The Great Depression: Gateway To Hitler
The Great Depression began in the United States in 1929; within a year, stock prices had lost 80% of their values and half the banks had failed, many of them large banks who had sacrificed themselves by buying up large blocks of stock when the market was falling in a futile effort to stem the panic. It quickly spread in a ripple effect to Europe and the rest of the world, and lasted until 1939, when the beginning of World War II may have hastened the recovery. Because economic conditions in America directly affected the countries in Europe that owed America the most money, the Depression almost immediately pulled Germany in; four years after the beginning of the Depression, 25% of the population were unemployed and Hitler was rising to power on the crest of the unrest. When Franklin Delano Roosevelt came to power in 1933, he initiated the New Deal, a package of social reforms designed to alleviate the grinding poverty that so many Americans had fallen into as a result of the Depression; by 1932, between 25 and 30% of Americans were unemployed. From the New Deal came most of our current social programs: welfare, social security, and Medicare and Medicaid. Because part of the New Deal was a huge work program, we also received a large part of our transportation and energy infrastructure from that time period; many of the big dams in the west and interstate roads crisscrossing our country were built during the 1930s. Financial reforms were also enacted during this time period, in an effort to prevent anything like the Depression from happening again. The Federal Deposit Insurance Commission, or FDIC, was formed to federally insure banks against another stock market crash. And the Securities Exchange Commission, or SEC, was formed to protect the investing public against fraudulent stock exchanges. The Great Depression resulted in a boom in the entertainment industry; Americans wanted to forget their worries, so they went to the movies for cheap entertainment. Many of the great old classics were written and filmed then, and glamorous song-and-dance movies, Technicolor, and grand epic stories became a part of American culture. Though the Great Depression was in itself a terrible hardship on the American people, it is arguable that the worst consequence of the Depression was the collapse of the German economy and the subsequent rallying of desperate