How Did The Great Depression Affect the South?
The Great Depression in the South came at a time when the South was still not fully recovered from the civil war. As a result the economy was already in worse shape than their thriving Northern counterparts.
The South was the poorest section of the depression with a per capita income ½ of that of the northern states. Workers struggled to feed their families even before the stock market crash of 1929. As people who would be interviewed later on would state, “those were the good old days, but the good old days were pretty tough.”
After the depression hit the south fell into even worse hardship. One county in North Carolina saw 3,500 Farm Foreclosures out of 5,280 farms in the county in a single year. This means if you were farming during that time period and lived next to two other farmers’ chances are two out of the three of you would have lost your farm within the year, an amazingly high figure.
A swarm of Locus and a drought hurt farmers even more by making it harder for them to grow their crops.
Governments in the South during the great depression responded to the economic disaster by raising the sales tax and cutting spending on government programs. These two things lead to an even greater disaster.
All of the problems in the South lead Franklin Roosevelt to refer to the south during the great depression as the nation’s number one