Pittsburgh was a Republican party stronghold until 1932. The soaring unemployment of the Great Depression, the New Deal relief programs and the rise of powerful labor unions in the 1930s turned the city into a liberal stronghold of the New Deal Coalition under powerful Democratic mayors.
The Great Depression hit Pennsylvania hard. Between 1927 and 1933, more than 5,000 manufacturing firms closed, and factory jobs plummeted by 270,000. Cities, where the most jobs were lost, suffered terribly.
The Great Depression of 1929 devastated the U.S. economy. A third of all banks failed. 1 Unemployment rose to 25%, and homelessness increased. 2 Housing prices plummeted, international trade collapsed, and deflation soared.
How did the Great Depression affect the American economy? In the United States, where the Depression was generally worst, industrial production between 1929 and 1933 fell by nearly 47 percent, gross domestic product (GDP) declined by 30 percent, and unemployment reached more than 20 percent.
The Depression made it impossible for some students to continue their education. Some quit school to help their families, others because they could no longer pay tuition and expenses, particularly as it became more and more difficult to find the kinds of part-time jobs that working-class students had relied upon.
Just as during the Depression, states are cutting their higher-education budgets. In the 1930s, appropriations declined an average of about 40 percent, with the reductions steepest in the regions —like the manufacturing states of the upper Midwest —where the crisis was most severe.Jun 16, 2009
The Great Depression transformed political life and remade governmental institutions throughout the United States, and indeed throughout the world. The inability of governments to respond to the crisis led to widespread political unrest that in some nations toppled regimes.
In the longer term, it established a new normal that included a national retirement system, unemployment insurance, disability benefits, minimum wages and maximum hours, public housing, mortgage protection, electrification of rural America, and the right of industrial labor to bargain collectively through unions.May 17, 2020
The Great Depression of the 1930s worsened the already bleak economic situation of African Americans. They were the first to be laid off from their jobs, and they suffered from an unemployment rate two to three times that of whites.
Not being able to maintain their small fortunes, most were forced to lower levels of society. The effects of the Great Depression in the 1930s on the social classes in the south caused many people to move to the lower class. The Lower class was the poorest and largest class of people during the 1930s (Babb).
Over the next several years, consumer spending and investment dropped, causing steep declines in industrial output and employment as failing companies laid off workers. By 1933, when the Great Depression reached its lowest point, some 15 million Americans were unemployed and nearly half the country's banks had failed.