At every baseball game the Star-Spangled Banner is sung. It is of musical historical significance that President Hoover made it our national anthem in 1931.

I should have highlighted the paragraph about Thomas Edison. Some of the venues in which music is displayed were invented / developed by him. The phonograph, or record, was the first way to actually record (that's why they call it a record, for some reason with a short e sound) a person singing or playing. Some of the first records were made of a type of wax, and later vinyl. And, of course, we have already discussed the development of film in the 1920s. By the 1930s, movies were already a major industry, raking in hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars somehow, in an impoverished U.S. economy. Just read below about how much money child-star Shirley Temple made and you'll see.

It doesn't say anything about it here, but President Roosevelt fulfilled his promise. It wasn't an overnight fix, but perhaps the biggest thing he did was create the WPA (Works Progress Association) as part of the New Deal. To put it simply, Roosevelt came up with ideas for jobs to help the millions of Americans who were out of work. It's kind of like when you were in Kindergarten and your teacher gave each one of you a job for the week...door holder, line leader, light-switch person, pencil sharpener...all kinds of tasks, right? The WPA was the equivalent for adults. They built bridges, roads, buildings, whatever was needed. There are brick streets in my parents' home town in central Texas that are still there that the WPA laid down 90 years ago. All this gave the average American money again. He could feed his family. He could take them into town and buy a few things. It helped them. It helped the economy. Businesses were better off because Average Joe had a little money to spend. No more taking turns eating.

The film below is only a couple of minutes long. Watch it to just get a taste of what it was like to live through the dust bowl.

The dust storms were a punch in the gut to an already reeling economy and farming industry in the U.S. in the mid 30s. But it goes back to my statement I made about the Stock Market Crash having an impact on the Great Depression. Some historians say the events were unrelated. I say everything is related. We live our lives and one thing leads to another all the time. It's oversimplified, but the stock market crashed, hundreds of thousands of Americans who were millionaires on Wednesday were penniless on Thursday. People stopped spending money. This hurt the economy. Many farmers now could not pay back bank loans. They then had to abandon the farms. No crops were planted. There was a major drought in the U.S. in the mid-30s, and with very little vegetation in place to hold down the top soil, the Midwest became vulnerable to the storms. I used to live in the Panhandle of Texas. Its windy...ALL THE TIME! Small storms can still happen. Lubbock, Texas looked exactly like the top left photo just last year.