in the 1920s it seemed like there were more ways than ever before to try to do that and the stock market was one of those ways it was a new kind of wealth to people you go in and you'd buy a stock let's say at 20 and you didn't know anything about the stock market so the next day the stock is 23 in the next day it's 27 and you haven't lifted the finger and boy that was easy if I just keep doing this I'll make a lot of money and I won't have to do anything and it got to the point where people became addicted to the market the stock exchanges in Europe were aristocratic that only a few people engaged in the stock exchange whereas the stock exchanges in the United States were democratic and they're ordinary people they're salaried workers they're middle-class folks they're shoeshine boys they're housewives they're ordinary folk like you and me this is an extraordinary new phenomenon and they are giddy about it tsai-tien a porkalicious show failed American visionary te amo Portia Nadia Pocatello la pasión dice que te den de Nova Lebanon Dasha Toronto face battered donkey iya enviro for colectivo we would feel foolish not participating in the money that was almost there to pick off the ground there was this kind of collective hurting mentality John Jacob Roscoe head of General Motors assures everybody that the economy is safe sound and guaranteed to be prosperous in fact he writes a very famous article that appears in The Ladies Home Journal everybody ought to be rich he says in this article and he tells them how and this appears one year before the great crash of 1929 John Raskob wrote if a person saved $15 a month and invested it in good common stocks within one or two years given the rapid growth of stock prices would have 80,000 dollars the financial press hailed him as a visionary it was like the gold rush on Wall Street millions of people wanted to be in on the action wanted to buy stock and there were all over the country there were officers with ticker tape bringing the results from Wall Street there are ticker tapes in beauty parlors there are ticker tapes on railroad trains there are ticker tapes in bar rooms there are ticker tapes on ocean liners so that for the first time speculating in the market becomes a kind of part of everyday life it had never been that before so you have brokerages springing up in small towns in villages in small cities all across America you know toggle together by electronic wire to the headquarters on Wall Street encouraging people to participate in the street it becomes a kind of sport that people are all playing together it wasn't the lower class that was buying stock it was the middle class because one of the things that happens in the 1920s as part of this whole pattern of the new consumer culture is banks are more willing to loan to make relatively small loans to individuals on no real collateral that had never been done before one American in three entrusted his savings to the magician's on Wall Street especially as it wasn't even necessary to have the available capital the stockbrokers gave credit and the bank's loan cash and made their capital work the brokers pocketed tidy commissions and everybody made a fortune people bought today to sell the next day investment companies multiplied and prospered a new firm was set up every day people speculate by borrowing the money on margin that as they put up a very small percentage of their own money to purchase a stock maybe 10% maybe 20% maybe even less than 10% and credit is so available and everybody is so super confident overconfident that these speculations will pay off on the end that people are taking enormous credit risks in investing in the market it was long as the price of the stock went up your collateral in the loan was always covered and it looked like the easiest thing in the world and you get twice the bang for your buck but once it starts to fall the stock price starts to fall then you have to put in more cash to cover the mart what's called the margin the difference between the amount you borrowed and what the stock is now the new President of the United States Herbert Hoover based his whole campaign on one slogan prosperity is just around the corner they even turned it into a song like him the best economists considered that the rise in the stock market was perfectly justified by the general stability of prices the prosperity and the favorable perspectives of the US economy he had a golden opportunity in his inaugural to say stock is too high we need to do something about the market but as a politician if he does that and the market then goes down as it probably wouldn't should everybody would blame him for causing the crash so we didn't do that the election has again confirmed the determination of the American people and opportunity must be given for the expression of popular will and we should keep it soaked when Hoover said that the market took off again during the summer of 1929 June July and August when normally the markets slow because it's summer people are on vacation and so forth the market went crazy political and financial leaders celebrated this euphoria and this reckless speculation this is everybody from President Herbert Hoover and includes the nation's chief bankers and the country is so overcome by this sense of confidence and they're being encouraged in this confidence by by apparently the most prudent savvy people in the country the country's financial elite is saying everything's fine there was no reason to think that anything else would happen people really imagined that this would go on and even the most famous economists too drove stock prices up to irrational even silly levels despite those crazy levels as in all speculative booms there were people who said the stock market