Do Now- use notes from last class
period.. You have 8 minutes!
• What were the effects of the Great Migration
on Mississippi?
• Explain why Henry Whitfield was called the
Governor of the People.
• Why did Bilbo want to consolidate the states
major universities?
• How did junior colleges in Mississippi begin?
The Calm Before
the Storm
The Flood of 1927
King Cotton
Great Depression
The Flood of 1927
• Dennis Murphee succeeded Henry
Whitfield as governor
• Major catastrophe happened during
his term
• A levee gave way and the Mississippi
River flooded
• Nearly 3 million acres of Delta land
under water
• 185,000 fled the waters
• Gathered at the top of levees
and Indian mounds
• Rescue boats-mainly took white
women and children
• National Guard- Came in and
evacuated whites and
established camps for blacks
The Actual Flood
• Covered 27,000 square miles
• The River was 70 miles wide
• Flood water did not go down til
late summer
• Whole cotton crop was lost
King Cotton
• Despite major set backs, cotton was
still major crop of Mississippi
• Prices increased dramatically from 19111919
• 1920- prices fell from 40 cents to
around 9 cents a pound
• Production was still mostly done by hand
• 1931- prices fell to 6 cents- which was
less than it cost to produce it
How did this affect the
farmers???
• Small planters struggled to grow cotton
• Delta planters- group that still prospered
• Sharecropping brought in profits in which the
Delta planters invested in the stock market
• Cotton prices helped to promote football at
Mississippi A & M (MSU!!) and tsun.
• It also funded teams in the Cotton States
League-pro baseball in the south
New Industries
• New factories were made for cheese and
milk and even tomato production
• Biggest boom of the 1920s was real
estate
• People were moving to Florida- the
spillover of crowd ran into the MS Gulf
Coast.
• Built hotels and casinos
• Prohibition brought some prosperity to
the area
• Kiln in Hancock County became famous
for supplying Chicago gangster Al
Capone with “Kiln Lightning”
• Moonshine
• Fishermen smuggled liquor from Cuba
• Gulf Coast became major port of entry
• Became illegal port
Prohibition and Moonshine
The Great Depression
Leading up to the Depression
Causes of the Depression
Effects of the Depression on Mississippi
Troubles on the Horizon
• Economy was looking good
• Value of the stock market
increased from $27 billion in 1925
to $87 bil in 1929
• Wages rose: over 40%/
unemployment decreased to less
than 4%
• Credit- used to purchase many new
items such as appliances, cars,
homes and enjoy them while using
them
Why was the use of credit
a problem?
• Government was encouraging borrowing
by keeping interest rates low to fuel
growth of the economy
• Many people had loans with banks-when
they lost their jobs they couldn’t repay
loans
• Failure to repay loans caused bank
failures which meant people lost their
deposits
Causes
Effects
• Crazy investing in stock
market
• Get-rich-quick attitudes
• Over use of credit
• Stock speculation led to
inflated stock prices
• Once prices fell-stock prices
also fell; companies lost
money
• Unemployment rose to
25%- up from 4%
• This caused stock prices to
fall and more companies
failed
• Inflated prices of company
stocks
• People put life-savings in
stock market losing it all
• Banks had loaned out
investors’ money; this
meant there was no money
to repay debts
• When demand fell, so did
prices
• As companies lost money,
they laid off workers
• If people couldn’t work-they
couldn’t pay loans, causing
banks to fail and money to
be lost
Black Thursday
• October 29, 1929
• Stock Market Crashes
• banks lost money in the market
crash and customers couldn’t repay
loans so many banks began to fail—
as they failed, investors lost all their
money on deposit.
• People PANICKED!!!
• Ran on the banks to withdraw their
money before it could happen to
them
Poverty increased dramatically
HIGH Unemployment
Effects of the Great
Depression on Mississippi
• Causes mass bank foreclosures and tax
sales on farms
• 1932- 10% of farm owners lost their
land because they couldn’t repay their
loans
• So much farmland and we could not feed
our own people
• Martin “Mike” Conner- Governor of MS
with no money in the treasury, left
with huge State debt.
• Proposed a sales tax
• Teachers were paid in scrip (basically
an IOU)
• Landowners could not pay rent