Abstract
On October 29, 1929 the US stock market crashed and opened the door for one of the most significant events in American history – The Great Depression. Savings were wiped out, banks closed, GDP dropped, and unemployment soared upward. At its peak, unemployment rose to nearly 25%, in 1933. GDP dropped by 29% between 1929 and 1933 (Swanson and Williams 1972).
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Notes
- 1.
It has been estimated that one-eighth of California’s population can claim Okie ancestry (Loh 1992).
- 2.
An interesting side line is that the field notes used by Sanora Babb for her own book were used by John Steinbeck in writing his masterpiece: The Grapes of Wrath.
- 3.
There other candidates in the 1932 election: Norman Thomas, a Socialist; William Z. Foster, a Communist; William S. Upshaw, a Prohibitionist party member; William H. Harvey, the Liberty Party; and Verne L. Reynolds, a Socialist of Labor.
- 4.
In 1932, Mexican artist Diego Rivera arrived in Detroit to paint a set murals at the Detroit Institute of Arts. Detroit was in the middle of the Great Depression and the unemployed were a significant population. A march was called, The Hunger March. Participants marched to the Ford Motor River Rouge Plant, demanding jobs. Armed security guards panicked and fired shots into the crowd, killing six people. The incident is known as The Battle of the Overpass. Rivera painted his mural and when unveiled, they created a large controversy, but in the end, the Art Institute did the right thing and accepted the murals. They remain one of the most engaging works of modern art of the twentieth century.
- 5.
The increase in the Hispanic population in the NE was most likely due to an increase in the Puerto Rican population. With the advent of jet travel it was a short trip from the Island to New York, for instance.
- 6.
Note that WW2 may have had an effect on the demographic differences between males and females. There were an estimated 405,000 Americans killed in WW2, and the figure represented 0.4 percent of the US population in 1940. The majority of these deaths were males.
- 7.
WW2 had significant effects on American society. There were four significant effects of WW2 on American society. (1) Military spending ended the Great Depression, and actually validated the theories of John Maynard Keynes; (2) Elevated business and business thinking in many sectors of American society, including education (see Cuban 2004; see also Callahan 1962); (3) Increased government bureaucracy as citizens began to rely on government for addressing problems that were normally handled privately; and (4) Lead to socioeconomic gains among women and oppressed minorities as Black and Hispanic soldiers, for example, who had risked their lives in battle and returned home seeking a better life for themselves and their families.
- 8.
The nativity results for NHBs seems to contradict more recent data on the educational differences between US born and foreign born Blacks. As we move into more recent years, the research suggests that foreign born blacks will have better educational experiences, mainly the result of their better socio-demographic statuses and the fact that there are differences between voluntary and involuntary immigrant populations (Ogbu and Davis 2003). For research in this area see also (Pinder 2008; Mithethwa-Sommers and Harushimana 2016; Anderson 2015; MPI 2012).
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Verdugo, R.R. (2018). Geographic Distribution of the US Population and the School Population During the Great Depression: 1930–1950. In: American Education and the Demography of the US Student Population, 1880 – 2014. Applied Demography Series, vol 10. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89423-2_4
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