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The thesis focuses on the role of race and poverty programs in influencing the housing market in the 1930s. I investigate claims that African American in-migration resulted in the decline of neighborhood property values in New York during the Great Depression. I find that contrary to the expectations of economists and government officials, African American migration initially increased housing values. However, this premium disappeared as the neighborhood was increasingly settled by African Americans.During the 1930s the federal and state governments introduced several programs designed to help people stay in their homes. In my analysis using U.S. Census data from 1920, 1930, and 1940, the results suggest that among the New Deal programs for non-farm households, the Federal Housing Administration was the only program that had a positive and statistically significant influence on the probability of home ownership for both white and black households. The Home Owners' Loan Corporation appears to have had no influence on home ownership rates. Among the farm programs, Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) grants are negatively associated with white farm home ownership rates, but had no statistically significant effect for black farmers which are consistent with previous findings that found the AAA spurred black out-migration from the rural south. Mortgage moratorium laws were associated with an increase in white farmers home ownership rates.Federal public housing for the poor was introduced during the New Deal. I examine how housing officials selected the location of public housing and measures the effect of public housing on surrounding contract rents in New York City between 1934 and 1940. I find that public housing was constructed in poor, crowded neighborhoods with nearby public transportation. My findings also suggest that public housing increased the share of contract rents throughout the city. The magnitude of the effect also appeared to not dissipate as the distance to public housing increased. However, my results suggest that the early public housing projects constructed by the Public Works Administration led to greater spillovers in in contract rents than the later projects constructed by the United States Housing Authority.

Studies of the Great Depression in Saskatchewan tend to focus on the unsurpassed poverty, unemployment and general suffering that characterize this period. Little research, however, has been conducted on how this suffering may have contributed to the increasing rates of committals in provincial mental hospitals throughout the 1930s. The Saskatchewan Hospital North Battleford (SHNB) not only experienced increasing populations, but serious overcrowding throughout the Depression era. The growth and overcrowding of SHNB demonstrates that Saskatchewan society utilized the hospital to fill their needs. This thesis analyses the patient ledgers of SHNB to determine what role mental hospitals played in Saskatchewan society during the Depression. Whether concerned for relatives with perceived mental illness, or apprehensive of their deviant behaviour, families were often the primary actors in initiating committal. Once within the walls of SHNB, patient labour was utilized to ensure both the treatment of the insane and the survival of the hospital. Lastly, SHNB also played a role in shaping Canadian society through the deportation and incarceration of unwanted elements. Through an analysis of patient ledgers, it is clear that SHNB was part of a complex set of strategies used by families, hospital staff and society to both house the insane and deviant and to provide treatment in hopes of returning the deemed ill to sanity.

Studies of the Great Depression in Saskatchewan tend to focus on the unsurpassed poverty, unemployment and general suffering that characterize this period. Little research, however, has been conducted on how this suffering may have contributed to the increasing rates of committals in provincial mental hospitals throughout the 1930s. The Saskatchewan Hospital North Battleford (SHNB) not only experienced increasing populations, but serious overcrowding throughout the Depression era. The growth and overcrowding of SHNB demonstrates that Saskatchewan society utilized the hospital to fill their needs. This thesis analyses the patient ledgers of SHNB to determine what role mental hospitals played in Saskatchewan society during the Depression. Whether concerned for relatives with perceived mental illness, or apprehensive of their deviant behaviour, families were often the primary actors in initiating committal. Once within the walls of SHNB, patient labour was utilized to ensure both the treatment of the insane and the survival of the hospital. Lastly, SHNB also played a role in shaping Canadian society through the deportation and incarceration of unwanted elements. Through an analysis of patient ledgers, it is clear that SHNB was part of a complex set of strategies used by families, hospital staff and society to both house the insane and deviant and to provide treatment in hopes of returning the deemed ill to sanity.

