95 Fun Facts About Great Depression

What name is given to the burst of New Deal legislation passed in spring 1933?

The Hundred Days first meant Congress's special session of March to June 1933, not the president's opening weeks: Roosevelt popularised the phrase himself in a radio address that July.

By what name is 29 October 1929, the most infamous day of the crash, remembered?

Black Tuesday saw some 16 million shares change hands, more than the machinery could handle, so stock tickers were still printing the day's prices hours after the market had closed.

At the depth of the Depression in 1933, roughly what share of the US workforce was unemployed?

Even in 1940, with war orders arriving, the rate was still around 15 percent.

The Dow Jones lost roughly how much of its value between its 1929 peak and its 1932 low?

90% is the round figure for an 89% fall: the crash itself took almost half the Dow's value by mid-November 1929, and a slow slide over the next three years took most of the rest.

The Dow did not regain its September 1929 peak until which president was in the White House?

Eisenhower was nearly two years into his presidency when the Dow finally closed above its 1929 high, on 23 November 1954, a wait of just over 25 years.

Which economist declared days before the crash that stocks had reached 'a permanently high plateau'?

Irving Fisher, a Yale professor, said it in a New York speech reported on 16 October 1929; the crash that began the following week cost him much of his fortune and his reputation.

On Black Thursday, Richard Whitney tried to calm the market by loudly bidding for which company's shares?

U.S. Steel was the stock Whitney, the exchange's vice-president, chose for his show of confidence, bidding $205 a share, well above the market, with the big banks' money; in 1938 he went to Sing Sing for embezzlement.

Roughly how many American banks had gone under by 1933?

About 9,000 banks, more than a third of the country's 25,000, had closed; with no deposit insurance yet, some $7 billion of their customers' money was frozen inside them.

Which future general, then a cavalry major, led the horsemen who charged the Bonus Army in 1932?

George Patton led the 3rd Cavalry against the veterans; one of the marchers, Joe Angelo, had once saved the wounded Patton's life in battle, and Patton brushed him off when he called the next day.

What became of both sponsors of the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff in 1932?

Both lost their seats: Willis Hawley was denied renomination by his own party, and Reed Smoot, after five terms in the Senate, went down in that November's Democratic sweep.

Roughly how many American economists signed the 1930 petition urging Hoover to veto the Smoot-Hawley tariff?

1,000 in round numbers: the petition carried 1,028 names when it reached Hoover in May 1930, and he signed the tariff the following month all the same.

Which country struck at Smoot-Hawley before it was even signed, raising its own tariffs in May 1930?

Canada did not wait for Hoover's signature: its new duties hit American goods a month before he signed, and in 1932 it turned to closer trade ties within the British Empire.

Which country stopped exchanging its currency for gold in September 1931?

Countries that left gold early, like Britain, recovered sooner; the US did not follow until 1933.

American loans had propped up which European economy until 1929, when their loss sent its unemployment toward 30%?

Germany had rebuilt in the 1920s on American credit; when the loans stopped, unemployment neared 30% in 1932 and voters deserted the centre for the extremes.

What were the shanty towns of the homeless that sprang up across America nicknamed?

Hoovervilles got their name from Charles Michelson, the Democratic Party's publicity chief, who wanted the shanty towns pinned on President Hoover; the word was in print by 1930.

In Depression-era slang, what was a 'Hoover flag'?

An empty pocket turned inside out was a Hoover flag, a bitter joke at the expense of a president who had made his name organising food relief for occupied Belgium.

In Canada, a horse-drawn car stripped of its engine was named after which prime minister?

R. B. Bennett was prime minister from 1930 to 1935, when Prairie farmers who could no longer afford gasoline hitched horses to their cars and named the result after him.

The 'Bonus Army' that camped in Washington in 1932 was made up of veterans of which war?

They were World War I veterans seeking early payment of bonus certificates not due until 1945; Congress finally paid the bonus four years after the march, over a presidential veto.

Which general led the troops that cleared the Bonus Army's camp from Washington in July 1932?

Douglas MacArthur took charge in person and, though Hoover twice sent word not to cross the river to the veterans' main camp, sent his men over that night.

The Bonus Army's main shantytown stood on which marshy patch of Washington, D.C.?

Anacostia Flats, across the river from the Navy Yard, held the veterans' largest camp; it went up in flames on the night of the eviction, and who lit the fire has never been settled.

Hoover won just 59 electoral votes in 1932, four years after trouncing which Democrat with 444?

Smith, New York's governor Al Smith, lost 444 to 87 in 1928; four years later Hoover carried only six states and lost even California, his home state.

Which song became Roosevelt's 1932 campaign anthem?

Happy Days Are Here Again was written for the film Chasing Rainbows, shot in the summer of 1929; by the time the film came out, after the crash, the song was already a hit, and Roosevelt's campaign took it up in 1932.

Where did Roosevelt first use the phrase 'New Deal'?

Accepting the 1932 Democratic nomination, he pledged 'a new deal for the American people'; he had broken with tradition by flying to the convention to accept in person.

Two days after taking office in March 1933, Roosevelt closed the financial system for four days by declaring what?

A national bank holiday was proclaimed at 1 a.m. on 6 March 1933; when banks began reopening a week later, depositors queued to put back the cash they had been hoarding.

What were President Roosevelt's evening radio talks nicknamed?

Fireside chats was a CBS man's phrase, coined in a press release in May 1933; there was no fireside, since Roosevelt spoke from behind a desk crowded with microphones in the White House.

When a second Bonus Army reached Washington in 1933, whom did the new president send to meet the veterans?

