Great Depression in the context of "Franklin D. Roosevelt"

⭐ In the context of Franklin D. Roosevelt's career, what primary focus did his role as Governor of New York from 1929 to 1932 primarily involve?

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⭐ Core Definition: Great Depression

The Great Depression was a severe global economic downturn from 1929 to 1939. The period was characterized by high rates of unemployment and poverty, drastic reductions in industrial production and international trade, and widespread bank and business failures around the world. The economic contagion began in 1929 in the United States, the largest economy in the world, with the devastating Wall Street crash of 1929 often considered the beginning of the Depression. Among the countries with the most unemployed were the U.S., the United Kingdom, and Germany.

The Depression was preceded by a period of industrial growth and social development known as the "Roaring Twenties". Much of the profit generated by the boom was invested in speculation, such as on the stock market, contributing to growing wealth inequality. Banks were subject to minimal regulation, resulting in loose lending and widespread debt. By 1929, declining spending had led to reductions in manufacturing output and rising unemployment. Share values continued to rise until the October 1929 crash, after which the slide continued until July 1932, accompanied by a loss of confidence in the financial system. By 1933, the U.S. unemployment rate had risen to 25%, about one-third of farmers had lost their land, and 9,000 of its 25,000 banks had gone out of business. President Herbert Hoover was unwilling to intervene heavily in the economy, and in 1930 he signed the Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act, which worsened the Depression. In the 1932 presidential election, Hoover was defeated by Franklin D. Roosevelt, who from 1933 pursued a set of expansive New Deal programs in order to provide relief and create jobs. In Germany, which depended heavily on U.S. loans, the crisis caused unemployment to rise to nearly 30% and fueled political extremism, paving the way for Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party to rise to power in 1933.

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👉 Great Depression in the context of Franklin D. Roosevelt

Franklin Delano Roosevelt (January 30, 1882 – April 12, 1945), also known as FDR, was the 32nd president of the United States, serving from 1933 until his death in 1945. He is the longest-serving U.S. president, as well as the only one to have served more than two terms. His first two terms were centered on combating the Great Depression, while his third and fourth saw him shift his focus to U.S. involvement in World War II. A member of the Democratic Party, Roosevelt previously served in the New York State Senate from 1911 to 1913, the assistant secretary of the Navy under President Woodrow Wilson from 1913 to 1920, and as the 44th governor of New York from 1929 to 1932.

Born into the prominent Delano and Roosevelt families in Hyde Park, New York, Roosevelt graduated from Harvard University with a Bachelor of Arts. He entered Columbia Law School in 1904, but dropped out in 1907 after passing the New York bar examination. Roosevelt was elected to the New York State Senate from 1911 to 1913 before serving as the assistant secretary of the Navy under President Wilson during World War I. Roosevelt was James M. Cox's running mate on the Democratic ticket in the 1920 presidential election, which Cox lost to Republican nominee Warren G. Harding. In 1921, Roosevelt contracted a paralytic illness that permanently paralyzed his legs. However, he returned to the public office upon being elected governor of New York in 1928, partly through the encouragement of his wife Eleanor, and during his tenure as governor of New York, he promoted programs to combat the Great Depression. After receiving the Democratic nomination, Roosevelt defeated President Herbert Hoover in a landside victory in the 1932 presidential election.

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Great Depression in the context of Republican Party (United States)

The Republican Party, also known as the Grand Old Party (GOP), is a conservative and right-wing political party in the United States. It emerged as the main rival of the Democratic Party in the 1850s, and the two parties have dominated American politics since then.

The Republican Party was founded in 1854 by anti-slavery activists opposing the Kansas–Nebraska Act and the expansion of slavery into U.S. territories. It rapidly gained support in the North, drawing in former Whigs and Free Soilers. Abraham Lincoln's election in 1860 led to the secession of Southern states and the outbreak of the American Civil War. Under Lincoln and a Republican-controlled Congress, the party led efforts to preserve the Union, defeat the Confederacy, and abolish slavery. During the Reconstruction era, Republicans sought to extend civil rights protections to freedmen, but by the late 1870s the party shifted its focus toward business interests and industrial expansion. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it dominated national politics, promoting protective tariffs, infrastructure development, and laissez-faire economic policies, while navigating internal divisions between progressive and conservative factions. The party's support declined during the Great Depression, as the New Deal coalition reshaped American politics. Republicans returned to national power with the 1952 election of Dwight D. Eisenhower, whose moderate conservatism reflected a pragmatic acceptance of many New Deal-era programs.

