Dust Bowl Dbq

Words: 854
Pages: 4

In the mid 1920s to the 1930s, the United States faced a tragic event that brought people to unity and fight against the government when the stock market crash. This was the time period after World War I: The Great Depression. The Depression left people with many people unemployed and no money to buy food, pay bills, or purchase clothing. The cause of the Great Depression is the economy dealing with the Dust Bowl, and the effects are the New Deal and the people that were affected by the Depression. The economy went downhill once the Dust Bowl hit. With the severe droughts and a failure to apply dryland farming methods to prevent wind erosions in the 1930s, the farmers was impacted with the devastation of no food production. The Dust Bowl …show more content…
One of those impacts was the New Deal. To respond negativity, the US government passed the New Deal which offered relief, reform, and recovery. The New Deal was a law that provided federal welfare system providing relief, unemployment insurance, and old-age pensions to people who has low-income, so the government would give them a little bit of financial support for food, shelter, clothing, and health related issues. However, the New Deal programs discriminated against blacks. “The NRA, for example, not only offered whites the first crack at jobs, but authorized separate and lower pay scales for blacks.” The discrimination affected the Blacks the equality of equal pay for all American citizens, which affects the survival of their families since they won’t have any money to eat, they won’t have another to eat, or they won’t have any clothes to stay warm. Also, a perspective of a white woman who has a white-collar job believes the program of social security is stealing her savings away that can be put towards use during the Great Depression. “Security at the price of freedom” is what the woman wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt, the first lady of the United States during the time. The idea of the government taking away the people’s money to give to people who are poor angered the wealthy since they worked so hard for that money; now they have to give the money to people less …show more content…
There were only limited amount of jobs during the time of the Great Depression, “that meant firing any married women identified as a family’s ‘secondary’ wage-earner.” In every household, only one member was allowed to work because there wasn’t enough jobs or enough money to pay many workers. It wasn’t fair to other families who have no working family member compare to two. Even if there were one or two working members in the family, the income in households during the time was not sufficient enough to have a full healthy meal. Also, most of the workers were men since they were more strong and efficient workers, so the companies got rid of the women. African Americans were also affected by the New Deal because they weren’t even included in the new law. “Taxes must be paid on behalf of this person before he turns 60..Negro sharecroppers and cash tenants would be left out.” People who are unemployed, don’t pay taxes, or are minorities, they had a difficult time because they weren’t given financial support, so they had to survive on their own with the money they already had in savings, which was not a large amount to provide a family. This shows that the New Deal wasn’t very successful because they excluded African Americans from social security and women from working. With the Great Depression, the cause is the economy failing to return money to the people, and