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Great Depression And The Lessons Essay

Lessons From the Great Depression The great depression in the U.S.A. was occasioned by the crash in the stock market in October 1929 and led to great panic at the wall street, wiping out millions of investors, the consumer spending drastically dropped and hence drop in investments hence by 1933 around 15 million Americans were rendered jobless and close to half the banks in the nation closed. More citizens withdrew their money from the banks with fears that the banks could go under despite the repeated assurance by President Roosevelt that it was safe to keep their money in the banks than to keep it under the mattress. It is a period that left people with no options to satisfy their basic needs, yet on the flip side, it presented people with positive lessons and skills to adopt in order to survive through the tough economic times (Browder, Laura

, 1998). These tough economic options drove majority of the Americas to learn how to share the few resources and supplies that were among them, a fact that bordered on communism amidst a capitalistic economy.

These depression brought hard times when there was little in terms of trade that the Americans could constructively engage in...

This situation left many Americans with only one option, that of writing in order to express their feelings and frustrations at the depression. At this time, the writers who inclined towards the leftist ideologies were more appealing to many Americans due to the general dissatisfaction with the way the depression was being managed and the measures that the government had put in place in addressing the dire situation of many Americans as noted by Dawahare, Anthony, (1997)
With such a big challenge before the U.S.A. government at that time, it required a myriad of tactics to tackle the greatest economic depression that the U.S.A. had ever experienced since independence. According to Himmelberg & Robert F. (2001)

, the new deal was one of the greatest strategies that were used in order to combat the economic challenge at that time. It involved a lot of economic reforms which included the reduction of the salary of those who worked in government departments, as well as the army by 15% and the reduction of government spending by 25%. This was a lesson…

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The effects of the depression were far reaching, however, there was a section of population that had an easier time as compared to other Americans. The Dakota population was a special exemption during the depression. McNicol Stock & Catherine, (1992)

note that apart from the crash at the stock market, the depression was further exacerbated by the bad weather that mutilated the agricultural sector just as the economic downturn took its worst turn. The people of Dakota however had a lucky spell of rainfall that meant they had a better harvest than the rest of the country. With this advantage over the rest of the U.S.A., Dakota combined it with the other skills and forged ahead with their economy as the rest of the country remained behind. It was a case of luck and skills combined for Dakota in the lessening of the effects of the drought, a lesson that the nation can learn on how to strengthen the parts of the economy that ach state has for the good of the entire U.S..

The great depression had various lessons as noted above for the current U.S. society in terms
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