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Great Depression in the context of Nazi Germany

Nazi Germany, officially the German Reich and later the Greater German Reich, was the German state between 1933 and 1945, when Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party controlled the country, transforming it into a totalitarian dictatorship. The Third Reich, meaning "Third Realm" or "Third Empire", referred to the Nazi claim that Nazi Germany was the successor to the earlier Holy Roman Empire (800–1806) and German Empire (1871–1918). The Third Reich, which the Nazis referred to as the Thousand-Year Reich, ended in May 1945, after 12 years, when the Allies defeated Germany and entered the capital, Berlin, ending World War II in Europe.

After Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany in 1933, the Nazi Party began to eliminate political opposition and consolidate power. A 1934 German referendum confirmed Hitler as sole FĂźhrer (leader). Power was centralised in Hitler's person, and his word became the highest law. The government was not a co-ordinated, cooperating body, but rather a collection of factions struggling to amass power. To address the Great Depression, the Nazis used heavy military spending, extensive public works projects, including the Autobahnen (motorways) and a massive secret rearmament program, forming the Wehrmacht (armed forces), all financed by deficit spending. The return to economic stability and end of mass unemployment boosted the regime's popularity. Hitler made increasingly aggressive territorial demands, seizing Austria in the Anschluss of 1938, and the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia. Germany signed a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union and invaded Poland in 1939, launching World War II in Europe. In alliance with Fascist Italy and other Axis powers, Germany conquered most of Europe by 1940 and threatened Britain.

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Great Depression in the context of Empire of Japan

The Empire of Japan, also known as the Japanese Empire or Imperial Japan, was the Japanese nation state that existed from the Meiji Restoration on January 3, 1868, until the Constitution of Japan took effect on May 3, 1947. From August 1910 to September 1945, it included the Japanese archipelago, the Kurils, Karafuto, Korea, and Taiwan. The South Seas Mandate and concessions such as the Kwantung Leased Territory were de jure not internal parts of the empire but dependent territories. In the closing stages of World War II, with Japan defeated alongside the rest of the Axis powers, the formalized surrender was issued on September 2, 1945, in compliance with the Potsdam Declaration of the Allies, and the empire's territory subsequently shrunk to cover only the Japanese archipelago resembling modern Japan.

Under the slogans of "Enrich the Country, Strengthen the Armed Forces" and "Promote Industry" which followed the Boshin War and the restoration of power to the emperor from the shogun, Japan underwent a period of large-scale industrialization and militarization, often regarded as the fastest modernization of any country to date. All of these aspects contributed to Japan's emergence as a great power following the First Sino-Japanese War, the Boxer Rebellion, the Russo-Japanese War, and World War I. Economic and political turmoil in the 1920s, including the Great Depression, led to the rise of militarism, nationalism, statism and authoritarianism, during which Japan joined the Axis alliance with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, conquering a large part of the Asia–Pacific; during this period, the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) and the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) committed numerous atrocities and war crimes, including the Nanjing Massacre. There has been a debate over defining the political system of Japan as a dictatorship, which has been disputed due by the absence of a dictator, and over calling it fascist. The other suggested terms were para-fascism, militarism, corporatism, totalitarianism, and police state.

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Great Depression in the context of Fiscal policy

In economics and political science, fiscal policy is the use of government revenue collection (taxes or tax cuts) and expenditure to influence a country's economy. The use of government revenue expenditures to influence macroeconomic variables developed in reaction to the Great Depression of the 1930s, when the previous laissez-faire approach to economic management became unworkable. Fiscal policy is based on the theories of the British economist John Maynard Keynes, whose Keynesian economics theorised that government changes in the levels of taxation and government spending influence aggregate demand and the level of economic activity. Fiscal and monetary policy are the key strategies used by a country's government and central bank to advance its economic objectives. The combination of these policies enables these authorities to target inflation and to increase employment. In modern economies, inflation is conventionally considered "healthy" in the range of 2%–3%. Additionally, it is designed to try to keep GDP growth at 2%–3% and the unemployment rate near the natural unemployment rate of 4%–5%. This implies that fiscal policy is used to stabilise the economy over the course of the business cycle.

