Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal provided relief for many facing dire poverty, but the Depression truly ended only with the economic boom that followed the state’s mobilization because of World War II. The era reshaped the state’s political, economic, and social traditions, highlighted the economic inequalities associated with industrial work, and challenged Alabama’s long-standing social and racial hierarchies, even encouraging some Alabamians, black and white, to push for basic civil rights. Their work, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, would become the iconic study of Alabamians’ experiences during the Depression. So dire was Alabama’s situation during these years that it drew the interest of Fortune magazine, which sent author James Agee and photographer Walker Evans to Alabama in 1936. The Depression’s impact on Alabama lasted throughout the 1930s and, for some Alabamians, into the early 1940s, which was longer than the nation as a whole. stock market crash of October 1929 is often seen as the beginning of the Great Depression, in Alabama and elsewhere, the crash exacerbated an already existing decline in agriculture that had begun much earlier in the decade and spread statewide to cities and industries thereafter. The Great Depression was a sustained, national economic recession that shaped the lives of all Alabamians.
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