1929 1933

Banks in operation 25,568 14,771 

Prime interest rate 5.03% 0.63%

Volume of stocks sold (NYSE)

1.1 B 0.65 B

Privately earned income

$45.5B $23.9B

Personal and corporate savings

$15.3B $2.3B

http://thepedia.com/define/Image:Dallas_South_Dakota_1936.jpg

Countless thousands of honest, hard-working people lost their homes and farms to the foreclosure’s hammer. Breadlines formed, soup kitchens dispensed food, and apple sellers stood shivering on street corners trying to peddle their wares for five cents. Families felt the stress, as jobless fathers nursed their guilt and shame at not being able to provide for their households. Breadless breadwinners often blamed themselves for their plight, despite abundant evidence that the economic system, not individual initiative, had broken down. Mothers meanwhile nursed fewer babies, as hard time reached even into the nation’s bedrooms, precipitating a decade-long dearth of births. (The American Pageant, 13th edition, pp. 761-762.)

Selling apples, Jacksonville, Texas. October, 1939. Photographer: Russell Lee. Many tried apple-selling to avoid the shame of panhandling. In New York City, there were over 5,000 apple sellers on the street.

Relief line waiting for commodities, San Antonio, Texas. March 1939. Photographer: Russell Lee.

Squatters in Mexican section in San Antonio, Texas. House was built of scrap material in vacant lot in Mexican section of San Antonio, Texas. March 1939. Photographer: Russell Lee.

When farmers planted their cotton crop in 1931, the market price of cotton averaged 9 to 10 cents per pound; by harvest time, it had fallen to 5.3 cents per pound, where it remained for the next year. p. 325.

A farmer needed at least three times the amount of production in 1931 that he needed in 1928 to pay off the same amount of loan. p. 326.

Dust storm in the Panhandle, April 14, 1935. Prints and Photographs Collection, Panhandle--sandstorm file, The Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin; CN 02655. In 1935 the Dust Bowl covered 100 million acres across the western United States. Visibility in Amarillo that year dropped to zero seven times during the first three months, with one blackout lasting eleven hours.

Dust Storm near Dalhart, Texas, 1936Dust Storm near Dalhart, Texas, 1936

Dust storm approaching Stratford, Texas. Dust bowl surveying in Texas

Image ID: theb1365, Historic C&GS Collection. Location: Stratford, Texas. Photo Date: April 18, 1935. Credit: NOAA George E. Marsh Album

Herbert Hoover, Financing Relief Efforts (1931)

Franklin Delano RooseveltFranklin Delano Roosevelt

U.S. NATIONAL DEBT CLOCK The Outstanding Public Debt as of 08 Nov 2006 at 03:20:22 PM GMT is: $8,592,736,640,916.48 The estimated population of the United States is 300,176,579 so each citizen's share of this debt is $28,625.61.

The National Debt has continued to increase an average of $2.14 billion per day since September 29, 2006!

Herbert Hoover, Financing Relief Efforts (1931)

Main Points:

1. The best way to help people during times of national difficulty is through mutual self-help and voluntary giving.

 

My own conviction is strongly that if we break down this sense of responsibility of individual generosity to individual and mutual self-help in the country in time of national difficulty and if we start appropriations of this character we have not only impaired something infinitely valuable in the life of the American people but have struck at the roots of self-government. (p. 109)

Herbert Hoover, Financing Relief Efforts (1931)

2. Federal aid to the hungry and poor encourages expectations of future paternal care and weakens Americans’ self-reliant character. It also weakens Americans’ willingness to help each other and give to each other, and thus enfeebles the bonds of common brotherhood.

 

Quotation of President Grover Cleveland by President Herbert Hoover: The friendliness and charity of our countrymen can always be relied upon to relieve their fellow citizens in misfortune. This has been repeatedly and quite lately demonstrated. Federal aid in such cases encouraged the expectation of paternal care on the part of the Government and weakens the sturdiness of our national character, while it prevents the indulgence among our people of that kindly sentiment and conduct which strengthens the bonds of a common brotherhood. (p. 110)

President Herbert Hoover: The help being daily extended by neighbors, by local and national agencies, by municipalities, by industry and a great multitude of organizations throughout the country today is many times any appropriation yet proposed. The opening of the doors of the Federal Treasury is likely to stifle this giving and thus destroy far more resources than the proposed charity from the Federal Government. (p. 110)

Socialist Party Platform (1932)

 

Norman Mattoon Thomas

Main Point 1: Capitalism is breaking down, so vote for the Socialist Party Platform. The capitalist system exploits and oppresses workers. The system is now breaking down, causing human suffering.

