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In the so-called Dust Bowl, a massive area of the great plains consisting mainly of Kansas, Oklahoma, and parts of Texas, people found themselves unable to make a living. On top of the economic crisis, the earth withered and blew away in a series of massive dust storms. For a farming people this was disastrous, and these migrants were led westward by advertisements for work put out by agribusiness in western states such as California. The migrants came to be called Okies, Arkies , and other derogatory names as they flooded the labor supply of the agricultural fields, driving down wages and increasing competition for jobs in a place that couldn't afford it. This story was dramatized in the famous novel The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck.
Many other nations, athough not all, experienced a similar decline, though the severity and timing differed from country to country. For example, Britain hit its trough in the third quarter of 1932, while France did not reach its low point until April of 1935.
For details, see the main New Deal article.
It was not until the U.S. entered World War II that Roosevelt's ideas for massive public expenditures and deficit spending truly began to bear fruit. Roosevelt's administration, of course, had little choice but to increase expenditures, given the war effort. Even given the special circumstances of war mobilization, New Deal policies seemed to work exactly as predicted, winning over many Republicans, who had been the New Deal's greatest opponents. When the Great Depression was brought to an end by the Second World War, it was obvious that the turnaround had been caused primarily by the reinforcement of business through government expenditure.
New Deal programs sought to stimulate demand and provide work and relief for the impoverished through increased government spending: the theories behind the New Deal were backed up later by the writings of British economist John Maynard Keynes. In 1929 federal expenditures constituted only 3 percent of the GDP. Between 1933 and 1939, federal expenditure tripled, and Roosevelt's critics accused him of turning America into a socialist state.
However, spending on the New Deal was far smaller than on the war effort. In the first peacetime year of 1946, federal spending still amounted to $62 billion, or 30 percent of GDP. In short, federal expenditures went from 3 percent of the GDP in 1929 to about a third in 1945. The big surprise was just how productive America became: spending financially cured the depression. Between 1939 and 1944 (the peak of wartime production), the nation's output more than doubled. Consequently, unemployment plummeted—from 19.0 percent in 1938 to 1.2 percent in 1944 as the labor force grew by ten million. The war economy was not so much a triumph of free enterprise as the result of government/business sectionalism, of the Federal government bankrolling business. While unemployment remained high throughout the New Deal years, consumption, investment, and exports—the pillars of economic growth—remained low. It was World War II, not the New Deal, which finally ended the crisis. Nor did the New Deal substantially alter the distribution of power within American capitalism; it had only a small impact on the distribution of wealth among the population (the effect of the war on this, however, was massive: the years immediately following the war played host to the narrowest wealth gap between rich and poor in American history, according to most estimates).
The Great Depression was not the longest depression on record, that title being held by the Long Depression of the late nineteenth century, nor was it the sharpest contraction, the one after the Second World War being a deeper drop. It has commonly been described as the "deepest" depression in history as no other contraction was so deep for so long.
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