The Great Depression - Some Key Points

1. 24 October 1929: "Black Thursday." The New York Stock Market crashes. The Stock Market index will
go from 381 in September 1929 to 1 in July 1932--an 89% loss for the entire stock market. The crash will
provide the prologue to a 10-year long Great Depression and what would be the largest economic crisis
of the 20th century.
Some causes:
--with the market booming, many Americans invested in stocks and borrowed money to buy more;
--the abuses of utility holding companies;
--commercial banks had irresponsibly put deposits at risk while investing in the stock market.

2. More than 15 million Americans are without a job; in 1932, an entire one-third of the nation's labor
force is unemployed. Four-fifths of the steel mills are closed. Farm income is a third of what it was in
1929. Thelives of many others are dramatically shattered. Jobs and savings vanish, belongings are
repossessed, mortgages foreclosed, families go hungry, people become homeless, hobo camps
proliferate. Once self-respecting people stand in breadlines, sell apples on street corners, beg for any
kind of work, or just ask for a handout: E. Y. Harburg's famous song, "Brother, Can You Spare Me a
Dime?" The representative destiny of the "forgotten man" is immortalized in the 1932 Warner Brothers'
Film, I Am a Fugitivefrom a Chain Gang(directed by Mervyn LeRoy); a war hero (played by Paul Muni)
becomes a hobo and then a criminal on the run. His parting words: "I steal!"

3. The resulting depression does not limit itself to the U.S., but spreads throughout the world.
International trade is shattered in Europe.

4. Franklin D. Roosevelt (President from 1933 to 1945 and engineer of the "New Deal"). FDR introduces
reforms meant to combat the economic crisis. His measures include the "Hundred Days" (9 March - 16
June 1933, meant to get banks running again), the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the Tennesse Valley
Authority (a regional economic development agency that would use federal experts and electricity to
rapidly modernize the region's economy and society), the National Industrial Recovery Act. The New Deal
above all sought to bring about relief, recovery, and reform.

5. Roosevelt modifies the American dream, transforming it into an ideal of success through collective
effort under the guidance of a strong leader. His inaugural address of 1933: "If I have read the temper of
our people correctly, we now realize as we have never realized before our interdependence on each
other; that we cannot merely take but we must give as well; that if we are to go forward, we must move
as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline, because without such
discipline no progress is made, no leadership becomes effective. We are, I know, ready and willing to
submit our lives and property to such discipline, because it makes possible a leadership which aims at a
larger good."