The Wall Street Crash of 1929 dramatically closed the curtain on the prosperity of the twenties and precipitated the greatest economic decline in US history. In 1929 only 3% of Americans were without a job, by 1933, the unemployment rate had risen to 25%. Natural calamities added to the nation's miseries. Drought in America's heartland turned the once rich soil to dust. Winds whipped the loose soil into gigantic dust storms that ravaged the country from South Dakota to Texas. Thousands were forced to abandon their farms, clogging the highways as they headed West in the hopes of finding a better life.
The stock market crash of October 29, 1929 provided a dramatic end to an era of unprecedented, and unprecedentedly lopsided, prosperity. This disaster had been brewing for years. Different historians and economists offer different explanations for the crisis–some blame the increasingly uneven distribution of wealth and purchasing power in the 1920s, while others blame the decade’s agricultural slump or the international instability caused by World War I. In any case, the nation was woefully unprepared for the crash. For the most part, banks were unregulated and uninsured. The government offered no insurance or compensation for the unemployed, so when people stopped earning, they stopped spending. The consumer economy ground to a halt. An ordinary recession became the Great Depression, the defining event of the 1930s.
The popular culture of the 1930s was fraught with contradictions. It was, simultaneously, a decade of traditionalism and of modernist experimentation; of sentimentality and "hard-boiled" toughness; of longings for a simpler past and fantastic dreams of the future. It was a decade in which many Americans grew increasingly interested in tradition and folk culture. Under the leadership of Alan Lomax, the Library of Congress began to collect folk songs. Plus, folk singers like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger attracted large audiences. Henry Ford, who had revolutionized the American landscape through the mass production of cars, devoted his energies and fortune to a new project: Greenfield Village, a collection of historic homes and artifacts located near Detroit. At the same time, the Rockefeller family restored colonial Williamsburg in Virginia. Many prominent intellectuals saw modern society as excessively individualistic and fragmented. In response, they looked to the past. Eleven leading white southern intellectuals, known as the Southern Agrarians, issued a manifesto, I'll Take My Stand, urging a return to an agrarian way of life. Another group of distinguished intellectuals known as the New Humanists, led by Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More, extolled classical civilization as a bulwark against modern values. One of the decade's leading social critics was Lewis Mumford. In volumes like Technics and Civilization (1934), Mumford examined how the values of a pre-machine culture could be blended into modern capitalist civilization.