Free Essays,College Free Essays,Free College Essays at Anti Essays

The Great Depression was an economic slump in United States, and other industrialized areas of the world that began in 1929 with the dramatic crash of the stock market. This was the worst economic disaster in American history. This marked the beginning of a decade of high unemployment, poverty, and deflation. Stock prices continued to fall for the next three years. At first economists thought this was temporary and kept an optimistic outlook, but it ended up being the longest and most harsh depression ever. Even thought the Great Depression began in the United States, but quickly turned into a worldwide economic disaster.

Not only did the Great Depression ruin many thousands of individual investors, but this decline in the value of assets put tons of pressure on banks and other financial institutions that were holding stocks in their portfolios. This caused many banks to close down and by 1933, 11,000 of the US banks had failed and closed down. This caused the confidence levels of the people to drop as well. This led to reduced spending and the demand for goods dropped too. When the demand for goods dropped, this caused a drop in production. Unemployment began to rise. Unemployment had risen to 25 percent of the work force, which was one out of every four Americans.

The presidential campaign of 1932, was a great debate about the causes and possible solutions of the Great Depression. Herbert Hoover had just been elected into office eight months before the stock market crash. He had struggled to get things back to normal, but was not able to set the wheels of industry in motion again. His Democratic opponent was Franklin D. Roosevelt, a popular governor of New York during this crisis. He argued that the Depression was caused from the U.S. economy's underlying flaws, that were brought on by Republican policies during the 1920s. Roosevelt was prepared to use the federal government's authority for experimental...