When President Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in 1933, one in four Americans was out of work nationally, but in some cities and some industries unemployment was well over 50 percent. Equally troubling were the bank panics. Between 1929 and 1931, 4,000 banks closed for good; by 1933 the number rose to more than 9,000, with $2.5 billion in lost deposits. Banks never have as much in their vaults as people have deposited, and if all depositors claim their money at once, the bank is ruined. Millions of Americans lost their money because they arrived at the bank too late to withdraw their savings. The panics raised troubling questions about credit, value, and the nature of capitalism itself. And they made clear the unpredictable relationship between public perception and general financial health--the extent to which the economy seemed to work as long as everyone believed that it would. To stop the run on banks, many states simply closed their banks the day before Roosevelt's inauguration. Roosevelt himself declared a four-day "bank holiday" almost immediately upon taking office and made a national radio address on Sunday, March 12, 1933, to explain the banking problem. This excerpt from Roosevelt's first "fireside chat" demonstrated the new president's remarkable capacity to project his personal warmth and charm into the nation's living rooms. Audio is an excerpt of the full address.

The urban workplace changed dramatically in the early decades of the nineteenth century. The American Revolution, with its rampant egalitarianism, dissolved much of the paternalistic control once wielded by fathers, masters and other authority figures, as the anonymous author "Old Apprentice" made clear in his set of three letters to the New York Observer in 1826. But significant blame for this erosion rested with the manufacturers themselves. Eager to seize upon new markets with expanded production, they divided up tasks to produce cheaper clothing or shoes. Semiskilled and unskilled women and children performed this labor rather than apprentices or other workingmen of the traditional artisanal system. These changes also dissolved the traditional residential patterns, pushing working men out into the housing market. A loss of reciprocity and responsibility occurred on both sides.

During the 1980's and 1990's international free trade agreements encouraged by the United States government increased the power and global reach of multinational corporations. The most controversial of these agreements, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), made it easier for U.S. companies to buy low cost goods from Mexico, which were often produced by U.S. subsidiaries that migrated to take advantage of low-cost labor. Organized labor and most liberal Democrats opposed NAFTA because they feared the loss of American jobs and the increased bargaining power of corporations who could easily transfer production overseas. As Nikos Valence, head of the Fair Trade Campaign, explained, these agreements also stimulated international labor solidarity, as workers in different countries struggled against the free reign of capital and in many cases against the same corporations.

Early nineteenth-century workers followed traditional workshop practices with a limited pace and intensity to their labor. Breaks for drink and food punctuated the workday in these recollections of a ship's captain of a New York City shipyard from 1835 (published in George McNeill's late nineteenth-century history of the labor movement). However, employers challenged these customs with the goal of obtaining greater efficiency and profit. Mechanics and artisans responded collectively by organized strikes or "turnouts." Despite the obstacles of planning these early collective actions, the ship carpenters 'strike for a ten-hour day proved successful in the mid-1830s. Even as new manufacturing complexes rose in Lowell and other factory towns, work patterns remained irregular in many trades; some craftsmen faced a growing division of labor and accompanying loss of independence. Irregular hours and unemployment always loomed, while cold winters would thrust many of those working outdoors out of work for the harshest season.

On the morning of October 24, 1929 ("Black Thursday"), billions of dollars in stock value were wiped out before lunch. Prices recovered somewhat that afternoon, but the Great Crash was underway. The next day President Herbert Hoover counseled reassurance, but as stock prices continued to plummet Hoover's reassurances rang increasingly hollow. The president's efforts to reassure the public did not stop, in part as he tried to convince voters that his policies were bringing recovery. In 1932, Edward Angly published a short book filled with optimistic forecasts about the economy offered by Hoover and his associates. The sarcastic title, Oh Yeah?, reflected his contempt for political leaders who did not seem to know what was happening to the country. These 17 quotations from or about Herbert Hoover proved that he was a poor prophet of the hard times ahead.

The most visible signs of industrialization in mid nineteenth-century America occurred in mushrooming factory towns such as Lowell, Massachusetts, but changes in manufacturing also took place in metropolises like New York City. Waves of immigrants entered the port cities 'small workshops, sites of intense craft activity. Cabinetmaking resisted mechanization and unskilled labor because the trade required intricate work on complex pieces of furniture. In his unpublished memoir German immigrant Ernst Hagen recalled that many of the leading names in nineteenth-century furniture, well represented today in museum collections, presided over large shops of toiling workers. Some employed over two hundred hands. The post-Civil War rise of western factories disrupted this urban system; skilled workers either found other employment or were relegated to margins of the trade such as repair work.

