The decade of the 1920s was characterized by an unprecedented economic expansion, which resulted in a huge bull market on Wall Street. Business leaders and

Millions were out of work during the Great Depression. Since the government provided no unemployment insurance, lost jobs resulted in repossessed homes and evictions. Homeowners

Thousands of farmers lost their land when they had no market for their crops and thus could not pay their mortgages. The plight of the

It was not bad enough that the economy dealt farmers a lousy hand, Mother Nature added salt to the wounds in the form of The

Besides the dust bowl migrants, other groups of people were traveling the roads, or hopping freight trains, or going place-to-place looking for something better during

After World War I, Congress voted a financial payment to veterans of the war as a bonus for their service. Every veteran of the Great

During the Depression, dance halls were both a way of obtaining badly needed money and an escape of the harsh realities of daily life. The

President Hoover believed that the economic problems that faced the country after the Wall Street Crash were best solved by private charities and/or local government.

Capitalism and the laissez-faire economics of conservatives like Hoover were questioned by large segments of the population. (Donaldson, “I Hear America Singing”: Folk Music and

Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) was the cousin of Teddy Roosevelt. He graduated from Harvard. He was the Assistant Secretary of the Navy under Woodrow Wilson.