Great Depression Dbq

1672 Words4 Pages

Following a period of relative prosperity in the 1920s with the trends of conspicuous consumerism or the act of making big purchases in an effort to flaunt wealth and buying on credit and margin, the so-called “Roaring Twenties”’s economy took a hard hit with the Great Depression. The Great Depression, which was in part caused by the Stock Market Crash of 1929, was the first actual economic depression, past just an economic panic, that the United States faced. During the depression, unemployment rates rose to twenty-five percent, the cost of field and crop supplies rose so exorbitantly that farmers could no longer afford the upkeep of a farm, the cost of agricultural products greatly fell, and thousands of banks failed. Due to the stock market crash, many banks lost big portions of their …show more content…

Though, the impact of Republican relief programs differed greatly from Democratic relief programs (4,6,5). In the beginning of the Great Depression, Herbert Hoover and his Republican advisors believed the American tradition of self-reliance would naturally restore the economy’s balance, though when Franklin D. Roosevelt and Democrats later took office, they believed that it was the government’s responsibility to step in and stabilize the economy. In Hoover’s radio address on Abraham Lincoln’s birthday in 1831, he conveyed the message that the government can only do so much to fix issues outside of its sphere, and that the responsibility to prosper out of the Great Depression really fell on individuals and not the government (doc 1). As Hoover was advised that the depression should have been handled as a panic, which would have resolved itself, he refrained from any government interference in the economic

Open Document