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Just how good were the “Good Ol’ Days”?
The Good Ol’ Days project helps students to develop an understanding of economic policies and measures through a study of present economic indicators and past ones. Each will research economic events that took place during 1916-1936. Each will study what caused these events; how government, businesses, and the American family responded to these events; the overall health of the U.S. economy during the time; and how good or bad life was during the time due to the result of economic events. -
Rural Credit Act
Financial aid is given to farmers through this act. Under the act, farmers could borrow up to 50% of the value of their land and 20% of the value of their improvements. The minimum loan was $100 and the maximum was $10,000. Loans made through the Act were paid off through amortization over 5 to 40 years. -
Cause Of Depression
Different historians and economists offer different explanations for the crisis–some blame the increasingly uneven distribution of wealth and purchasing power in the 1920s, while others blame the decade’s agricultural slump or the international instability caused by World War I. -
Children employment
The supreme court issued a law that states that children between 14 and 16 are not to work in factories. -
Wall Street Market Crash
Lasting over 4 years, the bursting of the speculative bubble in shares led to further selling as people who had borrowed money to buy shares had to cash them in, when their loans were called in. Also called the Great Crash or the Wall Street Crash, leading to the Great Depression. -
Banking Panics
During this time banks had very little actual cash in their banks. This led to them not being able to give people the money they were asking for. -
Effects 1930 Had On Future
The 1930s saw natural disasters as well as manmade ones: For most of the decade, people in the Plains states suffered through the worst drought in American history, as well as hundreds of severe dust storms, or "black blizzards," that carried away the soil and made it all but impossible to plant crops. By 1940, 2.5 million people had abandoned their farms in this "Dust Bowl" and headed West to California. -
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Crisis Worsening
Between 1930 and 1933, more than 9,000 banks closed in the U.S., taking with them more than $2.5 billion in deposits. Meanwhile, unemployed people did whatever they could, like standing in charity breadlines and selling apples on street corners, to feed their families. -
America Fed Up With Their President
By 1932, many Americans were fed up with Hoover and what Franklin Roosevelt later called his “hear nothing, see nothing, do nothing government.” The Democratic presidential candidate, New York governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt, promised a change: “I pledge myself,” he said, “to a New Deal for the American people.” This New Deal would use the power of the federal government to try and stop the economy’s downward spiral. Roosevelt won that year’s election handily. -
New President spiral downward
Americans elected a new president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who pledged to use the power of the federal government to make Americans’ lives better. Over the next nine years, Roosevelt’s New Deal created a new role for government in American life. Though the New Deal alone did not end the Depression, it did provide an unprecedented safety net to millions of suffering Americans. -
Presidential Second Chance
In the spring of 1935, he launched a second, more aggressive set of federal programs, sometimes called the Second New Deal. The Works Progress Administration provided jobs for unemployed people and built new public works like bridges, post offices, schools, highways and parks. The National Labor Relations Act gave workers the right to form unions and bargain collectively for higher wages and fairer treatment. -
Social Security
The Social Security Act guaranteed pensions to some older Americans, set up a system of unemployment insurance and stipulated that the federal government would help care for dependent children and the disabled.