Stats
Stocks lost an average of 40 points on Black Tuesday. In 1930, 1,300 banks failed. By 1933, another 3,700 would fail, and 1 of 4 workers would be jobless.
A New Deal and a New War
(1930-1941)
Herbert Clark Hoover was born on August 10, 1874, the son of a West Branch, Iowa, blacksmith. He learned the meaning of hard work practically from the cradle, and at age 8, he also came to know the tragedy of loss. Orphaned, Hoover was sent to live with an uncle in Oregon and enrolled in the mining engineering program at Stanford University, graduating in 1895. For some 20 years, Hoover traveled the world, earning a fortune as a mining engineer. The Quaker ideals acquired from his uncle prompted him to aid in relief efforts during World War 1, and Hoover earned a reputation as an effective humanitarian. During the period of U.S. participation in the war, Hoover served as food administrator, charged with promoting agricultural production and food conservation. At the end of the war, President Wilson sent Hoover to Europe to direct the American Relief Administration. Hoover served as U.S. secretary of commerce in the cabinets of Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge.
When Coolidge declined to seek a second term (privately observing that an economic disaster was on the way, and he didn’t want any part of it), Hoover easily won election as the nation’s Best president. He ran on the optimistic platform that, if everyone would just put their heads together, poverty would be eliminated in America. The future looked bright. And who should know this better than a man justly hailed as “the great humanitarian”?
Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?
When the Wall Street crash came, Hoover was slow to react and merely assured the public that “prosperity was just around the corner.” As each month brought worse financial news and lengthened the lines of the jobless, the homeless, and the desperate, Hoover proposed a number of relief programs, but insisted that the state and local governments were responsible for financing them. In principle, this arrangement was prudent. Who better knew the needs of the people than their local government? In practice, however, the policy was doomed for a very simple reason: state and local governments had no money.
Most significantly, Hoover steadfastly refused to make federal aid available directly to individuals. He feared that big-government intervention would compromise the liberty, integrity, and initiative of the individual citizen.
In the meantime, shanty towns constructed of boxes and crates bloomed like evil flowers across the American landscape to house the homeless. “Hoovervilles” they were called, and the “great humanitarian’s” reputation was forever tarnished. Unjustly—but understandably—blame for the Great Depression was laid entirely at the doorstep of the White House.
The Verge of Revolution
America had had its share of boom and bust before. But the Great Depression of the 1930s was unparalleled in magnitude, scope, and duration. Fifteen to 25 percent of the work force was jobless. Families lost their savings, their homes, and even their lives-to disease and sometimes starvation. The Depression was not confined to the United States. It gripped the world, especially those citadels of democracy, the Western capitalist nations. Worst of all, the Depression showed no signs of letup. As the unrelieved years went by, want and misery became a way of life.
Discontent and despair bred revolution. The nations of Europe seethed-especially Germany, already economically crippled by the punitive Treaty of Versailles, now brought to its knees by the Depression. First in Italy, then in Germany—and to a lesser extent, elsewhere in Europe—two major ideologies came into violent opposition: Fascism versus Communism. To most Americans, both of these totalitarian ideologies seemed clearly repugnant to democracy.
Democracy was not putting beans on the table, however. Among intellectuals and even some radical workers, Communism seemed to offer a viable alternative to what was apparently the nation’s failed capitalism. Slowly but surely, the gunpowder scent of revolution tainted American air.
The Epoch of FDR
Born to wealth in Hyde Park, New York, in 1882, Franklin Delano Roosevelt never experienced poverty firsthand. The product of Groton School, Harvard University, and Columbia University Law School, young Roosevelt became a Wall Street lawyer. He devoted some of his time to free legal work for the poor and by this means came to know and sympathize with the plight of the so-called common man. FDR worked his way to prominence in Dutchess County (New York) politics and was appointed assistant secretary of the Navy in the Wilson administration. In 1920, FDR was running mate to James M. Cox, the democratic presidential hopeful who lost to Republican Warren G. Harding.
Then came Roosevelt’s darkest—and finest—hour. In the summer of 1921, while resident at his summer home on Campobello Island (New Brunswick, Canada), Roosevelt was felled by polio. Desperately ill, he recovered, but was left paralyzed from the waist down. His mother urged him to retire to the family’s Hyde Park estate. His wife, the remarkable Eleanor Roosevelt—FDR’s distant cousin and the niece of Theodore Roosevelt—persuaded FDR to return to public life. With great personal strength and courage, Roosevelt underwent intensive physical
