Intro to 1930s

General knowlage:

        At the beginning of the 1930s, more than 15 million Americans–fully one-quarter of all wage-earning workers–were unemployed. President Herbert Hoover did not do much to alleviate the crisis: Patience and self-reliance, he argued, were all Americans needed to get them through this “passing incident in our national lives.” But in 1932, Americans elected a new president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who pledged to use the power of the federal government to make Americans’ lives better. Over the next nine years, Roosevelt’s New Deal created a new role for government in American life. Though the New Deal alone did not end the Depression, it did provide an unprecedented safety net to millions of suffering Americans.

Intro to The Great Depression:

The stock market crash of October 29, 1929, provided a dramatic end to an era of unprecedented, and unprecedentedly lopsided, prosperity.

The disaster had been brewing for years. Different historians and economists offer different explanations for the crisis–some blame the increasingly uneven distribution of wealth and purchasing power in the 1920s, while others blame the decade’s agricultural slump or the international instability caused by World War I.

In any case, the nation was woefully unprepared for the crash. For the most part, banks were unregulated and uninsured. The government offered no insurance or compensation for the unemployed, so when people stopped earning, they stopped spending. The consumer economy ground to a halt, and an ordinary recession became the Great Depression, the defining event of the 1930s.

President Herbert Hoover was slow to respond to these events. Though he believed that the “crazy and dangerous” behavior of Wall Street speculators had contributed in a significant way to the crisis, he also believed that solving such problems was not really the federal government’s job. As a result, most of the solutions he suggested were voluntary: He asked state governments to undertake public-works projects; he asked big companies to keep workers’ pay steady, and he asked labor unions to stop demanding raises.

Still, the crisis worsened. Between 1930 and 1933, more than 9,000 banks closed in the U.S., taking with them more than $2.5 billion in deposits. Meanwhile, unemployed people did whatever they could, like standing in charity breadlines and selling apples on street corners, to feed their families.