On September 19, 1873 the nation plunged into the longest and most severe economic depression up to that time. Thousands of businesses, large and small, went bankrupt, and the human toll was immense: fully a million workers were unemployed by 1874, and in some cities, unemployment levels reached 25 percent. The depression delivered a fatal blow to Reconstruction, as northern businessmen shifted their attention away from the rights of African Americans. It also nearly destroyed the labor movement, as pre-depression wage gains were erased and union membership plummeted. Despite the ghastly appearance of the figure representing financial panic, this New York Daily Graphic cover cartoon of September 29, 1873, subscribed to the belief that such financial busts" cleansed the economy

Many travelers made their way to Philadelphia and the Mid-Atlantic colonies in the eighteenth century in search of economic opportunity, but not all experienced the fabulous success of Benjamin Franklin. William Moraley, born in 1699 into a modest artisanal family, was more typical. Economic cycles were often critical in determining migration patterns; approximately 73,000 people left for the British colonies in the1730s, twice the average of earlier in the century (17,000 arrived in Philadelphia). Like half of all European emigrants to North America in the eighteenth-century, Moraley faced grim conditions at home. After the death of his father, a journeyman clockmaker, Moraley possessed scarce resources and was imprisoned for debt. The thirty-year-old Moraley bound himself for five years as a servant in the British North American colonies. He titled his picaresque account of life in Britain and America The Infortunate: The Voyage and Adventures of William Moraley, an Indentured Servant.

This is an online game about surviving poverty and homelessness created by ad agency McKinney for pro bono client Urban Ministries of Durham (UMD), whose mission "is to provide food, clothing, shelter and supportive services to neighbors in need".[1] Players must make the difficult decisions necessary to live for one month on $1,000, often having to choose between equally disagreeable options. The dilemmas they face represent those that bring people to places like UMD: Do you make a healthy meal or keep the lights on? Cover the minimum on your credit cards or pay the rent? Hope your sick daughter gets better on her own or risk your job by leaving early to take her to the doctor? Let your son play in the after-school sports league or save the money needed for his uniform?
The game ends when players either run out of money before the end of the month or make it through with money left over.
Since its launch in February 2011, the interactive game SPENT has been played more than 4 million times in over 218 countries.[2]
Excerpted from:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPENT

During the Great Depression, New Deal programs provided work for a range of unemployed Americans, including visual artists who were commissioned to paint murals in federal buildings around the country. Some of these painters found that their expressions clashed with local tastes, particularly when murals portrayed American society, past and present, in a critical light. In the case of this mural for Richmond's Parcel Post Building by Paul Cadmus, titled Pocahontas Rescuing Captain John Smith

Analyzes the impact of trade and financial flows and regional integration on the domestic politics of advanced industrial states. Pressures for harmonization and convergence of domestic institutions and practices and the sources of national resistance to these are examined. Cases include European Union and West European states, US, and Japan. This is a graduate seminar for students who already have some familiarity with issues in political economy and/or European politics. The objective is to examine the ways in which changes in the international economy and the regimes that regulate it interact with domestic politics, policy-making, and the institutional structures of the political economy in industrialized democracies.

A 1923 billboard advertisement for Endicott-Johnson shoes touted employee satisfaction as an important feature of the product. Company president George F. Johnson was a leading proponent of welfare capitalism

A master distributed provisions in an illustration from a weekly newspaper report on the operations of a plantation around 1860. The engraving suggested that this planter provided his slaves with a varied and nutritious diet, which was not usually the case. Slaves typically received a weekly ration of only three and a half pounds of salt pork or bacon and a quarter bushel of cornmeal. Although high in calories needed to perform heavy labor, that diet was seriously deficient nutritionally. This engraving did not show that slaves who wished to supplement their meager and boring diet had to rely on the vegetable gardens and hunting privileges some planters allowed them. Because of their unrelenting workday, slaves had to perform these tasks early in the morning or late at night.

