Tag: unemployed

03/14/11

Hard life during the Great Depression

Picture above: Free food was distributed  in some urban centers to large numbers of the unemployed.

Picture on the left: Number of people who were unemployed and looking for a job.

During the Great Depression,the unemployment rate reached a extremely high point. Ten of thousand of people lost their jobs and they were just kept looking for a job. However, it was impossible to satisfy everyone. The amount of unemployed people were so great meanwhile the job opportunity was so less. When the people lost their job, they could not provide food to their families, not even themselves. Therefore, the government provided free meals to those people. The Great Depression made a terrible effect on everyone and it took a more than ten years to recover the society.

03/13/11

Give Me Bread or Give Me Death!

Unemployed men waiting on line for food.

The Great Depression had a pervasive and profound impact on American life. When the stock market crashed, everything began to crumble and fall. Millions were without jobs, therefore, resulting in people relying on bread and soup lines to bring food to the table. In the two photographs, it depicts different groups of people waiting on line for food. In the first photograph, it is a picture of a group of men, most if not all white, on a line for free coffee and doughnuts. This line is targeted to the unemployed individuals. In the second picture, it shows African Americans on a soup line. These two pictures show how the depression negatively affected diverse segments of the population and that starvation was a widespread problem. In addition, the second picture has an ironic poster advocating the American life in the background. American dream? It did not exist anymore.

People waiting on the soup line.
03/11/11

The Great Depression in America

People sleeping on the streets using newspapers as a blanket and as a mattress

The Great Depression began in 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s and early 1940s. There was a sharp decline in profits, personal incomes and tax revenues. Businesses were failing rapidly and many people became unemployed and homeless. The two images shown above portray how the Great Depression greatly impacted their lifestyle. The first image have multiple pictures combined, it shows people of different backgrounds besieged with the same problem. The second image shows homeless people sleeping on the streets. This resulted from high unemployment rates, causing many people have no source of income to support themselves.