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Herbert Hoover And The Great Depression

Decent Essays

In the words of Dorothy Rowe, “Depression is a prison where you are both the suffering prisoner and the cruel jailer.” This phrase doesn’t directly talk about the Great Depression, but it describes how you can put yourself in situations and suffer consequences for your own actions. The period of economic hardship known as the Great Depression can never be forgotten because it was full of unemployment and a major economic downfall that forced Americans to live an unfortunate lifestyle.
The Great Depression can be described as a domino effect. The Wall Street Crash of 1929 would be the first domino to fall. Millions of people had invested in the stock market by using their life savings and taking out marginal loans. Before the summer of 1930, …show more content…

Herbert Hoover served as the 31st President during this time. Since the crash, Hoover had worked ceaselessly trying to fix the economy. He founded government agencies, encouraged labor harmony, supported local aid for public works, fostered cooperation between government and business in order to stabilize prices, and struggled to balance the budget (gilderlehrman.org, 1). When the depression worsened Americans wanted an increase in federal intervention and spending. Hoover did not want the help of the federal government. For they would force fixed prices, control businesses, and manipulate the value of currency (gilderlehrman.org, 2). He felt these were steps toward socialism. Socialism can be described as the political and economic theory that production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole (merriam-webster.com, 1). Hoover became known as uncaring toward the common citizen. During his reelection campaign, Hoover made arguments that measures Americans were calling for might help in the short term, but would be ruinous in the long term (gilderlehrman.org, 2). When Franklin D. Roosevelt ran for President in 1932, he promised Americans a “New Deal”. During his first “Hundred Days” as president, he signed numerous groundbreaking new laws. Bills created while under the New Deal supported direct federal aid, tightened government control, and forgoing volunteerism in favor of deficit spending, in the hopes of jump-starting both consumer confidence and the economy. The New Deal only targeted certain sectors of the economy such as agriculture, relief, manufacturing, financial reforms, etc. Since there was no macroeconomic theory total recovery did not happen during the 1930s. Due to the massive public spending during WWII it led the economy to full employment capacity production by

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