Dark Realities: America’S Great Depression

The Roaring Twenties, jazz music, Hollywood glamour: the end of the First World War ushered in a golden age for America, with a booming stock market and rampant property speculation. It seemed as if the good times with Presidents Harding and then Coolidge in charge would never end. In marked contrast were the fortunes of many European countries, struggling to repay war debts and with the terms of the Treaty of Versailles plunging Germany into economic catastrophe. With Herbert Hoover now President, the US markets continued to climb and some investors sold out, sensing trouble ahead. The Crash came in October 1929, and America slid into deep depression. Against a background of bank failures, industrial decline, rural poverty and unemployment, protests, strikes and riots broke out. Hoover was swept from power in 1932 and it fell to the new President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, to revive America’s fortunes with a number of ground-breaking new programmes which made up the New Deal. This book covers this turbulent period in America’s history, introducing us to the key figures and revealing the impact which the Great Depression had on the American people.