In the 1920’s, Americans wanted to expand their wealth and prosper. However, that took a turn for the worse when Herbert Hoover was elected president in 1929. At first, the stock market initially reacted favorably due to investors putting in money they did NOT have, they were using credit to purchase stocks while also taking advantage of the low interest rates. Unfortunately, everything went off course when the stock market crashed in October 1929. The market fell by more than half of what it used to. It was called, “The Wall Street crash of 1929.” Numerous American lives were ruined, banks closed because they couldn’t cover withdrawals and couldn’t provide credit. President Hoover took it upon himself and the federal government to find a solution to this problem. “According to Hoover’s economic theory, financial losses should affect profits, not …show more content…
Hoover also created the “President’s Emergency Committee for Employment” (PECE) to battle the rising unemployment rates. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a great success because of local programs and delegated authority over funding. Hoover rebranded PECE into the President’s Organization on Unemployment Relief (POUR) in August of 1931. POUR wanted to do what PECE did and raise money but was unsuccessful because of rising unemployment. People thought that Hoover was inadequate and was not fit for presidency because of his failures, even though he tried his best to resolve them. Consequently, Roosevelt came to the presidency in the summer of 1932. He created the “New Deal” to help Americans recover from the Great Depression. He created “The Social Security Act, signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1935, created Social Security, a federal safety net for elderly, unemployed and disadvantaged Americans. The main stipulation of the original Social Security Act was to pay financial benefits to retirees over age 65 based on lifetime payroll tax