is right those high levels are deserved there's a Nobel Prize winner named Edward Prescott in the US who argues that stock market was not especially high in 1929 the best experts the risk experts saying don't worry it will never happen and besides you can diversify and if it goes down in one place don't only be in one place other places it won't that's absurd in 1929 you had a stock market that had been going up up up and as it kept going up it sort of cut loose from its moorings by which I mean instead of being based on real values of the underlying companies it was a speculators market in which people bought and sold stock thinking that if they bought it now they could sell it later for more money investment pools were conspiracies really of insiders top investment bankers sometimes politicians who wanted to speculate in a particular stock and so they would buy up huge amounts of that stock send its price therefore skyrocketing then quickly and secretly dump the stock so that they could realize the profits while all those ordinary folk who had been encouraged to buy that same stock because they were watching its escalation when left with the losing's suppose a sous la yamomamo in Saudi connect dude economy real a/v demo on povedilla tone Simone said I collect estaba PT we may see a lot a red person dead isa del hijo continued le pré Marchionne l ec sousuke saudis juve profit elemetary co u s-- caspases are peta no cuckoo so you can make more and more by taking bigger and bigger risks taking bigger and bigger risks led to higher and higher prices for stocks and willingness to borrow excessively in order to do that and that created a structure that once he cracked came apart completely suppose stock prices quadruple and go from a hundred to four hundred even over the course of a decade a lot of people would look at that and say that is crazy you would not trust a stock market that had prices going up like that there were people who saw that the economy whose growth was based on false premises and warned the problem what would arise there are a handful of Wall Street bankers investment bankers who say that the economy and the market itself is way overextended that that speculation on margin is dangerous that the stock market the values on the stock market are grossly inflated warning that this is that there are danger signs there are some people like the statistician Roger Babson and they are systematically ignored Roger Babson declared in September one month before the collapse sooner or later a crash is coming it'll be terrific colossal even the stock market will fall by its own weight and there'll be a mad rush beyond anything we've ever seen the higher the market God the more other people shouted down those who warned that the market was getting out of control because if people started taking him seriously they'd start to sell their stock and the stock market would go down there were signs before the market crash that the economy was starting to go down again short term signs of economic recession can never be trusted we always have pauses and sometimes economies come back but there were signs there were signs of over speculation all over the place in particular the high level of stock prices which were very hard to justify on any historical basis but there was all kinds there were investment trusts that average people were putting their money in investment trusts were able to borrow a lot of money to invest in stocks average people typical people were borrowing money on their own to buy individual stocks margin borrowing so there were all kinds of signs that the was troubled to come it began to sort of vacillate through September and then in October it began to fall and then in about the third week in October the bottom started to fall out and that's usually a sign when the bubble will burst and a burst it did in October of 1929 the crash of 1929 was like a perfect storm in which all of these improbable things came together at the wrong time in the wrong way I want and on Thursday October 24th Black Thursday collective insanity put in an appearance in just a few hours thirteen million stocks were suddenly dumped on the market by panic-stricken shareholders who didn't even know at what price they'd sold their shares after three years of intense speculation Wall Street crashed and no one was in a position to decide to close the stock market the president of Wall Street was on vacation in Hawaii a speculative bubble burst causing financial panic through a domino effect the whole of the stock market collapsed the cumulative losses amounted to thirty billion dollars ten times the US Federal Reserve budget and more than the United States had spent during the whole of World War one in six days average prices went down 50% and kept falling and what was even more unusual the stock market crashed carried on or the crash was inevitable it was just a matter of time too was inevitable and then people realize that they had been assuming that prices would never fall and that assumption was wrong so their whole life had been based on an assumption the prices could go only one way of course if they had read history they would know that that was a stupid idea they know the prices come up and prices come down people had been putting their hand in the till at work taking the money putting it in the market figuring that's going to go up so it'll go up I'll cash in put the money back in the till and no one will be the wiser but when the market crashed there was no way to get the money back out all the sudden they realized the model that had been in their mind was totally wrong and realizing that they were wrong they panic but as they panic what do they see their neighbor panic on the market itself of course the