The stock market crash of 1929 was most certainly a contributing factor to the Great Depression which woul

The treaties resulting from World War I left no real winners. The United States was expected to police international justice and she could not. Great Britain and France were expected to mature into strong democracies and band together with world powers to maintain the peace. They did not. Russia was expected to remain the subservient backward nation that she had been and Germany was supposed to stay conquered. They did not. The American people were left feeling the frustration of this situation perhaps as vividly as the people in Europe. Although the U.S. first experienced an economic boom, she too eventually succumbed with the Great Depression of 1929. Conditions in the U.S. were so bad it was estimated that over 100,000 American citizens were seeking work in Russia (Sulzberger, 1966).

Investors and bankers alike took a watch and wait approach as the slide into the Depression became more and more steep practically every day (Foner and Garraty, 1991). Increasing unemployment, falling production and falling prices became in fact synonymous with the name of the current U.S. President, Herbert Hoover. Hoover’s name in fact became so inextricably tied to the economic plummet of the Great Depression that his presidency would end with him being the most hated man in America. Phrases like Hoovervilles, Hoover Blankets, Hoover Pullmans, and Hoover hogs would come to represent both the man and the Depression. Eventually with the entrance of Franklin Roosevelt into the presidency and his “New Deal” the Great Depression would start grinding to a slowly to a halt and with the start of World War II it would eventually end.

“The notion that thrift lay at the very heart of economic prosperity dominated public discourse during the interwar years. ‘Saving and foresight,’ a widely used Principles text instructed, were simply ‘indispensable in the capitalistic era in which we live and work’ [Ely et al. 1930, 137]. Accepted as the source of both individual and national economic well-being, saving received widespread moral sanction. The notion that thrift built ‘integrity of character and . . . a truer realization of the duties of citizenship" went largely unquestioned [Harger 1925, 301]. Expenditures on ‘luxury’ goods (defined differently by different commentators) were stigmatized by arguments possessing both economic and moral force.”

The U.S. government made several poor decisions which would escalate rather than check the impending Depression. The Depression was first viewed as being a simple recession, the effects of which had reconciled themselves in previous recessions. The government expected that eventually companies and individuals, largely underemployed and underproducing, would start competing among themselves and prices would fall (Foner and Garraty, 1991). At a certain point in this declining price slope the government felt that entrepreneurship would be once again stimulated and that the slack demand production would once again become profitable in response to the lowered wages (Foner and Garraty, 1991). When this happened it was expected that production would resume and the recession would eventually be rectified (Foner and Garraty, 1991).

The patriotism felt in World War II was like not other yet experienced by this country. Everyone had a common enemy. They had a cause. That the American people were

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