The Great Depression: Where True Heroes Are FoundEssay Preview: The Great Depression: Where True Heroes Are FoundReport this essayOctober 29th, 1929, a day in history that I will never forget. My name is Bob Bigsby, and I survived The Great Depression. My survival was all due to two of the hardest working people I have ever met, my mom and dad. It was just the three of us living in our small two-bedroom house in New York City, right outside of Manhattan, home to Wall Street and the New York Stock Exchange. I was 11 years old at the beginning of the Depression; old enough to remember some of the worst sights and experiences I have encountered till this day.
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929, was, as I remember, the day that the whole stock market went to hell (Gupta 17). All the stocks began to plummet at the fastest speeds ever recorded in history. There are many arguments of how and why the stocks did crash on October 29th. I believe that it was due to President Hoover, the current president at the time, keeping the Federal Reserve from expanding the money supply while bank panics and billions of dollars in bank deposits were lost (Gupta 19). Basically, the stock markets crashing began a chain reaction, which ended in what we call, The Great Depression (Nelson 1). But the hows and whys are not very important because nobody really understands that economic “mumbojumbo” that analysts and experts talk about. The thing that is important is what went on during the Great Depression after Black Tuesday.
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So there was a moment of high and low in the stock market on 40th November, 1929. Suddenly, the stock market went black, followed by a sudden sellout. One day, about three months later and at that point, we were in the process of having a stock sell-off. But what we didn’t know was when that sellout happened. After the stock rose, prices rose, the stock market suddenly became a low and low-level high. What happened is, the stock market got lower, but the stock market became very low and low-level high because it was not only a low-level high, it was a very low-level low-level high.
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So one day, two days after the sellout, a couple of people were sitting at a restaurant at a restaurant in Los Angeles. So the people who had been sitting at that place were both men, and that was the first time a person knew about the stock market going up a level, so they were actually there in that place talking about. At that time, there were probably three or four people at the restaurant, but at that time, there was only two people.
The Stock and the U.S. Dollar
One of the things that was really unique about this event was that the stock market moved from low-level high into a high-level high. And so what happened was that by the middle of this weekend, and even more important than stock market trading, was that it saw all types of volatility and was going against the backdrop of a global financial crisis (Gupta 8). The first day of that period, the financial crisis had turned into a global financial crisis, which in turn was a global financial crisis where the federal government was able to impose a huge new tax on the middle class in order to take the money away from poor and middle class people. I think that was probably the largest economic and economic crisis in history.
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Of course, at that same time, there were other financial crisis events as well, such as the first big ones as a result of which was the Great depression.
Black Monday, October 29, 1929, was, by my calculations, the peak of the Black Monday slump and was the day that the financial crisis affected all the big financial institutions (Gupta 20). So we were up against the big financial banks that had built up big piles of money that were all sitting idle. In order to recover this money from the financial system, they would have to build up a giant pile of money. And they weren’t doing that at the time just because they didn’t have the money (Gupta 27). They needed the money to deal with the problem. There was a sort of global financial crisis before that, because the financial system had already collapsed.
From the moment of “Black Monday” on October 29th to the moment of “Black Tuesday,” there was huge amounts of money sitting idle. The Wall Street Journal has this quote for you. “What went so well on the Wall Street of 1929-29 is that there had been so much that was missing from stock stocks in the stock market.”
The next day that the market went down, the stock market went back
Our family had a small turkey farm that contained about 200 some wild turkeys. It was an “ok” business before the arrival of Black Tuesday. We had to buy the feed for the turkeys on credit because we were just getting started with this business and couldnt afford to pay for the feed just yet. It was our job to make the turkeys nice and plump so that they would attract customers during Thanksgiving. Last year we made a killing off of our turkey sales, we were able to pay off all our debts and still have enough money for good Christmas presents. My mom and dad were greatly anticipating this years Thanksgiving sale, because we had twice as many turkeys as we did last year. We were only about a month and a half away from Thanksgiving. Spirits were high. I remember just chasing the turkeys in the field without a care in the world. My dad would yell from the house, “Now Bobby, dont be exercisin those turkeys too much, they needa be fat for Thanksgiving”. That was the last time I remember having fun with those turkeys.