Unemployment and poverty are inevitable products of the present system. Under capitalism the few own our industries. The many do the work. The wage earners and farmers are compelled to give a large part of the product of their labor to the few. The many in the factories, mines, shops, offices, and on the forms obtain but a scanty income and are able to buy back only a part of the goods that can be produced in such abundance by our mass industries….

Main Point 2: The Socialist Party will fix America’s broken system and improve the lives of Americans.  

The Socialist Party is to-day the one democratic party of the workers whose program would remove the causes of class struggles, class antagonisms, and social evils inherent in the capitalist system.

The Socialist party “proposes to transfer the principal industries of the country from private ownership and autocratic, cruelly inefficient management to social ownership and democratic control….

Franklin D. Roosevelt, Inaugural Address (1933)

 

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed effort to convert retreat into advance.

 

We need to act immediately to put people back to work.

  This Nation asks for action, and action now. Our greatest primary task is to put people back to work. This is no unsolvable problem if we face it wisely and courageously. It can be accomplished in part by direct recruiting by the Government itself, treating the task as we would treat the emergency of a war, but at the same time, through this employment, accomplishing greatly needed projects to simulate and reorganize the use of our natural resources.

 Franklin D. Roosevelt, Inaugural Address (1933)

America has plenty of natural resources and hard-working people. Our troubles are due to unscrupulous money changers.

…[O]ur distress comes from no failure of substance…. Nature still offers her bounty and human efforts have multiplied it. Plenty is at our doorstep, but a generous use of it languishes in the very sight of the supply. Primarily this is because the rules of the exchange of mankind’s goods have failed, through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and abdicated. Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men…. They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish. …[T]here must be an end to a conduct in banking and in business which too often has given to a sacred trust the likeness of callous and selfish wrongdoing.

 Franklin D. Roosevelt, Inaugural Address (1933)

We can fix the American system.

• The task can be helped by definite efforts to raise the values of agricultural products and with this the power to purchase the output of our cities.

• It can be helped by preventing realistically the tragedy of the growing loss through foreclosure of our small homes and our farms.

• It can be helped by insistence that the Federal, State, and local governments act forthwith on the demand that their cost be drastically reduced.

• It can be helped by the unifying of relief activities which today are often scattered, uneconomical, and unequal.

• It can be helped by national planning for and supervision of all forms of transportation and of communications and other utilities which have definitely public character.

• There must be a strict supervision of all banking and credits and investments; there must be an end to speculation with other people’s money, and there must be provision for an adequate but sound currency.

 Franklin D. Roosevelt, Inaugural Address (1933)

I am prepared to invoke emergency powers to solve our problems.

It is to be hoped that the normal balance of executive and legislative authority may be wholly adequate to meet the unprecedented task before us. [But if this fails,] I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis—broad Executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.

 Franklin D. Roosevelt, Inaugural Address (1933)

The government needs to create and implement safeguards to prevent a future Great Depression.

 

Finally, in our progress toward a resumption of work we require two safeguards against a return of the evils of the old order; there must be a strict supervision of all banking and credits and investments; there must be an end to speculation with other people’s money, and there must be provision for an adequate but sound currency.

 

In foreign policy, the United States will, like a good neighbor, respect the rights of others.

 

In the field of world policy I would dedicate this Nation to the policy of the good neighbor—the neighbor who resolutely respects himself and, because he does so, respects the rights of others—the neighbor who respects his obligation and respects the sanctity of his agreements in and with a world of neighbors.

Roosevelt consciously abandoned the term “progressive” and chose instead to employ “liberal” to define himself and his administration. In so doing, he transformed “liberalism” from a shorthand for weak government and laissez-faire economics into belief in an activist, socially conscious state, an alternative both to socialism and to unregulated capitalism. (Foner, The Story of American Freedom, pp. 201-204.)

Freedom, Hoover insisted, meant unfettered economic opportunity for the enterprising individual. Far from being an element of liberty, the quest for economic security was turning Americans into “lazy parasites” dependent on the state. For the remainder of his life, Hoover continued to call himself a “liberal,” even though, he charged, the word had been “polluted and raped of all its real meanings.” (Foner, The Story of American Freedom, p. 205.)

Redefining Redefining LiberalismLiberalism

F.D.R. & The Four Freedoms

Norman Rockwell, Our Four Freedoms, (1943)