1. Warm-up:
Do you think it is the President’s responsibility to help when the nation is faced with a crisis like the Great Depression? Why or why not?

2. Hoover’s Response

3. Hoover & the Depression
Throughout the 1920s, people were confident that business would bring continued prosperity.
After crash, insisted key to recovery was confidence; the nation’s business is “on a sound and prosperous basis”; insisted things would improve soon... “a chicken in every pot”
Had government spend more on new public buildings, roads, parks, & dams
Got business leaders to promise to maintain wages; did for a short time but had to start dropping wages
Got Congress to pass Hawley-Smoot Tariff backfired when European nations raised their tariffs slowing down international trade

4. Hoover & the Depression
Claimed state & local government responsible to provide relief; localism
Hoover believed in laissez-faire and small government involvement in people’s lives (Republican platform)
Set up Reconstruction Finance Corporation
gave government credit to industries, railroads and insurance companies, etc.
Believed that prosperity at the top would help the economy as a whole---"trickle-down theory"

5. *******Business********
Trickle-down Theory
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6. Bonus Army
WWI veterans promised a pension for fighting in war but would not receive it until 1945; $1,000 bonus
20,000 jobless veterans and their families, "bonus army," marched on Washington DC & camped until they receive the bonus
Most went home but a few thousand stayed and Hoover called out the Army, under General Douglas MacArthur, who used force to drive marchers out of Washington