During famines people flood in to cities. There were vast numbers of unemployed people in American cities at the time. There wasn’t massive mortality because there wasn’t the same kind of massive loss of agricultural production that you saw in, for instance, the 1932 Ukraine famine. The Soviets were trying to bootstrap the USSR’s agriculture from medieval to modern, dealing with serious resistance from Kulaks and serious administrative and logistical problems, and then got hit with a drought that affected agricultural production across almost the entire USSR at that time.
In the USA, on the other hand, agriculture was already employing modern technology, there wasn’t an equivalent to the fight with the kulaks, and the US’s vast agricultural regions and the localized nature of the dust bowl droughts relative to all agricultural land mean that the loss of agricultural production had a less severe impact.
Roosevelt took power in 1933 and stayed in power until 1945 and that era is the closest the US has ever been to a centrally planned economy. The federal government undertook massive programs to employ people, distribute food and other relief, subsidize farms and industry, and so forth.
There wasn’t the kind of mass death you saw in European countries because the situation, the material circumstances if you will, were drastically different in the USA.
The various New Deal programs kept reams and reams of records, you can probably look them all up if you call around to a few big city libraries and start asking questions.
During famines people flood in to cities. There were vast numbers of unemployed people in American cities at the time. There wasn’t massive mortality because there wasn’t the same kind of massive loss of agricultural production that you saw in, for instance, the 1932 Ukraine famine. The Soviets were trying to bootstrap the USSR’s agriculture from medieval to modern, dealing with serious resistance from Kulaks and serious administrative and logistical problems, and then got hit with a drought that affected agricultural production across almost the entire USSR at that time.
In the USA, on the other hand, agriculture was already employing modern technology, there wasn’t an equivalent to the fight with the kulaks, and the US’s vast agricultural regions and the localized nature of the dust bowl droughts relative to all agricultural land mean that the loss of agricultural production had a less severe impact.
Roosevelt took power in 1933 and stayed in power until 1945 and that era is the closest the US has ever been to a centrally planned economy. The federal government undertook massive programs to employ people, distribute food and other relief, subsidize farms and industry, and so forth.
There wasn’t the kind of mass death you saw in European countries because the situation, the material circumstances if you will, were drastically different in the USA.
The various New Deal programs kept reams and reams of records, you can probably look them all up if you call around to a few big city libraries and start asking questions.