The Impact of the Great Depression The stock market crash of 1929 plunged the nation into a state of economic paralysis that became known as the Great Depression. As industries contracted and businesses collapsed or cut back, up to 25% of Americans were left unemployed. At the same time, the financial crisis destroyed the life savings of countless Americans (Modern American Poetry). Food, shelter, and other consumer goods were in short supply for most people (Zinn 282). This widespread state of poverty had serious social repercussions for the country. America's agricultural economy had already been suffering for a decade when nature conspired against the country to exacerbate the Great Depression. From 1931 to 1939, strong winds ripped through the Dust Bowl, the region consisting of western parts of Kansas and Oklahoma, parts of New Mexico and Colorado, and the Texas Panhandle. These winds raised the dust of a landscape already devastated by drought and continuous and exhausting agricultural practices. These dust storms threatened people's health and destroyed entire crops (MAP). Impoverished tenant farmers found themselves unable to maintain their farms and were forced to abandon their lands. This affected everyone in the region, not just farmers (MAP). As in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, countless immigrants, generally nicknamed and despised as "Okies," flocked to California where they expected to find an abundance of jobs. They flooded the already saturated agricultural labor market, driving down wages as they competed for the few available jobs (Wikipedia). Thus, the Dust Bowl migration amplified the problems of the Great Depression and placed great stress on California's already troubled economy... middle of paper... conditions of American life, however, were not so easily recovered; the Great Depression and its various social repercussions had forever changed society and the lives of countless Americans. Works Cited Zinn, Howard. A popular history of the United States. Educational edition. New York: The New Press, 1997. “Great Depression in the United States.” Microsoft Encarta Online Encyclopedia 2004. http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761584403/Great_Depression_in_the_United_States.html, 1997-2004. "Great Depression". Wikipedia online encyclopedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_depression, 2004. Nelson, Cary. “The Great Depression”. An online journal and multimedia companion to the anthology of modern American poetry. http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/depression/depression.htm. Department of English, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2002.