Margaret Bourke-White’s photograph of a bread line in Louisville, Kentucky, 1937
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PART EIGHT
Hard Times: Wars, Depression, and Dust
At first, World War I seemed to be a European family feud that the United States could stay out of. On one side were the Central Powers: Germany, Bulgaria, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire. On the other were the Allies, including Britain, France, Russia, Japan, and Italy. For three years, the United States shipped food and materials overseas, mainly to the Allies, but didn’t send troops. But in April 1917, German submarines began to sink U.S. supply ships, prompting President Woodrow Wilson to declare war. “The world must be made safe for democracy,” he said. Confidently, he proclaimed the Great War the “war to end all wars.”
Though the fighting took place in Europe, the war changed life in the United States. Families worked harder and ate less to supply Allied troops in Europe. Some Americans turned against European immigrants, accusing them of having stronger loyalties to their former homelands than to their new nation. Neighbors spied on one another, and laws were passed to punish those who didn’t support the war.
Even the weather turned grim. A decade after World War I ended, it stopped raining in parts of the Great Plains for nearly ten years. Gusts of wind picked up soil from the Great Plains and carried some of it all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. Farm families went west to look for a future and instead found armed guards at the California state line. The stock market collapsed, and America’s economy went into a freefall, leaving many jobless and without food. Thousands of young Americans, with nothing to hold them, drifted around the country.
And far from ending all wars, World War I produced a desperate rage in Europe that ignited into a second, even bigger, war. A popular song of the 1930s was a plea that went “Hard times, hard times, come again no more.” Indeed, very few Americans who lived between the beginning of World War I and the end of World War II escaped hard times.