brokers are going crazy they're tearing their hair out they can't keep up with the descent of the market many people lose their money because the trades they tried to make couldn't be made in time at the prices they were trying to make them because the market was so over it the capacity to handle those trades wasn't there anymore the wires are burning up the ticker tape which recorded all the sales couldn't keep up and it would fall several hours behind and when it fell that far behind that means that if you were at two o'clock and you only knew what the market was doing at ten thirty you were in big trouble because you didn't know what had happened and as it was going down those who were slower said oh oh I made a mistake I wish I'd been faster and the pro-sex accelerates and you get this sense of freefall what precipitates that I don't think to this day anybody really knows what precipitates black Tuesday or Black Thursday why that particular day segi stralla two months of xrv episode of cleaver no clue Casali kana there was that there was something fundamentally wrong with this economy not only would the market with a stock market not only that stocks were overvalued but though there were underlying problems with the economy that this illusion of prosperity that so captivated people for nearly a decade was indeed an illusion and that the panic was a kind of inarticulate emotional recognition of that fact because in other words it was grounded in something real it wasn't pure hysteria inside it's like a rail station at the start of the vacation The Wall Street Journal wrote a Niagara of liquidation men and women jostle each other to try to understand what was going on these figures and letters were incomprehensible to a layman but they spelled ruin on the floor there were thousands of discarded stock exchange orders like empty cartridges on the battlefield wrote the New York Times the Great Crash is supposed to have produced mass suicides on Wall Street and elsewhere it became the object of a kind of gallows humor there were cartoons about Wall Street bankers jumping out of windows and so on it's a grossly exaggerated legend the wildest rumors were going around 11 speculators were said to have committed suicide it is alleged that the manager of the Ritz required customers to pay for their room in advance asking them if they wanted a room to spend the night or to jump there were indeed some suicides not very many one of the most notable however was witnessed by Winston Churchill Churchill was visiting New York at the time of the crash he first visited the stock market and was struck by not the panic on the market floor but by a kind of daze somnambulism of brokers walking around almost as if they were in a kind of semi-comatose State and then he went back to his hotel and while he was in his hotel someone indeed did jump out the window of the hotel he was staying with who turned out to be a Wall Street broker who had been ruined see lucky deceased Wacka Wacka con tam it support our low pony sua Rico vamos a Sante fondo eso que otros so 16 hola yo tengo as collective a Vida boy yo quiero es only Bella Terra et Ossa merida building is over antique KTLA Ella fool CD Eva so t su keep settin plumby hereit Antonova chingu ta la magia Pitamber me la foret Odessa to Madan Chico video wad a speculator cccd on an RV so so me pally posh on / common revenge cheated received a spectacular fall on Black Thursday Herbert Hoover refused to go to Wall Street choosing to take tea with Maliki who was visiting the White House he reminded her that he had been Secretary of Commerce before being elected president and that America was sure of herself and would enjoy endless prosperity at the same moment outside the deserted stock exchange ruined businessmen tried to sell the luxury automobiles for next to nothing the reaction the official reaction to the crash of the market is is a sense of shock disbelief and a and hubris a sense that if they act and simply assure people that everything is all right the market will immediately recover john d rockefeller goes and buys some stock in a very public way to show that he too is confident that the economy is sound and the market is sound John Rockefeller the richest man in the world saw his fortune melt by 80% in the 93 years of my life depressions have come and gone prosperity has always returned and will again it tries to assure everybody that the market is sound that this is a temporary lull and this act of buying up stock is a is a display of confidence in the market and it doesn't work Herbert Hoover the president of the country issues pronouncements that the underlying structure the economy is sound that people need not fear or panic but everybody does indeed panic and the panic is irreversible it's it's it's extraordinary it had even has a sound to it 10,000 people gather outside the New York Stock Exchange the city is very afraid they order a Mounted Police they think there's going to be a storming of the Bastille that as a storming of the New York Stock Exchange and that crowd gathers there and stays there for weeks and is a kind of low hum that kind of is emitted from the crowd a kind of dull roar a kind of it's like the sound of panic the sound of anxiety Herbert Hoover very very quickly once the crash hits loses credibility in the eyes of the American people he's doing nothing he's making constant false assurances that always turn out to be untrue did not recognize the crisis when it occurred he tried to say it's not so bad you know we will recover quickly his statements about prosperity being around the corner were an attempt to give confidence to the market no president is going to say we're about to have a disaster but because they were false promises when the reality