Great Depression

• President Herbert Hoover

o Became President in 1928
o blamed for the Stock Market Crash and Great Depression by most Americans
o acted conservatively even during the tough economic times, and his plans
backfired: raised taxes and lowered government spending while refusing to
give government aid and relying on weak private volunteer work
• Stock Market Crash
o When was it? –October 29, 1929
o Nickname –Black Tuesday
o Causes –
 Buying on Margin: paying a small part of a stock’s price as a down
payment and borrowing the rest
 Speculation –Investors bought and sold stocks in the hope of making a
quick profit
 The success of the wealthy in the 1920’s masked the poverty and
suffering of the middle-class and the poor (along with farmers and
other industries)
• Hoovervilles
o What were they? –shanty towns set up on the outskirts of cities –named after
Herbert Hoover as the public thought he was to blame for the Great
Depression
o Characteristics –Poor, terrible living conditions, people starving and waiting
for hours in line for a crust of bread or a bowl of soup at soup kitchens
• 1932 - Franklin D. Roosevelt
o Program Name –The New Deal
o Programs/Laws Passed for:
 The New Deal:
• FERA: Federal Emergency Relief Administration –provided
relief money to 13 million people who were unemployed
• PWA: Public Works Administration –provided jobs for people
to build highways, dams, bridges, and other public works
• TVA: Tennessee Valley Authority –provided jobs to people for
the development of the Tennessee Valley region, made over 40
dams
• FDIC: Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation –protected
people’s money in banks
nd
 The 2 New Deal:
• WPA: Works Progress Administration –Provided jobs to people
by creating large-scale national works programs
• Wagner Act: protected labor’s right to form unions and set up a
board to hear labor disputes
 • Social Security Act: workers and employers made payments
into a special fund, from which they would draw a pension
after they retired –helped needy families, laid-off workers, and
people with disabilities too
o Fireside Chats: radio broadcasts made by FDR to give the public hope and
confidence that they were going to make it through the Depression
• Dust Bowl
o a 150,000 square-mile area covering parts of Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas,
Colorado, and New Mexico
o Dust storms constantly ripped through the plains for years in this immense
area, destroying crops and fields
o This caused thousands of farmers to flee westward to California, looking for
work
• 21st Amendment –an amendment passed in 1933 that repealed Prohibition, which was
seen as a failure because of the lawlessness that it caused
• What helped bring the Depression to the End:
o The New Deal –the economy improved greatly after both of the New Deals
o WWII –with the U.S. at war, factories closed for years immediately reopened
for the sudden demand of supplies

WWII

• WWII:
o Two Causes:
 The Treaty of Versailles –Germans viewed the treaty as unjust and
that not all of the blame should have been placed on them
 The Rise of Dictators –Ruthless, war-like regimes such as Hitler’s
Nazi Party caused WWII to start
• Allied Powers:
o United States, Great Britain, Soviet Union, Canada, France, etc.
• Axis Powers and Leaders:
o Germany: Adolf Hitler and Nazi Party
o Italy: Benito Mussolini and Fascist Party
o Japan: Gen. Hideki Tojo
• Appeasement
o a policy by which a country meets another’s demands to avoid war
• Fascism
o What is it? –a political movement started by Italian dictator Benito
Mussolini that preached an extreme form of patriotism and nationalism
• U.S. enters WWII
o Why? –Japanese Navy attacks Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941
o Forces U.S. to declare war on the Axis Powers
• Island Hopping
 o a U.S. strategy implemented during the War in the Pacific by which the
U.S. would attack weakly-defended Japanese-controlled islands and then
use these to stage attacks on other islands
• D-Day
o June 1944 –the Allied seaborne invasion of France at Normandy, France
-10,000 Allied soldiers were killed in the attack
o By the end of June, 850,000 Allied soldiers were in France, liberated the
capital (Paris) on August 25
• Holocaust
o define: the genocide of 6 million Jews and 5 million Jews, Poles, Gypsies,
and Russians by Hitler and the Nazi party
o The Worst Camp: Auschwitz, Poland -1 million people are thought to have
been murdered there
o Hitler believed that “The Final Solution to the Jewish Question” was to
exterminate all Jews in Europe
• Kamikaze
o a suicide pilot that filled his plane with explosives and then crashed
themselves into Allied warships
• Manhattan Project
o a top-secret project set up in 1942 in the U.S. to create an atomic bomb
o led by J. Robert Oppenheimer, the team of scientists took 3 years to
complete construction
• Nagasaki and Hiroshima
o as the U.S. neared their target of Japan, American military leaders started
creating plans for the invasion of Japan
o They decided that the invasion would cost as much as 200,000 American
casualties
o President Harry S. Truman (president after FDR died) ordered the use of
an atomic bomb to save these American lives
o Nagasaki and Hiroshima were two targeted cities in Japan where atomic
bombs were dropped (In sequence of events: Hiroshima bombing,
Japanese refusal to surrender, Nagasaki bombing, Japanese surrender
o In Hiroshima, 70,000 people were killed in the immediate explosion, and
thousands more died from disease, cancer, and radiation poisoning after
the initial explosion
• U.S.S. Missouri
o the American battleship where the terms of surrender were signed in
Tokyo Bay on September 2, 1945