The shantytowns that were popping up as more and more people lost their homes were nicknamed “ Hoovervilles” as an insult to the president’s hands-off policies. Though he believed that the “crazy and dangerous” behavior of Wall Street speculators had contributed in a significant way to the crisis, he also believed that solving such problems was not really the federal government’s job.Īs a result, most of the solutions he suggested were voluntary: He asked state governments to undertake public works projects he asked big companies to keep workers’ pay steady and he asked labor unions to stop demanding raises. President Herbert Hoover was slow to respond to these events. The New England Hurricane of 1938, also a Category 5 storm, caused property losses roughly equal to $5 billion in today’s money. Other natural disasters struck more quickly: The 1935 Labor Day Hurricane hit the Florida Keys as the most violent hurricane to ever make landfall in the Atlantic basin. The crisis gave the decade an unfortunate nickname: the “Dirty Thirties.” The 1930s saw natural disasters as well as manmade ones: For most of the decade, people in the Plains states suffered through the worst drought in American history, as well as hundreds of severe dust storms, or "black blizzards," that carried away the soil and made it all but impossible to plant crops.īy 1940, 2.5 million people had abandoned their farms in this Dust Bowl and headed west to California.
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