Great Depression Dbq

During 1929 to 1939, the United States suffered from the Great Depression, a severe financial and industrial recession. The depression is defined as a continuous decline of the economy over an extended period of time that often leads to great consequences. The major reasons as to why the Great Depression occurred would be due to speculation within the stock market and and the overproduction of products and crops from WWI. Speculation is the act of quickly purchasing and selling stocks in order to earn the most money. During this time period, people had borrowed a large amount of money from banks in order to purchase stocks to make money. This caused the inflation of stocks that led people to believe that stocks were actually worth more than

Ultimately, these two incidents caused the banks to go bankrupt, diminishing the financial standings of the entire country. Then in 1928, Herbert Hoover was elected president of the United States, plunging the country into greater crisis. Hoover believed in rugged individualism, where the people of a country should not rely on their government for assistance during a time of distress but should instead look to themselves for a solution to their problems. He also believed that a country had natural cycles, that the economy would decline and naturally return to a state of prosperity on its own. Hoover’s ideology proved to be unsuccessful, so in 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected the new president, one that believed in the “try anything” approach, setting into motion the New Deal that provided reform, recovery, and relief to our country. The New Deal brought the Great Depression to an end through rebuilding the banking system, providing jobs to the high number of unemployed, and creating programs to provide opportunity and assistance to

Roosevelt first closed down all banks for a short period of time, restocking the banks with enough money to reopen and provide money for those that were in desperate need, then he created the FDIC program that restored the trust that people had in banks through guaranteeing that even if a bank went bankrupt, the government would be able to insure that all of the money people had placed into their bank accounts would be returned to them. As the banking system began to stabilize, people were able to gradually participate in normal spending and safe loaning of money from banks, once again creating a healthy flow of money within the