Inland Empire And The Depression

There were several factors that contributed to the start of the Great Depression. One of them is the crash of the stock market. It was 1929, and Republican Herbert Hoover had just been recently elected. During the previous few years, the stoc

Pullman would also benefit from the Grand Coulee project. In the 1950’s approximately 48,500 acres of irrigated land would become available to farming in the Columbia basin. (Pitzer) In 1957 the State government would pay Washington State College $200,000 to help facilitate and establish new farmers on this irrigated farmland. (Pitzer) Washington State College would also be contracted by the by the state to come up with ways to mine manganese on the Olympic peninsula using the new available hydroelectric power. (Pitzer)

One projects of the Work Progress administration was the building of the of the Grand Coulee dam, and the Bonneville dam as well as dams all along the Snake River into Idaho. These dams would provide some of the cheapest power in the nation at the time. Washington State to this day is still provided with cheap electricity. This cheap power made it a haven for aluminum industries that required vast amounts of electricity for smelting. Kaiser aluminum would come to Spokane and provide aluminum during World War II, and well into the late 1990’s. Boeing would also come to Washington State because of the cheap power as well as the proximity to aluminum plants. Army core of engineers identified Washington, Oregon, and Idaho as an area where 41.4 percent of undeveloped hydroelectric potentialities lay in the United Sates. (Northwest is richest district..) The army core engineer predicted that the Columbia and its tributaries could produce 62,700,000-kilowatt hours of electricity. (Northwest is richest district..) The snake river and its tributaries was predicted at 17,510,000 kilowatt hours of electricity. (Northwest is richest district..)

Due to the low prices of food it became important for farmers to preserve their produce until the prices rose again. Since the cost of producing food was more than its value at market, farmers let their crops rot in the fields, or would leave their fields fallow. In order to preserve what food they grew farmers began to can their food. A newspaper article in the 1930’s explains this transformation. “The short span of a few years has brought a new and thriving industry to the farming district to the south of Spokane. What once was a barren, dry country, now is the highly productive state, and from the area about one-eight of all the peas in the United States are grown and canned.” (Inland Empire furnishes..) The total investment in this industry totals slightly over three million dollars with more than five thousand employees on the payroll. (Inland Empire furnishes..) These canning plants also canned tomatoes, corn, cherries, apples, cider and grape juice. (Inland Empire furnishes..) The canning industry in Washington was recorded as having canned 2,794,500 cases of fruit valued at 7,220,894 dollars. (Inland Empire furnishes..)

By the year 1932, there were more than fourteen million jobless people in the United States. (Turner) This equaled to one third of all workers in the country. Stocks were worth on the average only eleven percent of the

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