show them to be inconsistent with what they had said it actually discredited Hoover the Congress and the president together could have appeared on the Capitol steps easily and said we realize that what we're doing is destructive but they didn't and the president did not look back on the crash apologize for having caused it and express any regret for his policies it's continued its policies as it had before he himself I think is so stunned by what has happened so confident that the market will recover the Federal Reserve was saying that the stock market crash was no great deal no great concern nothing to worry about and that it was not Prasad in any kind of economic downturn well of course that was dead wrong assumption the crash was not the event of one day it really spread out across a week and it's sort of the fall went on for almost three weeks from late October into middle November after that the market began to recover and it actually gained back during the winter something like a third of what it had lost and it was look like recovery was on the way everybody was looking not at the market but at the economy what was going to happen ownage America can even Modi Cronshaw Camilla Baraboo's monkey pea - member rasca Santos Aveiro uncle como si Dickinson Tirupathi reached crash particular day in 1929 was something like 24 25 percent but actually from 1929 to the bottom of the stock market the entire decline was 80% in fact Wall Street had already started its long interminable descent into hell and the whole of America's economic activity followed this downward slope until it reached the depths of the abyss it's really snowballs after 1929 more and more banks fail if you have money in a bank and the bank fails you've lost it all so that means there's a run on the bank and there is literally a financial crisis American opinion was shocked by the collapse of what was once the indestructible bastion of triumphant capitalism the bank's people are desperate and the banking system is collapsed there's an enormous liquidity crunch there's no credit available to restart the engines of the economy one of the controversies 29 was what role did the central bank play would it have been able to reverse it allowed provided more money to the banking system the complete evaporation of confidence in the economy and in the financial sector particularly means there's no credit available so it was a period of following decline in economic activity the finally googler to a financial crisis that then of course continued the downward spiral of the economy suddenly a banking community will not be able to lend money people will not be able to buy houses that feeds on itself and that's how recessions work businesses start to lay off workers they can't get loans to meet their payroll they can't get loans to keep their businesses going businesses go out of business more people are let go other people are afraid they will go be let go they stop spending you spend less money business makes even less profit more businesses go under and all of this feeds on itself and and the economy sinks into this sort of death spiral a coma spiral let's call it but that takes time markets can collapse in a few days but the economy sinking takes time when the economy collapsed there was no reservoir of consumer purchasing power to to to buoy it up again and people began to lose jobs then you get this shift and once that mood shift starts is very very hard to reverse again and so you get this escalating crisis that begins as a banking crisis but becomes a general economic crisis no shame or smell plays say a key a poly Fontenot abou sliminess see spawn a SATA mode - ah be enjoyable in dota mode automobile gear boy Elmo on innocent hot risotto Don Cooper de confianza a la la consummation Avesta smallest ok safe on Lego hype oh no no no es a primo - Teddy's automobile Vanna so sector very socio a sous-vide automobile key so nice on Sheba a lock - says da consomme oh say some cos Omega Y Papa's necklace adora sector quiero - oh Lisa see any socio no Nanette fundo homo der Adam unsolvable professor Poisson museo civico access so people stop buying things they start worrying about the future whereas before the future looked like nothing but bright because the market was going up they had money but as soon as the market crashes and the underlying causes start to seep in like the housing market donation even behave as a ultra important don't Oh Satan Jesus was on Fox on day manager Ahn kevo fell diffuser all solo home huh click on que toda tu KO de cette époque me prepay lemme see July 2 da Cunha John Nelson Piquet Pablo de subasta de pueblos dead for fait le Kuwabara fois 8 8 consomme yo Mentos mint Imperials database machine Oct so Dante Emilia the rocky Potro dead to predict he'll see and once the house prices stop growing the whole house of cards collapsed Limina repeal do shoulder phone he's impaired do Pascal level or inability phone a PETA's collaboost 8f Andre long statue general deprived a so conjugate a Lhasa general Drake little poor although this is simple metal nestled by dt2 lays on Pantera as business failed they could repay the loans the only way they could do it by borrowing more and more but that process had to come to an end a preliminary many chances in feature to the coup is over pawn shops ecology capture mode considerable eminem ek keep off a capo Vasudha spawn said upon he pop a pile of usual Pascal Allah la voz eNOS Cosmo Peppa high-low hot red CT digit if only they thought that they had made their life and then suddenly the floor dropped out from one room and they started to lose it all again I mean who's hurt by depression the poor have always been poor you know this is not anything particularly new to them it's a little