between 682 and 800 people, and damaged or destroyed over 57,000 homes, including the home of famed actress Katharine Hepburn, who had been staying in her family's Old Saybrook, Connecticut, beach home when the hurricane struck. The Dust Bowl, or "Dirty Thirties", a period of severe dust storms causing major ecological and agricultural damage to American and Canadian prairie lands from 1930 to 1936 (in some areas until 1940). Caused by extreme drought coupled with strong winds and decades of extensive farming without crop rotation, fallow fields, cover crops, or other techniques to prevent erosion, it affected an estimated of land (traveling as far east as New York and the Atlantic Ocean), caused mass migration (which was the inspiration for the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck), food shortages, multiple deaths and illness from sand inhalation (see History in Motion), and a severe reduction in the going wage rate. The 1938 Yellow River flood pours out from Huayuankou, China, inundating of land and killing an estimated 500,000 people. Assassinations and attempts Prominent assassinations, targeted killings, and assassination attempts include: A plan to kill the English film star Charlie Chaplin, who had arrived in Japan on May 14, 1932, at a reception for him, was planned by activists eager to ingest a nativist Yamato spirit into politics. Chaplin's murder would facilitate war with the U.S., and anxiety in Japan, and lead on to "restoration" in the name of the emperor. However, excepting the death of the prime minister, the coup came to nothing, and the murderers gave themselves in to the police willingly. French president Paul Doumer is assassinated in 1932 by Paul Gorguloff, a mentally unstable Russian émigré. U.S. presidential candidate and former Governor of Louisiana Huey Long is assassinated in 1935 by Carl Weiss. Engelbert Dollfuss, Chancellor of Austria and leading figure of Austrofascism, is assassinated in 1934 by Austrian Nazis. Germany and Italy nearly clash over the issue of Austrian independence despite close ideological similarities of the Italian Fascist and Nazi regimes. Alexander I of Yugoslavia is assassinated in 1934 during a visit to Marseille, France. His assassin was Vlado Chernozemski, a member of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization. The IMRO was a political organization that fought for secession of Vardar Macedonia from Yugoslavia. Economics The Great Depression is considered to have begun with the fall of stock prices on September 4, 1929, and