Great Depression

From RationalWiki

The Great Depression was the largest economic downturn in the history of the modern world. A confluence of things brought it about, including crop failures, stock speculation, and high tariffs. It went on unabated for its first four years (1929-1933) because Herbert Hoover was a strong believer in rugged individualism, and thus refused to use the power of the government to correct matters. This led to the historic win by Franklin D. Roosevelt, the New Deal, and a constitutional amendment to move up the date that the President takes office.

Some conservatives like to claim that the Depression was almost over when Roosevelt took office, and his policies set the country even further back. They are correct only in that employment reached rock bottom when he took office, but it remained for the country to dig itself back up out of the hole. By 1937 employment reached a level roughly equal to the 1929 peak, but the economy slipped into a second, milder recession which delayed full recovery until the outbreak of World War II. However, it is clear from the margins by which Roosevelt won re-election each time what people of the time thought about him. ^[1]

[edit] Wingnuttery

The Great Depression was an ideal occasion for the brief rise of a number of personalities and movements (both wingnut and moonbat), promoting woo as a purported ticket out of the Depression, including:

• Father Coughlin - a ranting "radio priest"
• The Townsend Plan - a mathematically unsound old-age pension proposal
• John R. Brinkley - a quack doctor promoting goat testicle transplants as a cure for impotence, who twice almost got elected as an independent candidate for governor of Kansas
• Huey Long - Democratic governor of Louisiana, who brought Louisiana into the 20th century but did so with one of the most corrupt and paranoid administrations in U.S. history
• Gerald Winrod - the "Jayhawk Nazi", a right-wing preacher from Kansas
• Gerald L.K. Smith - another preacher, originally a Huey Long supporter, later turned anti-Semitic demagogue
• Social Credit - an economic ideology based on consumer power in the marketplace directing production
• E.P.I.C. (End Poverty In California) - socialist Upton Sinclair's plan for California, promoted during his 1934 run for governor
• Edward R. Dewey and Ralph N. Elliot both claiming to identify cycles the economy runs in to explain the Depression (their two cycles mutually contradictory, of course).
• And of course, the Communist Party

Sinclair Lewis' chilling novel about the rise of fascism in the U.S., It Can't Happen Here, featured Buzz Windrip (modeled after Gerald Winrod) rising to power with the support of Bishop Prang (modeled after Father Coughlin).

[edit] Footnotes

1. ↑ Bush won re-election, too - but only barely, and during wartime.