In an era saturated with images of suffering, especially the suffering of children, the voice of the impoverished child in modernist fiction of the Great Depression demands a different type of response as the reader experiences an experimental modernism that is, at once, as political and complicated as highly sentimental images. The fictional construction of the poor child's voice does major cultural work that has been long ignored in studies of the 1930s, cultural work that expands discussions of poverty and teaches us how to listen to what we might otherwise reject. The astonishingly complex voices that the poor child in these representations is pressed into, the choices made and claims asserted--that may seem bizarre and ill-fitting and outrageous--are in fact the artistic and political triumph of these texts, an artistic triumph that functions as an ethical understanding and elicits a moral engagement in which we as readers learn to listen to a kind of self-presentation that is entirely of its own making, that asks us to respond and to comprehend. Literature from the 1930s written about children depicts the other that is actually other, disoriented and confusing and odd. After all, it is tenable if the poor child should choose silence or bitterness; yet instead, this literature gives voice to the poor child, voice that sensitively displays great ingenuity and practicality. The anti-language of this vulnerable other, as demonstrated in the work of Faulkner, Caldwell, Olsen, and Wright prompts the reader to see overlapping registers not as chaotic or nonsensical but as the child's efforts to shape order from clutter and to engage others in the problems of their world, a world marked by loss and damage. Thus, by unpacking the disorder within the language of the poor child, the limit case for depravity, the reader undertakes an empathetic engagement that, because it sees the child as other, attempts to imagine the child's interiority. The child in poverty models for the reader a way to see the world anew, a call for an ethical understanding that brings forth imaginative proposals to problems devastatingly simple--a lack of basic needs--yet made complex not only by the magnitude of those suffering and the systems that propagate such suffering, but the fact that the one suffering is a child. In other words, the anti-language of the poor child teaches us how to read ethically while other cultural voices for the child in poverty, because they erase the "potential disorder" within language, make invisible the interior complexity of the poor child. If taught how to listen to that which we might otherwise reject, the anti-language of the poor child--articulated or silent, stream-of-consciousness or formally narrated, fictional or epistolary--demands a response. Poverty, after all, is deeply embedded within our denials and America, quite frankly, does not know what to do with the poor. A call toward an ethical understanding that elicits our engagement is to claim voice for a poor child, to move her from the margins to the center where we are made aware and can begin the arduous work of unpacking the complicated dialectic of her language.

This paper examines banks in Missouri during the Great Depression in order to find the correct model specification for bank failure during economic downturns. The data set controls for a bank’s balance sheet, correspondent network, charters and memberships, county characteristics, and market share, and includes both Federal Reserve member and non-member banks. Using a probit model, it is concluded that the contractionary monetary policy employed by the St. Louis Federal Reserve did not help bank survival, as being a member of the Federal Reserve had no significant effect on a bank’s probability of survival. Additionally, while an increased network led to higher rates of bank survival, connections to Chicago show evidence of contagion risk. Finally, the paper concludes that for future model specification it is important to capture balance sheet, network, and environment characteristics, as leaving out certain information can lead to omitted variable bias.

This thesis concerns banking and financial systems in the United States of America during the time of the Great Depression. In the first stage, I will focus on the Federal Reserve System's monetary policy and its expansive character. Then I will emphasize on the events taking place in American banking system during the 20's, the linkage between these events and the great contradiction of American economy, which took place at the end of the decade. The key part of my thesis will be devoted to the analysis of the most important state interventions, which were supposed to save the banking and financial system from collapsing between 1930 -- 1933, and make the economy prosperous again. I will devote to the steps taken by Hervert Hoover; the president between years 1929 -- 1933, as well as the steps from the first year of F. D. Roosevelt's presidency. F. D. Roosevelt's era started in March 1933, and it was the time when the American banking system found itself in the most critical situation ever. During this era, the crucial measures were taken, and I will examine the hypothesis in which there were close connections between the political and the big business representatives standing behind their enactment. I will attempt to demonstrate that the officially proclaimed goals of those measures were unlike the real content, and the consequences of the new legislatives being enacted during these times.

The Great Recession has brought income inequality to the forefront of the American psyche. Parallels have been made between the Great Depression and the Great Recession, and as such, economic history can act as a powerful analytical tool in directing policy. The first essay in Income Inequality during the Great Depression is a qualitative analysis of income transitions from 1929 to 1933 using 33 representative cities as surveyed by the Civil Works Administration. The second essay investigates the welfare effects of income inequality on infant mortality during the Depression. And the third essay on noninfant mortality gives context to the analysis of infant mortality and stillbirths.

The Works Progress Administration came to New Orleans in 1935, a time of economic uncertainty and even fear. The implementation of the relief embodied in the WPA was influenced by local factors that reinforced the existing social order at first but that left a framework through which that order could be challenged. The business of providing WPA relief also was attended by scandal and criticism. In spite of these inherent weaknesses and certain incident, the WPA left behind an enviable physical legacy that is used and enjoyed today by the citizens of New Orleans. This paper explores the roots of that legacy, some of the obstacles faced by the WPA, and how a local government, and its citizens, related and adjusted to an increasingly powerful and intrusive federal government.