harder the rich if you've got twenty million dollars and you lose ten or twelve million you can still scrape by on that other eight million it's the middle class the ones who are new to that lifestyle and the middle class on that level as I said because of the consumer economy was grounded in the possession of material things whether it's an automobile whether it's clothes whether it's your house or whatever and all of that is one-by-one taken away from and so the economy continues to descend and ascend and descend no matter what Hoover is prepared to do and he's prepared to do not very much are the kinds of views that Hoover advocated were the the kinds of policies that made the Great Depression as bad as it was he refused to really have the kind of stimulus that the country needed there was really a lack of comprehension of the depth of the problem and the appropriate policies to respond to result from the world wireless aftermath to boost the confidence of the financial world Hoover decided to urgently repatriate to the US capital loan to Germany this was a devastating measure and a monumental mistake Germany which was barely recovering from the war was hit hard by the withdrawal of American capital the effect was simply to cut the flows of money that had previously in the middle of the 1920s moved from from the United States to Europe and had fed an economic boom World War one was not forgotten in 1929 there was still a lot of anger than the depression gave the Hoover administration and the Republicans at the time the opportunity to vent their anger among other things there is no way it would have saved the day by repatriating that money Leo politi Mao hospitalero Cappadocia a sushi debunk chaos ISIL economy Elmo did cetera you don't give you weekly KP to America trade Easter visitor Luke automaticity no stall good assume poor Gracie Katy poga me I don't think they were fully aware of the implications of what they were doing he stole money basically as Mamula say Papa's hey Rosita genuine Akane pono loot wasn't autre measure on Sanko sunset apis asked sequester comedy severity low-level nerve save our skeletal cell atlantic a Ecola premier pony Bo BIA Kikuchi pericles Selman la razón por aquí el almanarah Pony ah - Jessica open structural noggin a Pietro flannel man polyphenols no the capital region kiss on immediate motier Oprah my mom on deck widowed isness Ovid no 40 home Luther peacefully lucky dude draal Mannion the very first credit transfer spell disaster for the German economy the amount of the u.s. loans was staggering the Reichsbank had to set 14 billion march to the u.s. in gold and currency investors were ruined the empty banks were mobbed the international financial system the way it worked clearly contributed to the spread of the crisis in Germany and that led to contraction of the economy so that was one of the factors that contributed to the downward spiral what had been a local affair that is a largely American affair becomes a european-wide depression in a continent which itself has been suffering almost for the whole decade from a very weak economy not like the United States Europe hadn't been booming during the 20s but in fact was suffering all the consequences of a devastating world war one only was beginning to rebuild its industry and its agricultural economy and so on Germany had been in an economic mess all through the 1920s remember the horrendous mega inflation of the 1920s and just about wiped out the German middle class in the 1920s and a lot of that was the spillover from the the horrible terms of the Versailles Treaty those debts war reparation debts and war loan debts hangover the economy depressing it further until finally the the depression spreads from the United States to Europe mcafee to America MonaVie booze one-pass Kapoor she no sister more Lilly pasado de partido de da da man Seto DT and when you look at the German the German deal that what Germany got visibly France and what France did to Germany in that period and what the UK along with France did and what the u.s. allowed to happen to Germany we hurt Germany in a way that damaged stable democracy of course in a faucet off a waffle OLX trend what a party did a risky economy almond mal sexy beneficial Paulo Falls it's a city foo yeah your fate Jon Keller MonaVie le francais CVD a vaguely paradisio divulge fellow a colossal SD demo like his deliberate sulla krishna inaho she said reliability hermosa ID stay RS PA said business Abhinav yak assess a dynamic immediate no mojo Jaco Fozzie Bear clean interior OVR a play bomani APPA NEPAD duper silica silica do deserve solid Navya provocated muchos extrema Ella Krishna Fabio Kamala that Yankee that Ovidiu Catholicism in Germany industrial production collapsed bankruptcies increased and the number of unemployed reached over 6 million leading to widespread disillusionment and anger hunger marches were held in several cities and soup kitchens sprang up once again Hibiki on the Mendelsohn's toss a gem souviens Muhammad destroy burns all the soup along play in Monica's case excessive pollution cellphone Mia for hunting deer moose umma yeah police me - Tessa yet oh no uncle Manny Rosetta Jeanie Toto us a payload only do Cairo - true Nara motorman Santos au revoir exact oh no Lenny my phone or a few deep read reproduction coo coo coo zetas you nearly peop Evo wat sobolik reason many Akuma tragic me making Sasha meadow suspect a career goes con la bruja OC unarmed and cozy tahini in the United States the shock wave of the stock exchange collapse had not subsided before the effects of the terrible irreversible spiral of recession began to be felt American industrial production dropped by half thousands of families had to rely on the soup kitchen for food the economy did