first mainstream Mexican American political organizations and was formed largely through the efforts of Mexican American World War I veterans who were frustrated at the continued discrimination Mexican Americans faced in the United States. Ben Garza served as the organizations' first president. LULAC quickly developed into an influential middle-class civil rights organization with councils across the Southwest. Organization members tended to portray themselves as patriotic "white" Americans, and membership was restricted only to English-speaking U.S. citizens. Like the NAACP at this time, LULAC believed an "educated elite" Mexican American leadership would guide the community as a whole toward a higher political and economic standing in the United States. Nevertheless, the organization focused mostly on issues such voter registration and poll tax fundraising-drives, aggressively waging legal campaigns against racially discriminatory laws and practices. Great Depression Poverty The Great Depression started in the United States after a major fall in stock prices that began around September 4, 1929, and especially with the stock market crash of October 29, 1929, (known as Black Tuesday). The Depression had a major impact for the approximately one and a half million Mexicans and Mexican Americans living in the United States by 1930. Agricultural work fell as one of the depression's first casualties. As white Americans increasingly found themselves unemployed, they grew outraged at the fact that farmers in the Southwest employed Mexican and Mexican American laborers. They mounted pressure campaigns on government officials and employers to insist that only "citizens" be hired. The campaigns were successful, and soon construction companies, stores, factories, and laundries fired their Mexican employees in favor of white Americans. The Hoover administration explicitly blamed Mexicans for taking jobs away from "American citizens". When Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected president in 1932, there was hope he would provide relief to the suffering Mexican American communities across the United States. This did not materialize. While no New Deal program explicitly barred people by race or immigration status from receiving assistance, occupational status was used to exclude Mexican Americans from receiving Depression relief. The Social Security Act of 1935, for example, barred agricultural and domestic workers from both social security benefits and unemployment insurance, which effectively excluded many African and Mexican Americans from this early social safety net. At the local level, few Mexican migrant laborers received relief, since residency restrictions often required the applicant to have lived in the county for a set amount