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Did You Know 

Eleanor Roosevelt received and responsed to thousands of letters

During her first year in the White House, Mrs. Roosevelt received 300,000 pieces of mail from adults and children.

She continued to receive hundreds of thousands of letters in the years that followed.

The First Lady had a secretary who was in charge of the mail. Her secretary would read the mail and either reply to it or send it to another department for action. She would also select about 50 letters a day for Mrs. Roosevelt to read. The First Lady would sometime dictate replies to those letters. 

Eleanor Roosevelt helped establish the National Youth Administration in June 1935. The NYA helped more than 2 million high school and college students stay in school by giving them grants in exchange for work.

They worked in libraries and college labs, and on farms. The NYA also found work for 2.5 million young people who were not in school and not working. As World War II approached, NYA youths worked in defense industries where they gained useful job skills.

The NYA was an equal opportunity agency, providing aid to women and minorities. This feature of the program was very important to Mrs. Roosevelt. "It is a question of the right to work," she said, "and the right to work should know no color lines."

Youth Hobo's

In 1932 sociologist Thomas Minehan disguised himself as a hobo and set out to research the lives of transient, homeless men. Much to his surprise, Minehan found that "a great number" of hoboes ''were youths and even boys.... And as I left .... to live in hobo railroad yard camps or jungles and river shanty-towns, [where the homeless stopped as they wandered across the country I found more and more youths and not a few girls ... -- children really -- dressed in army breeches and boys' coats or sweaters -looking, except for their dirt and rags, like a Girl Scout Club on an outing."

Minehan was so startled by this army of homeless youths that he made these poor children and teens the subject of his book Boy and Girl Tramps of America (1934).

What Minehan had stumbled upon during his research was just one part of the youth problem of the 1930's. Some 250,000 youths belonged to the homeless sector that Minehan had studied in the early Depression years; millions of other teens and children, even though not homeless, faced material deprivation and limited educational opportunities because of the economic crisis.

The unemployment rate among young Americans during the 1930s was higher than that of the rest of the population. Experts on youth, such as Homer Rainey, director of the American Youth Commission, estimated that during the early Depression years "40 per cent of the youth (16-24) in the whole country are neither gainfully employed nor in school." Children below working age were utterly dependent upon their parents, and when those parents were unemployed -- as was common in this age of double digit joblessness, before the advent of federal unemployment and food relief programs -- hunger often resulted.

Surveys revealed that a fifth of New York City's children suffered from malnutrition at the height of the Depression. In the impoverished coal regions of Illinois, Kentucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia that malnutrition rate may have exceeded 90%. Schools and colleges were also thrown into crisis. Declining tax revenues disrupted the education of at least a third of a million children in 1932 in districts which lacked the funds to operate schools. Poverty forced some 80,000 college students to drop-out in 1932-1933, making this the first peace-time period in the twentieth century when American college enrollments declined.

Commodity Prices tumbled druring the depression

In 1918 Curde Oil had soared up over $3 a barrel, driven up by WWI from under 0.50 cents a barrel in 1914. After WWI prices fell back.

By 1929 Oil was down to $1.45 but during the Great Depression Oil fell to only 0.25 cents a barrel in 1933. Oil experienced a sharp bounce back up to $1.00 in 1934.

Reference Sources

Wikipedia -Great Dpression

The World in Depression 1929-39

Lessons from the Great Depression

The depression had devastating effects in almost every country,

rich or poor. International trade plunged by half to two-thirds, as did personal income, tax revenue,

prices and profits. cities around the world were hit hard, especially those dependent on heavy industry. Construction was virtually halted in many countries. Farming and rural areas suffered as crop prices fell by roughly 60 percent.  Facing plummeting demand with few alternate sources of jobs, areas dependent on primary sector industries such as farming, mining and logging suffered the most .

In early 1930, credit was ample and available at low rates, but people were reluctant to add new debt by borrowing.  By May 1930, auto sales had declined to below the levels of 1928. Prices in general began to decline, but wages held steady in 1930, then began to drop in 1931. Conditions were worse in farming areas, where commodity prices plunged, and in mining and logging areas, where unemployment was high and there were few other jobs. The decline in the US economy was the factor that pulled down most other countries at first, then internal weaknesses or strengths in each country made conditions worse or better. Frantic attempts to shore up the economies of individual nations through protectionist policies, such as the 1930 U.S. Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act and retaliatory tariffs in other countries, exacerbated the collapse in global trade. By late in 1930, a steady decline set in which reached bottom by March 1933. But a major recession relapse hit again in 1937.

Many economist now believe WWII ended the recession as millions were drafted into war around the globe.  A few  economist argue that had the economic policies of President Roosevelt continued and WWII not have come along, the Great Depression would have lasted 20 years or until 1949.

Depression Scares Are Hardly New

By ROBERT J. SHILLER  May 3, 2009  NEW YORK TIMES Article Excerpt 

The Michigan surveyors produce a confidence score from the answer to this question. (It is one of the five ingredients in their combined Index of Consumer Sentiment, which is much more widely followed.) A high score on the question means that the answers tilted toward continuous good times, with a low score tilting toward unemployment or depression. Since 1960, the average score has been 94.

If we define a depression scare as any time the score is below 65, there have been four such scares since 1951. They were in the periods from 1974 to 1975, during which 47 was the lowest score; from 1978 to 1982, with a low of 41; from 1990 to 1992, with a low of 54; and from 2008 to 2009, with a low (to date) of 59. Note that so far, at least, the worst reading in the current scare has not been as bad as those of the previous episodes.

As Franklin D. Roosevelt famously said during the Great Depression, “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Let’s hope that is true, and that the relative complacency in the general population is good news for the economy.