“There was no hurry, for there was nowhere to go, nothing to buy and no money to buy it with, nothing to see outside the boundaries of Maycomb County.”(Lee 6 PDF) This quote stated by Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird shows the reader what it was like to live in a small town during the Great Depression, explaining how little they could do with the money they had. Maycomb was an example of what the United States was going through during the Great Depression. The effects of the Great Depression during the 1930s and present day issues such as the stock market crashes, unemployment, and poverty all have similarities and differences.
The Great Depression of the 1930s, including in To Kill a Mockingbird, played a major role in poverty …show more content…
When the stock market started to decline and unemployment was increasing, the price of stocks did not go down with it which left the stocks being bought overpriced (“The Depression”). Many people invested most of their savings into stocks because as far as they knew in the 1920s, it made you richer. When the stock market started to go down people were losing their jobs with their money still invested in overpriced stocks, causing what became known as the Great Depression. When Hoover and the government tried to save the crisis from going too far by loaning money to failing banks, it did not exactly work out, causing the government to lose money along with its people (“The Depression”). The country had started to head toward bankruptcy so President Hoover tried to at least save the banks. The government poured loans into the banks to attempt to save them, but this did not prevent what had already been decided by the universe. “The stock market, centered at the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street in New York City, where everyone from millionaire tycoons to cooks and janitors poured their savings into stocks” (“The Depression”). When the stock market crashed the amount of people who were impacted were blind sighted because it happened so quickly. Everyone who had any money invested at least some of it into stocks, the best way to make money until it went down the drain. Many American investors’ stocks were found to be of no worth and many people started to go bankrupt and fell into debt. People lost their houses and their jobs, which caused The Great