cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/54239937
During the Great Depression, when banks foreclosed on farms, neighbors often showed up at the auctions together.
They’d bid only a few cents, and return the land to the family that lost it. Sometimes a noose hung nearby as a warning to outsiders not to profit from someone else’s ruin.
It was rough, but it worked, communities protected each other when the system wouldn’t.
If a collapse like that happened today, do you think people would still stand together or has that kind of solidarity disappeared? Could it happen again?
Wasn’t the Great Depression a worldwide thing?
Not really, the great depression in capital letters was almost 100% in the US.
The rest of the world had a recession, a bit tougher than normal but nothing near what happen in the US
You are forgetting the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the rise of the Nazis.
https://www.britannica.com/event/Great-Depression
Their currency collapsed to the point, where a wheelbarrow of cash could not buy a bread.
I would say that is pretty significant.
That mostly has to do with the end of WWI and the reparations they had to pay. It happened near the same time, but not really related.
???
The weymar hiper inflation happened almost 9 years before…
The great US depression was only a drop in a miriad of causes, it is not even in the top 3 of reasons of nazi getting the power.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_the_Weimar_Republic
That’s also partly because they printed a ton of money for reparations for losing the first world war
A story my parents shared with me as a kid, allegedly from somewhere in family history was of an individual taking a wheelbarrow of cash to the store to buy a loaf of bread, heading inside and learning the price had further increased and upon returning outside finding the cash dumped in the street and the wheelbarrow gone since that was the (relative) valueble left unattended.
The US Great Depression directly lead to hyperinflation in Weimar Germany which lead to the rise of National Socialism.
Edit: I was wrong, the hyperinflation was 9 years prior and it was a 30% unemployment rate from the crash which was a leading factor to National Socialism, not hyperinflation.
Part of that was linked to a great drought on US farms caused by overfarming leading to the dust bowl. That was a major part of the US GDP then. And 100 years later people still don’t believe humans can alter the environment.
The US at the time deported Latino citizens due to the increases racism/bigotry. Most of them were farmhands who knew how to work the land, better than the white farmers. The US realized their mistake in the middle of the depression and attempted to woo the same people back under the Vaquero program. The promise of citizenship was never fulfilled by the US.
Nope, it didn’t, the hiper inflation happened almost 9 years before.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_the_Weimar_Republic
Edit: I appreciate your edit, but now mine looks out of touch :)
Seems I mixed up the unemployment from the depression with the hyperinflation of the Weimar Republic.
I’ve edited my comment to say this
It was but these penny auctions were mainly a US thing I think