Changes in the level and composition of taxation and government spending can affect macroeconomic variables, including:

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Great Depression in the context of 1932 Summer Olympics

The 1932 Summer Olympics (officially the Games of the X Olympiad and also known as Los Angeles 1932) were an international multi-sport event held from July 30 to August 14, 1932, in Los Angeles, California, United States. The Games were held during the worldwide Great Depression, with some nations not traveling to Los Angeles as a result; 37 countries competed, compared to the 46 at the 1928 Games in Amsterdam, and even then-U.S. President Herbert Hoover did not attend the Games. The organizing committee did not report the financial details of the Games, although contemporary newspapers stated that the Games had made a profit of US$1 million (equivalent to US$18.67 million in 2024).

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Great Depression in the context of Herbert Hoover

Herbert Clark Hoover (August 10, 1874 – October 20, 1964) was the 31st president of the United States, serving from 1929 to 1933. A wealthy mining engineer before his presidency, Hoover led the wartime Commission for Relief in Belgium and was the director of the U.S. Food Administration, followed by post-war relief of Europe. As a member of the Republican Party, he served as the third United States secretary of commerce from 1921 to 1928 before being elected president in 1928. His presidency was dominated by the Great Depression, and his policies and methods to combat it were seen as lackluster. Amid his unpopularity, he decisively lost reelection to Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932.

Born to a Quaker family in West Branch, Iowa, Hoover grew up in Oregon. He was one of the first graduates of the new Stanford University in 1895. Hoover took a position with a London-based mining company working in Australia and China. He rapidly became a wealthy mining engineer. In 1914, the outbreak of World War I, he organized and headed the Commission for Relief in Belgium, an international relief organization that provided food to occupied Belgium. When the U.S. entered the war in 1917, President Woodrow Wilson appointed Hoover to lead the Food Administration. He became famous as his country's "food dictator". After the war, Hoover led the American Relief Administration, which provided food to the starving millions in Central and Eastern Europe, especially Russia. His wartime service made him a favorite of many progressives, and he unsuccessfully sought the Republican nomination in the 1920 United States presidential election.

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Great Depression in the context of Harlem

Harlem is a neighborhood in Upper Manhattan, New York City. It is bounded roughly by the Hudson River on the west; the Harlem River and 155th Street on the north; Fifth Avenue on the east; and 110th Street on the south. The greater Harlem area encompasses several other neighborhoods and extends west and north to 155th Street, east to the East River, and south to Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, Central Park, and East 96th Street.

Originally a Dutch village, formally organized in 1658, it is named after the city of Haarlem in the Netherlands. Harlem's history has been defined by a series of economic boom-and-bust cycles, with significant population shifts accompanying each cycle. Harlem was predominantly occupied by Jewish and Italian Americans in the late 19th century, while African-American residents began to arrive in large numbers during the Great Migration in the early 20th century. In the 1920s and 1930s, Central and West Harlem were the center of the Harlem Renaissance, a major African-American cultural movement. With job losses during the Great Depression of the 1930s and the deindustrialization of New York City after World War II, rates of crime and poverty increased significantly. In the 21st century, crime rates decreased significantly, and Harlem started to gentrify.

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Great Depression in the context of Harlem Renaissance

The Harlem Renaissance was an intellectual and cultural movement of African-American music, dance, art, fashion, literature, theater, politics, and scholarship centered in Harlem, Manhattan, New York City, spanning the 1920s and 1930s. At the time, it was known as the "New Negro Movement", named after The New Negro, a 1925 anthology edited by Alain Locke. The movement also included the new African-American cultural expressions across the urban areas in the Northeastern United States and the Midwestern United States affected by a renewed militancy in the general struggle for civil rights, combined with the Great Migration of African-American workers fleeing the racist conditions of the Jim Crow Deep South, as Harlem was the final destination of the largest number of those who migrated north.

Though geographically tied to Harlem, few of the associated visual artists lived in the area itself, while those who did (such as Aaron Douglas) had migrated elsewhere by the end of World War II. Many francophone black writers from African and Caribbean colonies who lived in Paris, France, were also influenced by the movement. Harlem had also seen significant Black immigration from British, French and other colonies in the Caribbean. The zenith of this "flowering of Negro literature", as James Weldon Johnson described the Harlem Renaissance, took place between approximately 1924—when Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life hosted a party for black writers where many white publishers were in attendance—and 1929, the year of the stock-market crash and the beginning of the Great Depression. The Harlem Renaissance is considered to have been a creative crucible for African-American art-making and its institutionalisation within white-dominated museums and cultural institutions.

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