Banking and Farming in the 1920s and 1930s

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Banking and Farmingin the1920s and 1930s

• By
• Rachael
• Aurelie
• Steve
• Greg

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Banking

• The tinder that fueled the Depression had been
  gathering undetected for a decade, the spark that
  set if off was struck in a single week in
  October,1929, when the stock market crashed.

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• National income plummeted after 1929 from
  87,800,000,000 that year to less then
  75,700,000,000 in 1930, and down to
  40,200,000,000 in 1933, the low point.

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• John Garner of Texas demanded federal loans for
  the needy. The American Federation of Labor
  wanted appropriations to pay teachers in bankrupt
  cities. A chorus of voices urged revival of U.S.
  Employment Service, defunct since the war.
  Hoover looked coldly on these proposals, but he
  was driven in July, 1932, to accept a bill that
  authorized the Reconstruction Finance Corporation
  to lend 300,000,000 to states for relief and to
  make 1,500,000,000 available for public works.

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• Banks had been collapsing like dominoes all
  across the county for three years.

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• In the three years, 1930-1932, eighty-six
  thousand business failed.

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• 1,400 businesses had gone down in 1932.

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• 9 million saving accounts were wiped out and many
  people were upset.

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• Wages fell by an average of 60.

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• National wealth shrank from a pre-Depression
  439,000,000,000 to 330,000,000,000 in 1933.

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• The Federal Farm Board, set up by Hoover in 1929
  before the crash to help farmers market
  surpluses, had begun in January of 1930 to urge a
  program of reduced production as a way of forcing
  farm prices up.

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• In 1932, when the national agricultural income
  had dropped to less than half of what it had been
  in 1929, farmers began to take action.

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• In any event, the President didnt like the idea
  of federal control over farm production, and by
  the middle of 1931 attempts to help the farm
  economy were all but abandoned.

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• On March 16th the President dropped a bomb shell-
  in effect initiatingthe true New Deal. This is a
  call for comprehensive agricultural legislation,
  long overdue, to refinance farm mortgages in
  order to relieve debt pressures and saves the
  land from foreclosure and also to raise farm
  income by restricting production and paying
  farmers not to produce.

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• Farmers were the first hit and were among the
  hardest hit in the depression.

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• They fled their sterile acres in droves, at the
  rate of 600,000 annually during the closing years
  of the 20s and crowded into the towns and
  cities, where, before long they would fall under
  another kind of blight- namely, unemployment.

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• In Iowa, Farmers were withholding produce until
  prices rose. They made roadblocks and turned
  back cars and trucks bound for market.

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• Dairy farmers took more of an aggressive action,
  seized milk shipments, prying open the cans, and
  dumping them along roads and railways.

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• Meanwhile, hundreds of farmers were losing
  everthing they owned as banks foreclosed on
  mortgages and homesteads were auctioned off. It
  was not uncommon for friends and neighbors to
  converge on such a sale, scare off any outsiders,
  and buy back the farmers holding for him. -a
  quarter for a horse or cow, a dime or nickle for
  a hog.

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• Net Farming income remained static at about 9
  billion during all the years that corporate and
  speculative profits were zooming off the charts.

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• The value of farm lands decreased from 80
  billion to around 55 million.

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• The whole farm sector of the economy was allowed
  to stagnate and even to fall backward during this
  dizzying decade.

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• The rate of farm bankruptcies multiplied six
  times over.

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• THE END!