Great Depression in West Chester, PA Research Paper

Great Depression in West Chester, PA - Research Paper Example West Chester, PA1 is the village which had been ravaged by the Great Depression. The Great Depression took place in October 1929. The depression was triggered by the stock market crash. The crash was the offshoot of the social protest movements. The people had a growing sense that the government should step into the economic debacle. The people wanted the government, especially in Chicago, to directly give a positive impact on the ordinary citizen’s lives. The hardest hit community was Chicago. More than 50 percent of the 1929 Chicago factory workers had been retrenched due to the onslaught of the Great Depression. Chicago imposed taxes on its residents in 1928. In response, the citizens staged a strike. The strikes forced the Chicago government into bankruptcy because it could not collect the taxes needed to pay the government’s daily operating expenses that include government employee payroll. The 1929 Great Depression2 did not significantly reduce customer revenue in West Chester, P.A. On the other hand, the sales of movie theatre tickets increased during the difficult years. The West Chester movie scene indicates a stark difference between from the movie theaters in other parts of the United States. Specifically, the movie sales of theaters in other parts had declined to unprecedented levels. The secret of West Chester’s movie theater revenue increase is innovation. ... On the other hand, most of the movie theaters in many parts of the United States did not include a sound system. The movies were soundless. Popular movies during the soundless movie era included the many movies of Charlie Chaplin, a comedian. In terms of the movie theater industry, West Chester, PA profitably continued its sound-engineered movie theater programs. In addition, Robert Himmelberg (3) emphasized â€Å"unforeseen and unexpected, inexplicable and inexorable, the Great Depression was a traumatic experience for many of the men and women of the 1930s and exercised a profound influence on the generation that lived through it. In its duration and magnitude, it was infinitely more severe than any other episode of â€Å"hard times† in American national life and was unquestionably the dominant force molding the nation’s history during the long decade reaching from mid-1929 through 1940†. The Great Depression had established great hardship and economic difficul ties to a majority of the Americans, especially in West Chester. The 1929 Great Depression also produced a political and social environment that was ripe for a major negative transformation rippling across the entire range of economic, political, and social institutions and policies of the United States government. The 1929 Great Depression had created a strong impact on people’s everyday lives, especially in West Chester, PA. Many had suffered from economic hardship and insecurity. The majority of Americans escaped actual retrenchment from their current jobs or disappearance of their farm or home. However, the people’s faces shaped by the 1929 Great Depression in a significantly unfavorable manner because they had lived in an insurmountable fear that the 1929 Great Depression can easily swallow