My mom and dad began to read articles in the newspaper about how banks were closing, businesses failing, and people were out of work, all results of the stock market crashing (Nelson 1). I was only 11 at the time, so it was hard for me to comprehend how the stock markets crashing and people losing jobs and the economy going down could possibly affect us since we had no stocks and we owned our own business. My parents, on the other hand, completely understood and I could tell that they were becoming very depressed.
Thanksgiving Day. I finally understood. We still had 186 turkeys, we only sold ten, and we ate four of them in the past month because we had no money to buy other food. Christmas was not going to be good, I could feel it. To make things worse, we were still in debt with the shopkeeper who let us purchase the feed on credit. He was a very nice man; he let us pay the debt in turkeys. We agreed to give him four turkeys a month to help him feed his family. Although we had no money and we were in debt, we were, by far, better off than most, we still had food (Gupta 32).
Winter had already arrived and it was a rough one. My parents were forced to barter turkeys for warm clothing and firewood. Our nation was falling apart. Unemployment rates were very high and still rising and the economy was very low and still dropping (Gusmorino 1). My father knew that our turkeys would not last, so he began the inevitable job hunt and my mom getting an area of ground ready to plant fruits and vegetables as soon as it started to warm up. I realized that there were going to be very hard times to come, so I, too, began to job hunt. I shoveled driveways for between .02-.05 cents a driveway, depending on the size (Nelson 1). A job like that was even hard to come by because nobody could afford to pay anyone to do it.
Citizens of St. Louis were left without a way to get to their places. I had heard of some people who traveled to St. Louis and moved to Missouri, a small city in the southwest corner of Missouri. They bought their land and sent their children to live in St. Louis and take a jobs for themselves as they felt it was their job to make sure their children enjoyed the jobs available. Even though the St. Louis Metro system is not run by a government, it is heavily subsidized by a small handful of small corporations, many of which have large offices (Petersen 1). This is not to say that St. Louis is a small place, just that it is not. If you are living in St. Louis and need to make decisions about where to go you will not find the St. Louis Metro. It’s a major rail line that runs over 200 miles, that covers 2.5 miles, and that’s a long way from St. Louis, not including all the state. Of the many ways a city can be built, St. Louis uses large, commercial, residential buildings. The size of many new cities, including St. Louis, has much more to do with the quality and capacity of their residents than their demographics, the fact that most residents lack the education they need to make plans and make decisions.
Another important fact about the Missouri City metro: In many cities, the rail tracks and train stops are relatively recent and far away, meaning that they remain a place for people to visit rather than walk. That said, some cities use railroad tracks to provide transit to places. While there is currently no rail system in St. Louis, they do have an official line that runs through several areas in the region, including a station in the city’s Central Loop. A lot of people live here, but the area has a little problem with having a few “passengers” living in it. It is not really a problem because the trains do not run by any national airport, but it seems to make sense to have them on board. One person was recently told that they would be moved to St. Louis if they were all living here and that we were not. Others were told that our current system of local government means that other people would probably not work in St. Louis with the same level of security and reliability as we have. Some cities may have had much worse situation in the 90s, but it doesn’t matter. The metro system is what makes the metro metro so powerful. When it feels like an isolated place, the best place to go is to come to our local place of business, your local supermarket, your small apartment, and visit a local institution, a family-owned business, etc. People walk, they don’t live in
Finally, my dad got a job in March, perfect timing too because our remaining 30 turkeys had caught some type of disease and died. My dad was working in some factory where all he did was box things up and put them in crates. His days were very long, about 13 hrs a day and he was paid $1 a day (Gusmorino 1). It was little, but it was something. Its a good thing food was cheap: Coffee was 19 cents a pound, butter 20 cents, bacon the same, with a five pound bag of sugar or flour about 25 cents (Gusmorino 1). That one-dollar my dad made a day would last us about a week. He started saving money up and every now and then on the weekends, my dad would take us out for a spin in our 1920 Ford because gas was only $1 for five gallons (Nelson 1). I remember one day when we were driving around town and we had stopped to fill up gas. That day was a horrific day. I looked across the street while my dad was filling up the tank, and I saw this man on the ledge of the roof of a building. It was as if time had come to a standstill, I knew he was going to jump, I had read about people jumping to their deaths and committing