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Of course...no one died...I mean how bad could it be-no money and no food...why it was a Walton kind of depression really. Again, no one will ever know how many died. I think the range I gave you-obtained from google is reasonable...but since good records were not kept, people didn’t always have birth certificates or even death certificates, and to further confuse the facts you had transient populations who moved from place to place attempting to survive- I would be a liar if I attempted to provide a definite number...a range is all that one can attempt which I did. As for being a liar...I’m sure that’s a category which includes all who disagree with you...so think what you like.

“The Great Depression differed in both length and harshness from previous depressions in the United States. In earlier depressions, business activity had started to pick up after one or two years. But from October 1929 until Franklin D. Roosevelt became President in March 1933 the economy slumped almost every month. Business failures increased rapidly among banks, factories, and stores, and unemployment soared. Millions of people lost their job, savings, and home.

Economic breakdown. From 1930 to 1933, prices of industrial stocks fell about 80 percent. Banks and individuals with investments in the stock market lost large sums. Banks had also loaned money to many people who could not repay it. The deepening depression forced large numbers of people to withdraw their savings. Banks had great difficulty meeting the withdrawals, which came at a time when the banks were unable to collect on many loans. Between January 1930 and March 1933, about 9,000 banks failed. The bank failures wiped out the savings of millions of people.

Ben Isaacs, who lived in Chicago during the depression, described what happened to him: “I was in business for myself, selling clothes on credit. ... But ... banks closed down overnight. We lost everything. ... I couldn’t pay the rent. ... I sold it [the car] for $15 in order to buy some food for the family. ... I would bend my head low [in the relief line] so nobody would recognize me. ...” (The quotations in this article are from Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression (c) 1970 by Studs Terkel, published by Pantheon Books, a Division of Random House, Inc.)

Bank failures made less money available for loans to industry. The decline in available money caused a drop in production and a further rise in unemployment. From 1929 to 1933, the total value of goods and services produced annually in the United States fell from about $104 billion to about $56 billion. In 1932, the number of business closings was almost a third higher than the 1929 level.

In 1925, about 3 percent of the nation’s workers were unemployed. The unemployment rate reached about 9 percent in 1930 and about 25 percent — or about 13 million persons — in 1933. Many people who kept or found jobs had to take salary cuts. In 1932, wage cuts averaged about 18 percent. Many people, including college graduates, felt lucky to find any job. In 1932, the New York City Police Department estimated that 7,000 persons over the age of 17 shined shoes for a living. A popular song of the 1930’s called “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” expressed the nationwide despair.

Foreign trade also fell greatly during the Great Depression. The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 contributed to the drop. This law greatly increased a number of tariffs. President Hoover signed the law because he thought it would reduce competition from foreign products. But tariffs rose so high that other nations reacted by raising tariffs on U.S. goods.

From 1929 to 1933, prices of farm goods fell about 50 percent. This drop occurred partly because high tariffs made exports unprofitable. In addition, farmers produced a surplus of crops. The surplus pushed prices down because there was more food than people could buy.

Human suffering became a reality for millions of Americans as the depression continued. Many died of disease resulting from malnutrition. Thousands lost their home because they could not pay the mortgage. In 1932, at least 25,000 families and more than 200,000 young people wandered through the country seeking food, clothing, shelter, and a job. Many youths traveled in freight trains and lived near train yards in camps called hobo jungles.

The homeless, jobless travelers obtained food from welfare agencies or religious missions in towns along the way. Most of their meals consisted of soup, beans, or stew and had little nourishment. The travelers begged for food or stole it if they could not get something to eat in any other way. Sometimes they ate scraps of food from garbage cans.

The ragged travelers found clothing harder to obtain than food. Missions gave most of the clothing they had to needy local people. Some of the travelers became ill because they did not have proper food and clothing. Even the sick wanderers had trouble getting help because hospitals aided local residents first.

Many people who lost their home remained in the community. Some crowded into the home of a relative. Others moved to a shabby section of town and built shacks from flattened tin cans and old crates. Groups of these shacks were called Hoovervilles, a name that reflected the people’s anger and disappointment at President Hoover’s failure to end the depression.

Peggy Terry, who grew up in Oklahoma during the depression, recalled a visit to a Hooverville in Oklahoma City: “Here were all these people living in old rusted-out car bodies. ... One family ... [was] living in a piano box. This wasn’t just a little section, this was maybe 10 miles wide and 10 miles long. People living in whatever they could junk together. ...”

In 1932, many farmers refused to ship their products to market. They hoped a reduced supply of farm products would help raise the price of these goods. Such farmers’ strikes occurred throughout the country, but they centered in Iowa and the surrounding states.

Harry Terrell, who lived in Iowa during the depression, described the conditions among farmers: “Corn was going for 8 cents a bushel. One county insisted on using corn to heat the courthouse, ‘cause it was cheaper than coal.... The people were desperate....[Farmers] stopped milk wagons, dumped milk....”

Severe droughts and dust storms hit parts of the Midwest and Southwest during the 1930’s. The afflicted region became known as the Dust Bowl, and thousands of farm families there were wiped out. Many farmers went to the fertile agricultural areas of California to look for work. Most who found jobs had to work as fruit or vegetable pickers for extremely low wages. The migrant families crowded into shacks near the fields or camped outdoors. John Steinbeck’s famous novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939) describes the hardships some migrant families faced during the depression.

Hoover’s policies. President Hoover believed that business, if left alone to operate without government supervision, would correct the economic conditions. He vetoed several bills aimed at relieving the depression because he felt they gave the federal government too much power.

Hoover declared that state and local governments should provide relief to the needy. But those governments did not have enough money to do so. In 1932, Congress approved Hoover’s most successful antidepression measure, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC). This government agency provided some relief by lending money to banks, railroads, and other large institutions whose failure would have made the depression even worse. However, most Americans felt that Hoover did not do enough to fight the depression. They elected Franklin D. Roosevelt President in 1932.”