Did Franklin D Roosevelt
Save America from Revolution?
A revolution is described in the dictionary as a complete change; this can take any length of time but usually happens very quickly and can involve any number of people.
The previous president to Roosevelt was president Herbert Hoover, he was disliked because he had let America slip into the depression, there are five main reasons for this, businesses had to much stock than they could sell and so were stuck with potential money, but no one wanted the stock. Everyone in America saw what industries were doing well and so did the same idea themselves, meaning that the money people spent on the product was shared between more companies meaning that the companies income fell. The choice of places to buy from was very small, this meant that farmers sometimes couldn’t find a place to buy a house from, as there were farmers moving into the city the farm income fell 66% from 1920-1929 and by 1929 the top 10% of America’s population had received 40% of the nations ‘disposable income’. There were huge credit problems, banks failed as more people failed to pay mortgages, bankers kept money for themselves to invest in the growing stock market, banks stopped making much money in banking and so had to invest in other businesses. The other reason was the fact that the demand for American goods from other countries fell, this was because European countries started gradually building their agricultural and their heavy industries up again, American goods were too expensive for many international countries, European countries borrowed money from American banks to pay off wartime debts which increased indebtedness and High American protective tariffs took away trade. While people were trying to get out of this depression people invested in the sock market, which, in October 1929 roach $8.5 billion in loans, in September 1929 shares started to fall and by December $40 billion in stock value had been lost. Hoover and other business leaders lied to the public by saying that the countries economy was fine, this went further when J.P.Morgan and some other bankers bought $20 million of U.S steel to restore confidence. Between 1929 and 1933 100,000 businesses failed, over 6,000 banks failed, loosing over 9 million savings accounts. Corporate profits fell from $10 billion to $1 billion, by 13 million workers were unemployed and others were underemployed. Diseases such as tuberculosis, typhoid and dysentery, in 1932, 95 people in New York died from starvation and many turned up in soup kitchens and breadlines looking for food. Finally, large numbers of homeless people roamed the streets looking for work; this was particularly a problem in the Southwest. Hoover thought that the dole was as undermining in character as rugged individualism and so rejected it, he urged people to turn to community and church resources to meet the needs of the poor and he also gradually used federal agencies to address issues, he met with business and labour leaders to reduce layoffs and strikes, financed federal work projects in the west such as dams, Set up RCF (Reconstruction Finance Corporation) in 1932 to make loans to simulate economy in a ‘trickle-down’ manner and raised tariffs 33% by signing the Hawley-Smooth tariff in attempt to keep foreign goods off the American market.
