The ‘20s: Culture, Consumption, and Crash 147expressed in two ways. First—the data, the numbers that show the steep
decline in the U.S. economy. The GDP in 1929 reached about $104 billion,
dropped to $92 billion a year later, went down to about $59 billion by 1932,
and bottomed at $57 billion, barely half of what it was 4 years earlier, in 1933.
Private investment, $170 million in 1929, fell to below $40 million, a decrease
of more than 80 percent, by 1933. Global trade, a key indicator of economic
health, plummeted from about $3 billion in 1929, to less than $1 billion in
1933, a decline of almost 70 percent. For individuals, the crisis was grave as
well. Wages, based on $1 in 1926 value, stood at $1.04 in 1929, but by 1932
fell to 90 cents, and in 1933-1934 were below 80 cents. Finally, unemploy-
ment, barely 3 percent in 1929, rose to about 9 percent within a year, to 16
percent in 1931, again to 24 percent in 1932, and peaked at about 25 percent
the following year. Considering that many people, especially women, worked
“off book” so to speak—taking in laundry, doing domestic work, babysitting—
those numbers were likely quite higher. Second, and on a more intimate level,
the depression should be viewed as a huge humanitarian crisis. Those millions
FIGuRE 3-7 Florence Owens Thompson, famous Depression-era
photo by Dorothea Lange, later an image on a u.S. postage stamp