A Whig party poster blamed the economic recession of 1837, and the unemployment troubles and family suffering that ensued, on president Martin Van Buren.
Source: Public domain
Unemployed men queued outside a depression soup kitchen opened in Chicago by Al Capone in February 1931.
This iconic photo by Dorothea Lange, hired by the Farm Service Administration to document the effects of the Great Depression on Americans, shows a Dust Bowl migrant farmer and three of her seven children.
Source: U.S. Library of Congress
Occupy Wall Street protesters demonstrate against widespread unemployment and corporate greed in September 2011.
Source: Photo by David Shankbone
Thousands were employed by the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project during the Great Depression.
Workers on a Works Progress Administration road-building project.
At Our Daily Bread Employment Center in Baltimore, people line up for the hot meal program, held seven days a week.
Source: Photo by Jim Stipe
Chris Stewart, a 20-year-old who moved from South Dakota to San Francisco to find a job, advertises himself on the back of his T-shirt.
Source: Photo by Steve Rhodes
One thousand unemployed marched to the White House in 1977 to protest cuts in federal unemployment benefits.
Source: Reading/Simpson
Representatives to Warren Harding's 1921 Conference on Unemployment, the brainchild of Herbert Hoover.
Source: U.S. Library of Congress
This political cartoon commented on the depressed state of the economy under Andrew Jackson in 1837. A panorama of offices, rooming houses, and shops reflects the hard times.
Source: U.S. Library of Congress
This promotional poster for an 1895 Broadway melodrama promised to recreate a dramatic "run on the bank" onstage
This promotional poster for an 1895 Broadway melodrama promised to recreate a dramatic "run on the bank" onstage. It could have been any number of nineteenth-century financial crises. The U.S. experienced panics in the years 1819, 1837, 1857, 1873, and 1893.
Source: U.S. Library of Congress
The WPA Federal Theater Project funded this 1935 production of "Horse Eats Hat" with Joseph Cotton.
This poster promotes the Social Security Act (1935), a key and lasting component of FDR's New Deal.
Men fight during a labor strike at the Ford Motor Company in May 1937.
Jobless men in Philadelphia talk with a member of the Urban Coalition, a church-based organization of black community leaders, in 1973.
Source: The U.S. National Archives
President Barack Obama signs the Tax Relief, Unemployment Insurance Reauthorization, and Job Creation Act of 2010 at the White House.
Source: White House photo
Senior citizens protest inflation, unemployment, and high taxes in Chicago in 1973.
Source: Public domain
