How Did Hoover Lead Up To The Great Depression

832 Words4 Pages

October 29, 1929 was perhaps one of the most dreadful days in American history for its economy. Before “Black Tuesday”, as it was known, stock prices had been dropping. As a result, America experienced a devastating reality known as the Stock Market Crash. Many economists hold the belief that it was caused due to people “buying on margin”. The effects of this were detrimental and quickly lead us into a depression, and not only for America, but around the world as well. Our unemployment rate had been as high as 25%, and for other countries rose to 33%. Every industry was affected by this depression one way or another. The president of the United States at the time of this economic collapse was President Herbert Hoover. He recognized that Americans …show more content…

This basically meant that he thought each person had the capability to help themselves out of the situation they are in. In addition, he believed that businesses would recover on their own and if they recovered, everything else would return to normal. For this reason, he took a more “laissez-faire” approach. A tremendous amount of people despised this method, and so Franklin D. Roosevelt was voted into office in the Election of 1932. President Roosevelt approached the economic disaster at hand much differently from that of Hoover. Unlike Hoover, Roosevelt thought that it was the government’s job to protect and provide for the people during this time. To combat this immense issue occurring, FDR proposed what was known as the “New Deal”. This consisted of the proposition of many new agencies to provide relief, recovery, and reform. Historians called this the “3 R’s”. Each one of the r’s were for a certain task: relief for the struggling and needy, to recover the economy, and reform the system financially to ensure that a depression never happened again. He believed that through the many agencies he created, they would do just that. Many historians believe that the New Deal was a failure, but the successes of it outweighed its