Urban reformers in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries had long pointed with horror to the unsanitary and inadequate conditions in which millions of Americans lived, particularly in large cities. But it took the severe economic crisis of the Great Depression to force the federal government to intervene directly in the housing market, and even then the response was often only half-hearted. In the 1930s, access to public housing was highly desirable, and early residents preferred their new homes, which offered bright and well-appointed alternatives to their previous substandard residences. The sharpest criticisms of public housing, however, came from builders and realtors who feared competition and argued that public housing was too appealing and would decrease home ownership. The most influential of the anti-public housing lobbies was the National Association of Real Estate Boards (NAREB). In this 1935 report to the board, NAREB president Walter S. Schmidt argued against public housing on economic and ideological grounds.

New home construction declined dramatically during the Great Depression as rents rose, reaching an all-time high in 1940. A persistent housing shortage continuing into the early 1950s forced families to separate and apartment dwellers to "double-up." The housing reform movement, largely ineffectual in the 1920s and 1930s, gathered strength in the postwar period. Labor and veteran groups pressured Congress and the White House to enact a comprehensive housing policy with money for public housing and continued wartime rent control. President Harry S. Truman, echoing reformers, wrote to Congress, "A decent standard of housing for all is one of the irreducible obligations of modern civilization." Despite opposition from real estate interests, the Housing Act of 1949 passed. Although the Act called for the construction of 810,000 units of public housing over six years--and two additional housing acts in 1961 and 1965 promised substantial increases--by the mid-1960s, more people lived in substandard housing than in 1949. In addition, many blamed public housing itself for destroying neighborhoods and fostering social problems. In the following 1947 testimony before a joint Congressional committee created by anti-housing reform legislators to stall action, four spokespersons for housing reform--including social worker Mary K. Simkhovitch, a leading reform advocate since the 1920s--presented views and proposals.

Sarah Smith Emery, in her nineties when she wrote this memoir, grew up around the turn of the 19th century in the Massachusetts countryside. Her family lived on a farm near the port town of Newburyport, on the Merrimack River. Life on the farm, as she described it, was a series of peaceful routines organized by season, time of day, age, and gender. Emery described the home production of food, such as butter and cheese, and household items, including candles, soap, and clothing. Spinning, weaving, knitting, sewing, dressmaking, cooking, preserving food, and housecleaning filled this early nineteenth-century girl's life, while the men in her family farmed, butchered, and chopped wood. Militia training took place twice each year, in spring and fall. At the time that Emery was writing, the United States was rapidly shifting from an agricultural to an urban industrial economy, and nostalgia for rural life thus colored her recollections.

In the decade preceding the American Revolution, settlers spilling into new inland settlements created increased social conflict along with economic opportunity. Those living in the backcountry demanded better political representation in the colonial government, as well as government action to remove Indians from those inland areas. The North Carolina Regulator movement of farmers, tenants, and laborers challenged the government in the 1760s; they accused the coastal elite of corruption and monopolization of government offices. Often settlers found land speculators had already claimed the best lands. Herman Husband, the author of this tract, was the most prominent agitator in the regulator movement. A man of great contradictions, he held land grants of over 8000 acres yet also advanced new democratic ideas in his writings. In this pamphlet he challenged the undemocratic basis of Carolina's government and urged his fellow backcountry residents to vote out their corrupt representatives.

Like many other industries, shoe manufacturing changed in the early 19th century. Previously, most shoemakers worked in their homes or small workshops (called ten-footers")

These six family budgets collected by the Illinois Bureau of Labor Statistics in 1884 show the range of family incomes and spending patterns within the working class. Although skill level was probably the most important determinant of wages, relatively few male breadwinners were able to earn a "family wage"--enough to support their wives and children decently. Most families pooled their members' wages in what historians call the "family economy." The wages of children and teenagers often meant the difference between a modicum of comfort and mere survival, and women who were not working for wages sometimes brought in money by operating home-based businesses such as washing clothes or keeping boarders. Women also contributed to the family's economic survival by managing the household budget, sharing resources with other female householders, and scavenging for discarded food, clothes, and fuel. Unlike current times, prices were not constantly rising in the late-19th century, and the period's declining prices (particularly food prices) allowed a modest, gradual improvement in working-class living standards.

Even before the 1890s depression struck with devastating force in 1893, large numbers of jobless men and women competed in tight labor markets and faced homelessness. One of the best first-hand descriptions of "what it is to look for work and fail to find it" comes from political economist Walter Wycoff's two-volume study of The Workers: An Experiment in Reality, first published in 1899. Wycoff had abandoned his studies at Princeton to seek a more concrete appreciation of social problems. His record of his two years spent as a common laborer became an early classic of sociological writing.