Hard Times

1. How did a person's race or gender affect his or her experience of the Great Depression? How did people's experience of the New Deal vary according to their class status during the 1920s? Compare and contrast three testimonies from different chapters of Hard Times.
2. How did people's responses to the New Deal change in the years after World War II? How did children feel about their parents' experiences of the Great Depression?
3. What did people find most disturbing about the Great Depression? How did their experiences shape their response to New Deal programs? Were the 1930s a unique decade in the history of American government programs? How, if at all, was the decade a break with the past?

Readings on the Great Depression

• Surviving the Dust Bowl: An Eyewitness Account
• Talking Dust Bowl Blues
• 1932 Campaign Speech by Herbert Hoover, Madison Square Garden
• Roosevelt's First Inaugural
• The Delayed Nourishment and The Master Wheel Forgotten -- 1932 Presidential Campaign Cartoons, pro-Hoover slant

1. Compare Lawrence Svobida’s memoir account of the Dust Bowl with Woody Guthrie’s song, "Talking Dust Bowl Blues." What contribution does art make to our understanding of historical events?
2. Looking at the cartoons, what did people feel was new, different, beneficial or lacking in FDR's campaign promises?
3. What specific problems does Herbert Hoover perceive in Roosevelt's "New Deal" agenda?
4. How did the general public feel about Corporations? Unions? Congress? The Presidency?

Internet Resources

Studs Terkel

An Interview with the man who interviews America.

New Deal Network

An on-line library of photographs, political cartoons, and texts related to the New Deal, with rotating special exhibits on specific topics related to New Deal history. This is a wonderful resource to compliment the reading in Hard Times.

Every Picture Tells a Story: Documentary Photography and the Great Depression

An exploration of how FSA photos were chosen for publication and how government-funded photography affected people's understanding of the nation and its travails in the 1930s.

"Voices from the Dust Bowl"

This collection documents the everyday life of residents of Farm Security Administration (FSA) migrant work camps in central California in 1940 and 1941. This collection consists of audio recordings, photographs, manuscript materials, publications, and ephemera.

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