Economic Essentials
This is a period of severe economic downturn, often characterized by high unemployment and low production.
What is a depression? A severe, long-term downturn in economic activity.
This small beetle decimated SC cotton crops in the 1920s, leading to early economic ruin.
What is the Boll Weevil? An insect that migrated from Mexico and destroyed SC’s cotton-based economy.
This program provided jobs for young men in SC to build state parks like Hunting Island and Myrtle Beach.
What is the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC)? It built many of SC's most famous state parks.
This word describes the shockingly bad or "wretched" conditions many rural South Carolinians lived in.
What is deplorable? Used to describe the living conditions of sharecroppers and tenant farmers.
These are shares of ownership in a company that was bought and sold on the market.
What is stock? Pieces of a company sold to the public to raise money.
To boost the economy, banks lower this "cost of borrowing" money to encourage people to spend.
What is interest? The price paid for the use of borrowed money.
Because SC was largely an agricultural state, it experienced a "pre-crash" ____ in the early 1920s.
What is a depression? SC's "depression" started nearly a decade before the rest of the country due to falling cotton prices.
This massive SC project created Lakes Marion and Moultrie to provide hydroelectric power to rural areas.
What is the Santee Cooper Project? The largest public works project in SC history, bringing power to the countryside.
This term refers to a period of success and wealth, which many South Carolinians missed in the 1920s.
What is prosperity? While the "Roaring 20s" brought wealth elsewhere, SC struggled with farm debt.
Many people bought stocks on "margin," using this—property pledged as a guarantee for a loan.
What is collateral? Assets like land or equipment that banks took if farmers couldn't pay their loans.
This is a milder economic downturn than a depression, though still marked by less trade and industrial activity.
What is a recession? A period of temporary economic decline.
Under the AAA, farmers were paid to destroy crops to fix the "overproduction" that lowered prices.
What is the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA)? A program that aimed to raise crop prices by paying farmers to leave land unplanted.
This New Deal program brought electricity to farms that previously relied on kerosene lamps.
What is the Rural Electrification Act (REA)? It helped modernize rural SC by providing electricity to farming families.
The "Charleston ____" was a 1920s cultural movement of artists and writers in the Holy City.
What is the Renaissance? Specifically, the "Charleston Renaissance," which showcased SC culture during hard times.
On Oct 29, 1929, also known as "Black Tuesday," this market saw a historic and devastating crash.
What is the Stock Market? Its collapse in 1929 is often seen as the symbolic start of the Great Depression.
During a recession, businesses often cut back on these—the materials and workers used to create goods—to save money.
What are resources? Businesses reduce costs by cutting production factors during smaller downturns.
Many Black farmers left SC during this mass movement to northern cities to escape Jim Crow laws and farm failures.
What is the Great Migration? A period between 1910 and 1970 when millions of African Americans moved from the rural South to urban areas in the North and Midwest.
This SC native and advisor to FDR headed the "Black Cabinet" and pushed for New Deal benefits for African Americans.
Who is Mary McLeod Bethune? A powerful civil rights leader from Mayesville, SC, who served as a key advisor to President Roosevelt.
These "push factors," like the lack of economic opportunity, drove many South Carolinians to look for a better life elsewhere.
What are push factors? Specific reasons (like racial oppression or the boll weevil) that forced people to leave South Carolina.
This was the first "alphabet agency" in SC, paying farmers to plow under cotton to raise its market value.
What is the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA)? It sought to end overproduction by paying farmers to plant less land.
To prevent future crashes, the New Deal created this commission to regulate the stock market and stop dishonest trading.
What is the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)? A reform agency designed to protect investors and the national economy from future crashes.
Tenant farmers often lacked this, making it impossible to get bank loans to save their land during the depression.
What is collateral? Without land or equipment to offer as a guarantee, poor sharecroppers could not borrow money from banks.
This program provided "work relief" by hiring artists to paint murals in SC post offices and writers to record slave narratives.
What is the Works Progress Administration (WPA)? Beyond construction, it funded cultural projects and preserved historical accounts from formerly enslaved people.
The renaissance in Charleston showed that while the economy was in a depression, the state's culture could still thrive.
What is the Charleston Renaissance? A cultural boom in the 1920s and 30s that brought national attention to South Carolina's arts and history.
This 1935 Act created a "safety net" by providing old-age pensions and unemployment insurance for the first time.
What is the Social Security Act?