The nation once again awakens to history’s continuing relevance with comparisons between the current economic crisis and the Great Depression. As we attempt to address the questions and concerns of our students, certainly our lesson plans on the Great Depression take on new relevance—and offer new teaching opportunities.

Until recently, the Great Depression has been a difficult topic to teach and a difficult topic for students to understand. The challenging economic and political concepts often blurred their appreciation of the effect the Depression had on the generations of the 1930s. Sadly, the current economic climate may provide us a rare teachable moment. When our students examine the Great Depression through the words of elected officials, the work of Depression Era photographers, and through the concerns of regular citizens, especially children, the significance of the past to their own lives will become clearer.

What primary sources will be most effective in demonstrating the impact of the Great Depression? Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s inaugural address is an excellent way to introduce the new president’s vision for a nation in crisis. As teachers, we are not strangers to FDR’s reassurance that we had “nothing to fear, but fear itself.” Students may be familiar with these words too, but, having students examine the speech beyond that famous line proves far more valuable: students will search for evidence of FDR’s vision for recovery. Asking students to find specific evidence of his plans for agriculture, for job creation, and for preventing foreclosures can be a starting point for a later evaluation of his New Deal policies. In addition, students can identify FDR’s view of the root causes of the Depression. Students can also examine FDR’s optimism, an optimism based on traditional American values and ideals.

Reading an inaugural allows students to understand both the visionary and analytical elements of a politician’s speech, but photographs can help students visualize the effects of government policies and the reality of the human condition in a crisis. There are few Depression Era photographs more famous than Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother. This photograph can instantly put a human face on the Depression for students. Asking students to speculate on what Lange was thinking when taking the photo and what the mother’s thoughts were as she was being photographed can spark interesting classroom discussion. However, if students are asked to examine other photographers’ work, Lange’s other photos taken during and after the Depression, and her background and purpose as a Relocation Administration photographer, these students become historians, actively assessing the role of a paid photographer. They will also have a better understanding of the importance of the visual documentation of history.

Speeches and photographs provide students with two very distinct perspectives – one from the history makers and one from history’s recorders. Rarely do students examine the past through the voices of those directly affected and those closest to their ages. Judiciously selecting children’s letters from Dear Mrs. Roosevelt: Letters from Children of the Great Depression (edited by Robert Cohen) can provide our students the opportunity to discover the way young Americans experienced a very frightening time. In addition, supplementing visuals with an individual’s voice can enrich the classroom experience. Students could be asked to find letters that provide textual support for their analysis of Depression Era photos. Using these letters allow students today to develop an empathy for a population of Americans whose hardships are usually only brought to them through statistics and data.

Studying the Great Depression through these three lenses—inaugural addresses, visual depictions, and letters written by ordinary young people—can assist modern-day students in understanding the past, making connections with the present, and recognizing the importance of their history classroom.

Chronological thinking is a fundamental building block for understanding the past. From the earliest years of a students’ education they create and examine timelines that display the chronology of their lives or important historical events from an already-processed string of dates and facts often drawn from textbooks. Students are asked to use the timelines to determine causal relationships between events, or to see patterns among events along the time continuum. What students rarely do, and the ill-fated Bonus Army of 1932 provides a wonderful occasion to do so, is develop a chronology using the same primary sources employed by historians. In doing so, students move beyond the simple reflection of temporal order generated by the analysis of a timeline, to a more critical determination of how the events along the line were determined to have a relationship with one another. By challenging students to create a chronology, they gain insight into how historians have determined what happened in the past and practice the types of thinking skills relevant to the twenty-first century.

During the depths of the depression, a collection of World War I veterans led by former soldier and unemployed cannery worker Walter W. Waters demanded the bonus promised them as part of their military service to be paid early. Initially scheduled to become available in 1945, the bonus money was sought by veterans suffering from the deepening economic depression. Hoping to support the legislative efforts of Texas Democrat Wright Patman, who proposed the Serviceman’s Readjustment Act calling for immediate payment of the bonus, veterans descended on the Capitol. Traveling to Washington by foot, auto, and rail, the veterans embodied the right to petition one’s government for redress of grievances, and the mounting frustrations of many Americans with the now three-year-old economic downturn. Arriving in mid-spring of 1932, the marchers intended to protest peacefully. Camp Marks, the Hooverville established by the marchers, became the site of a makeshift community complete with a library, newspaper, nightly entertainment, and the enforcement of order amongst its residents. Radical talk, and especially support for communism, was shouted down by the veterans. Daily trips to the Capitol Hill to express support for early payment of their bonus were the major focus of the marcher’s day-to-day efforts in the Washington. Unfortunately, the measure was defeated on June 17, 1932, the United States Senate voted down the Patman Bill.

By late June of 1932, the majority of the marchers had departed for home. Still, 10,000-15,000 veterans and other protesters, including some members of the Communist Party not formally associated with the marchers, remained in Washington. On June 28th, needing the condemned federal buildings that housed many of the marchers, Police began to forcibly remove the marchers. The United States military, led by General Douglas MacArthur, and Majors Dwight Eisenhower and George S. Patton, took over from the efforts from the police department and forcibly removed the remaining marchers. Crossing the Anacostia Bridge into Camp Marks, the troops–armed with machine guns, tanks, and the other accoutrements of war, the troops destroyed the hovels of the Hooverville, and dispatched the remaining protesters. The Bonus March ended with flames rather than celebration of the Constitution’s protections of speech, assembly, and petition.

How can such a seemingly straightforward event be fertile ground for developing students’ critical abilities to think chronologically? To do so requires an historical question that provokes students to need to create a chronology of the event in order to generate a reasoned historical response to the question. In this case, asking students to determine why the Bonus Marchers were forcibly removed from the nation’s capitol and to determine who bears responsibility for their removal structures the students’ investigation. Providing students with a variety of documents allows them to sift through the evidence trail and develop an interpretive argument regarding the two questions posed. These documents include news magazine articles from The Nation and Harpers Weekly, memoirs from General Douglas MacArthur, Major Dwight Eisenhower, General George Van Horn Mosley, and a press release from President Herbert Hoover. Essential to the development of a useful chronology is how students deal with the dates of sources versus the information contained within. The President’s press release, issued the day after the removal, declares that the marchers were removed on his order because of “revolution in the air.” Reading the memoirs of thirty years after the march discuss MacArthur’s blatant disregard for presidential orders becomes patently obvious. If students build the chronology of the events surrounding the removal of the Bonus Marchers around the dates of the documents, then the determination of why the marchers were removed and who bears responsibility will be dramatically different then if they use the information contained in the documents to construct the chronology. Crucial to this difference is the fact that the material presented in the MacArthur, Eisenhower, and Van Horn Mosley memoirs differs from the press release by President Herbert Hoover on the day after the removal of the veteran marchers. Many students will create the chronology based solely on the dates of the sources instead of comparing the contentions of the sources and why they were produced. By creating a chronology of events, and dealing with the contradictions presented by the various sources, students can critically attack the lessons’ focus questions: Why were the Bonus Marchers removed and who bears responsibility for this decision?

By requiring students to think like historians, through the posing of questions, analysis of resources, and teaching skills such as sourcing, contextualizing, chronological thinking, historical significance, causality, and others, students see history as less of a march from “one damn thing” to another, and more the application of evidence to make arguments about past events, people, and ideas. The creation of a timeline documenting the expulsion of the Bonus Army takes chronological thinking from a static depiction of time-event relationships, and converts it into the construction of an interpretation of the past.