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June 11, 2012

Americans during the Great Depression

Since the onset of the recession in 2007, pundits have compared the crisis to the Great Depression of the 1930s - but this week's release of 1,000 photographs from that bygone era serves as a reminder of how truly harsh that period was.

All of the black-and-white photos that were made available online by the New York Public Library were taken in the 1930s and 1940s under the auspices of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) – an agency created in 1935 as part of the New Deal policy to combat rural poverty.

The New York Times has reported that Roy Stryker, founder of the FSA’s photography project, was determined to compile a visual encyclopaedia of Depression-era U.S. and preserve it for future generations.
Downtrodden: Children of migrant fruit worker in Berrien County, Michigan
Homeless: Squatters camping on a highway near Bakersfield, California, in 1935
Hard-knock life: A California fruit 'tramp' was photographed with his family in a migrant camp in Marysville in 1935
Destitute: Children sitting on the steps of a dilapidated house in Michigan in June of 1937

Backbreaking work: Many farmers who lost their land in the crisis were forced to become sharecroppers to eke out a meager living
Documented: The photographs were taken by the Farm Security Administration that was combating rural poverty
Quality control: Department of Agriculture officials testing meats at Beltsville, Maryland, in 1935

Bleak: Dust bowl refugees photographed along a highway near Bakersfield, California, in 1935

Crisis: In 1932, the unemployment rate was at 24.9 per cent, and millions of people were homeless and living in shantytowns
Down-and-out: Mother and father and several children of a family of nine living in open field in rough board covering built on old Ford chassis on U.S. Route 70, between Bruceton and Camden, Tennessee
Bygone era: A family of eight living in a four-bedroom home in El Monte, California, paying $16.20 rent a month
Jobless: At the height of the Great Depression, as many as 15 million Americans were unemployed
Wayward: Migrant family in Kern County, California, in 1936

Hovels: Houses of African-Americans in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in 1936

7 comments:

  1. We now have unemployment at 40%, 47 million of food stamps and no end in sight. Thank you CONgress for giving 24 trillion to the bankers to cover their illegal activities. Time to do what the Icelandic people did. Put their bankers in jail and forgive all debt. Then end globalism and see the US soar. Until then.....

    These photos could very well be from today.

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  2. Actually, they look pretty healthy compared to the disgusting, lumbering, obese WHALES I see strutting their stuff all over the US today.

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  3. It looks good compared to what we see today in some places.

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  4. So who got us out of it? Hitler.

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  5. Jct: F.D. Roosevelt banning their interest-free community currencies morted an extra 7 million Americans of poverty. Stats show 7 million less Americans when the "lack of money" depression was over. Notice how local media of exchanged saved Argentina in the 1980s, Russia in the 1990s, Argentina again in the 2000s, Greece and many other places around the world now, when people end up with no medium, they revert to barter except now it's organised into LETS timebanks. FED banning local media of exchanged killed more Americans than any other President. For instance, LBJ only killed 50,000 in Vietnam. George Bush only killed a few thousands in Iraq-Afghanistan. FDR is America's greatest mass-murdered of Americans and most people have no idea of how his ban cost an extra 7 million souls for form the gauntlet he had to run when he croaked and tried to get into heaven. Har har har.

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  6. Wallmart pics are great.

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  7. different time. today we have chemtrails fluoride spice aspartame fda cia fbi and do i really need to preach to the choir....if we are going to compare then i would say today is far far worse than yesterday. If youde like to debate the fact...freedarren007@yahoo.com

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