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The first Academy Awards are presented.
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The stock market crashes. Known as Black Tuesday, "The Crash". The stock market loses 12 times more money in three weeks than the government spends in a year.
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More than 40% of the nation's banks fail.
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8.02 million Americans are unemployed.
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The Hoover Dam (formerly Boulder Dam) is a concrete arch-gravity dam in the Black Canyon of the Colorado River, on the border between the U.S. states of Nevada and Arizona. The project started in 1931. It was constructed between 1931 and 1936 during the Great Depression and was dedicated on September 30, 1935, by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
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In 1932, World War 1 Veterans march on Washington demanding pensions. General Douglas MacArthur's uses force to remove them. The Bonus Army arrives in Washington, D.C.
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Franklin Delano Roosevelt is elected president.
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The Twenty-first Amendment ends Prohibition.
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More than 13 million Americans are unemployed.
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The drought that began in the early 1930's wreaked havoc on the Great Plains. One windstorm in 1934 picked up millions of tons of dust from the plains and carried it to East Coast cities. The region that was the hardest hit, including parts of Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, and Colorado, came to be known as the Dust Bowl.
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Franklin Delano Roosevelt launched the New Deal with the Emergency Banking Act. It closed all U.S. banks to stop devastating failures.
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The Social Security Act provided income to the elderly, the blind, the disabled, and children in low-income families. It was paid for with payroll taxes and the Social Security Trust Fund.
