The Great Depression

             Americans on the whole proved remarkably patient through the ordeal of the early 1930's. In these worst years of the depression, they were for the most part even passive. But a few events contradicted this passivity. The most notable of them was the encampment in the nation's capital during the spring and summer of 1932 of the Bonus Expeditionary Force (BEF), when thousands of unemployed veterans came to Washington to lobby for immediate payment of a bonus for wartime services, only to be routed out by the U.S. Army and a government fearing social unrest. (Himmelberg, 10) Many Americans who lost jobs and property, in accordance with the deeply engrained belief that individual effort determined personal success in life, seemed to have blamed themselves rather than the system. They initially tended to believe the reassurances they received, for they had long entrusted the success of the economy to Republican presidents and to big business leaders, however, it would only be later, after the Democrats had taken control of the presidency and Congress and recovery had begun from the depths of the depression that workers would adopt a more militant stance in their dealings with employers and that middle Americans would begin to listen attentively to the irresponsible preachments of demagogic figures such as Fr. Charles Coughlin (the "Radio Priest") or Senator Huey Long of Louisiana, who would make "every man a king" through a radical redistribution of income and wealth from the few to the many. (Himmelberg, 11).
             The faith of the people in the Republican Party, which most of them had regarded as the custodian of prosperity, and in the Republican President, Herbert Hoover, by 1932 had reached the vanishing point. (Himmelberg, 11) Governmental efforts to end the depression had failed. As the situation grew worse, expectation of strong action in Washington had grown everywhere except among rigid conservatives such as the secretary of the treasury, Andrew Mellon, who advised the president to liquidate to let the depression run its course without doing anything.