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First Successful Enterprise After the Depression

After the Great Depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt aspired to rescue the economy by giving the government more authority to intercede financially through the New Deal. World War II ultimately put the country back to work.

  1. The Great Depression

    • After the Great War, the "roaring 20s" bore witness to America turning from a rural country to a more industrialized one. This led to an overabundance of goods, which were bought and sold through installment programs, which drove up private debt. The stock market crash of 1929 led to a credit squeeze that reverberated throughout the country.

    The New Deal

    • By the time Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected in 1932, one-fourth of the American workforce was unemployed. Unlike his predecessor Herbert Hoover, FDR decided the government should give its citizens relief, recovery and reform. The government put many to work through the New Deal and by 1935, 2 million jobs had been recovered.

    World War II

    • Though The New Deal made an employer out of the United States government through several different recovery programs, jobs that manufactured weapons and materials for World War II were the most successful enterprise in the wake of the Great Depression. This would pull Americans out of economic dire straights and point them right toward the prosperity the United States enjoyed through the 1950s.

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