not recover and by June because spring was usually the big month for when the economy begins to perk up for the coming season didn't happen and as a result the bottom just sort of fell out of the market again and the country drifted along until about October and it's not until really about October of 30 that the country begins to fall into a depression America's sturdiest strongholds collapsed after the Wall Street Crash it was in stark contrast to their recent period of rapid growth one worker in five was unemployed the population seemed to neste thighs in New York where every month 17,000 families were put on the streets hundreds of thousands of unemployed including many white-collar workers struggled to survive trudging through the cold for hours just to get a bowl of soup and a piece of bread the government has no safety programs no safety net welfare programs there is no unemployment insurance so as people lose jobs and they're thrown on the streets they have nowhere to go but to private charities and those private charities are just completely overwhelmed you my early memories of the Depression was seeing seeing my mother standing on one of these lines to get food ashamed of being poor ashamed of having to ask somebody for something I remember that you know very vividly because it was very painful to see her on this line waiting to get some food as a depression got worse we moved from bad tenements to worse tenements of course another thing I remembers my own family my father was a waiter when the depression came there was less work and so my father had to do many other things desperately he became a salesman of ties of neckties because I remember I felt very ashamed I walking past down the street to school and there was my father selling ties on the street and I to this day I'm I'm ashamed of my own reaction and another time you became a window cleaner and he did that until he fell from one of his window cleaning jobs have hurt himself and I remember my father doing some cleaning streets or something like that and that's part of the awful tragedy of the depression it's it's literally etched on the faces of people men get up and they go out to look for work and they know they're not going to find anything and so they're going to spend half the day sitting on a park bench feeling useless it was a reality that it was very difficult to escape from I think you couldn't go anywhere without seeing the signs of depression you couldn't go anywhere without seeing the boarded up stores the factories that were not working the people who were standing on the street in the early phases of the depression many men for instance still dressed up as if they were going to work because they didn't want to tell their families they're too embarrassed to tell their families that they were unemployed but then they would stand around and in their work all day in the streets to be away from home to be somewhere else broken by the recession and prepared to do anything to survive more and more people took part in numerous dance marathons 1930s variant of ancient circus games the rule of these trials was simple couples had to dance for as long as possible sometimes for several days in the hope of winning the $500 awarded to the last couple standing to the delight of the audience's who came to forget their own misery the organisers thought of everything doctors beds and food the losers at least got the chance to eat you that's one of the things that I remember of course another thing I remembers people being evicted from their tenements even as low as the rents were they could not afford to pay them and so the police would come they'd take their furniture and put them out on the street and I remember as a little boy going by these scenes of furniture out on the streets and you know you might see the mother crying weeping you know because they it was not only that they had lost their home but it was psychologically humiliating for them to have all of their possessions in full view of everybody and to for everybody to know that they could not pay their rent but once or twice I saw scenes of rebellion people organizing to move the furniture back to defy the police and has happened several times people as they lost their homes had to had to go somewhere and they went largely into these makeshift Hut's that they put together with cardboard and tin and leftover materials they slept in caves in Central Park there are tent cities all over America of homeless people that are called Hoovervilles in mocking disdain for what Hoover has visited upon the country Central Park in New York City had a number of Hoovervilles and who rules were for a number of years the shame of our society once I live the life of a millionaire spending my money lord I didn't I carried my friends out for a mighty good time I'm bootleg liquor champagne and wine then I begun to didn't have no money and no place to if I get my hands on a dollar I'm gonna hold on til the Eagles grin because when you're down in your pockets not one penny and your friend you have not any but when get home you meet again everybody who wants to be your long-lost friend it's mighty strange without Adam if you're passionate about documentaries go online to view more programs read articles and join the discussion at SBS comm a you forward slash documentary

Channel: Nik TheSaint

Views: 1,570,609

Rating: 4.7454367 out of 5

Keywords: ARTE, 1929TheGreatDepression, Pt1

Id: bCEJ65H_1XE

Length: 52min 31sec (3151 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 02 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/IPlayAtThis]

Yeah, there's a fun movie about this called, "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?" Okay, it's not fun. It's disturbing and depressing.