3. Towns based on agricultural support suffered heavy losses of jobs
Dubuque, Iowa, a community with an industrial base reliant on agricultural products in 1929, already felt depression conditions before that year’s stock market collapse. Falling prices for farm produce led to job losses in Dubuque, and similar communities across America, in the mid-to-late 1920s. Between 1927 and the end of 1933, 2,200 workers lost their jobs due to business closures in Dubuque. During the same period only 13 new companies opened, creating 300 jobs, a net loss of 1,900. Railroad jobs in Dubuque numbered over 600 when the 1930s began. At the beginning of 1933, there were only a couple dozen still employed by the railroads.
Despite the failures of farms and the means to ship their produce to market, most large urban areas did not suffer from food shortages. They did however suffer from hunger, not from lack of food, but from lack of money with which to purchase it. Low food costs continued throughout the Great Depression, after having been one of its major causes in rural communities. Hoover did not support federal government intervention to directly aid farmers, the food supply chain, nor consumers, during the first three years of the depression, and the situation worsened with each succeeding year until 1933.