American History: Fear Takes Hold During the Great Depression
23 February 2011
The son of a Depression-era refugee from Oklahoma who moved to California
BARBARA KLEIN: Welcome to THE MAKING OF A NATION -- American history in VOA Special English. I’m Barbara Klein.
STEVE EMBER: And I’m Steve Ember.
The stock market crash of nineteen twenty-nine marked the beginning of the worst economic crisis in American history. Millions of people lost their jobs. Thousands lost their homes.
During the next several years, a large part of the richest nation on earth learned what it meant to be poor.
Workers lost their jobs as factories closed. Business owners lost their stores and sometimes their homes. Farmers lost their land as they struggled with falling prices and natural disasters.
And Americans were not the only ones who suffered. This week in our series, we talk about the economic crisis that became the Great Depression.
(MUSIC “Creole Love Call”/Duke Ellington and his Famous Orchestra)
BARBARA KLEIN: One of America's greatest writers, John Steinbeck, described the depression this way:
"It was a terrible, troubled time. I can't think of any ten years in history when so much happened in so many directions. Violent change took place. Our country was shaped, our lives changed, our government rebuilt."
Steinbeck, winner of the nineteen sixty-two Nobel Prize in literature, said: "When the market fell, the factories, mines, and steelworks closed and then no one could buy anything, not even food."
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