History

The Industrial Crisis in the United States

Following the stock market crash of 1929, the Great Depression took hold of America. Poverty and unemployment were rampant and no economic sector escaped the ravages of the depression. The decline of purchasing power in the market commodities staggered agriculture, which already had been suffering the effects of production surpluses. The prices of agricultural products fell off rapidly, and farmers responded by upping production. The results to these matters were disastrous.

However, beginning in 1933, when policies began to reflect a more socialist political approach in both the United States and Europe, the global economy entered a state of gradual recovery and stability. In 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt brought an air of confidence and optimism that quickly rallied the people to the banner of his program, known as the New Deal. The New Deal introduced types of social and economic reform familiar to many Europeans for more than a generation. In addition, the New Deal represented the culmination of a long-range trend toward abandonment of "laissez-faire" capitalism, going back to the regulation of the railroads in the 1880s, and the flood of state and national reform legislation introduced in the Progressive era of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. The Works Progress Administration (WPA), the principal relief agency of the so-called second New Deal, was an attempt to provide work rather than welfare. Under the WPA, buildings, roads, airports and schools were constructed. Actors, painters, musicians and writers were employed through the Federal Theater Project, the Federal Art Project and the Federal Writers Project. In addition, the