Eleanor Roosevelt went out to the camp, lunched with the veterans and listened to their songs; most of them then took the administration's offer of jobs in the Civilian Conservation Corps.

Civilian Conservation Corps recruits earned $30 a month on what condition?

Most went to family: $25 of the $30 was sent to a recruit's dependants, so each of the nearly three million young men who served was supporting a household while he worked.

'Roosevelt's Tree Army', the CCC, planted roughly how many trees between 1933 and 1942?

3 billion is the usual count, and one estimate says 3.5 billion; Roosevelt had created the corps for forestry work and to check soil erosion, which is why its men were set to planting on such a scale.

Who headed the Works Progress Administration, created in 1935?

Harry Hopkins, a former social worker, had run Roosevelt's relief programme in New York when he was governor; at the WPA he insisted that the jobless be given work, not a dole.

Which New York airport, opened in 1939, was built with WPA money and labour?

LaGuardia grew out of Mayor Fiorello La Guardia's fury at landing in Newark on a ticket that said New York; the WPA, which put some 8.5 million people to work in all, helped build it.

The Tennessee Valley Authority, created in 1933, is best known for bringing what to the rural South?

Electricity from TVA dams competed with the region's private power company, whose chief, Wendell Willkie, fought the agency for six years, sold out to it in 1939 and ran against Roosevelt in 1940.

The FDIC began insuring bank deposits in 1934 up to what amount per depositor?

$2,500 was the first limit and was soon doubled; a string of later increases took it to $250,000 in 2008, a hundred times the original.

The 1933 Glass-Steagall provisions barred firms that took deposits from which other line of business?

Investment banking had to be split off: J.P. Morgan & Co. kept its deposits, and the partners who left to underwrite securities founded Morgan Stanley in 1935.

Which New Deal agency's Blue Eagle codes were struck down unanimously by the Supreme Court in 1935?

The Schechter 'sick chicken' case, decided 9-0 that May, killed the National Recovery Administration and its Blue Eagle codes, and set up the president's clash with the Court.

Social Security in 1935 excluded which workers?

Farm and domestic workers were left out when Roosevelt signed the act in August 1935, and since those were jobs many Black Americans held, about 65 percent of Black workers got no cover.

Frances Perkins, who steered the drafting of Social Security, was the first woman to do what?

Perkins was the first woman to serve in a US presidential cabinet; she had watched the Triangle Shirtwaist fire of 1911 and became executive secretary of the citizens' safety committee that pressed New York for new factory laws.

Roosevelt's 1937 proposal to add up to six new justices was mocked with what nickname?

The 'court-packing plan' would have added a justice for every sitting member over 70 who refused to retire, up to six; even his own party balked and the Senate buried it in July 1937.

Which justice's 1937 vote to uphold a minimum-wage law was dubbed 'the switch in time that saved nine'?

Owen Roberts looked as if he had bent to Roosevelt's threat to enlarge the Court, but he had cast his vote in conference on 19 December 1936, weeks before the plan was announced.

The great dust storm of 14 April 1935 that blackened the Plains is remembered by what name?

Black Sunday turned the afternoon dark across the southern Plains; thirteen days later Congress declared soil erosion a national menace and created the Soil Conservation Service.

Who coined the term 'Dust Bowl'?

An AP journalist wrote it in a report filed the day after the storm of 14 April 1935, meaning the stricken region; accounts credit either reporter Robert Geiger or his editor, and the name soon covered the whole disaster.

In 1936, which California city sent its own police to the state line to turn back Dust Bowl migrants?

Los Angeles police chief James Davis posted officers at the Arizona border to turn away 'undesirables', and the ACLU sued the city; about 200,000 Dust Bowl migrants reached California all the same.

The Dust Bowl was centred on the panhandles of Oklahoma and which other state?

The Texas and Oklahoma panhandles had been ploughed up for wheat in the boom years; with the native grass gone, nothing held the soil when the drought came, and it blew away.

Which folk singer's Dust Bowl Ballads earned him the nickname 'the Dust Bowl Troubadour'?

Woody Guthrie lived through the great dust storm of April 1935, which inspired his farewell song 'So Long, It's Been Good to Know Yuh'; he then joined the migrants heading west.

In The Grapes of Wrath, the Joad family leaves Oklahoma for California along which highway?

Route 66 is 'the mother road' in Steinbeck's novel, and the nickname outlasted the highway itself, which was struck from the US highway system in 1985.

The title The Grapes of Wrath comes from which patriotic song?

The Battle Hymn of the Republic gave the novel its name at the suggestion of Steinbeck's wife Carol; he had struggled for a title and judged hers better than anything he had come up with.

Who played Tom Joad in John Ford's 1940 film of The Grapes of Wrath?

Henry Fonda got the part only by signing the seven-year contract that studio chief Darryl Zanuck demanded; the role brought an Oscar nomination, and he lost to his friend James Stewart.

Who took the 1936 photograph known as 'Migrant Mother'?

Dorothea Lange, by her own account, did not ask the woman's name or history; she stayed anonymous until 1978, when a reporter identified her as Florence Owens Thompson.

Which crooner joined Rudy Vallee in making a 1932 hit of Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?

Bing Crosby recorded it three weeks after the revue Americana opened on Broadway; business leaders tried to have the song kept off the radio as an attack on the economic system.

Senator Huey Long promised every family a $5,000 grant under what programme?

Share Our Wealth, launched by the Kingfish in a February 1934 radio address, claimed more than seven million club members before Long was shot dead in his state capitol the following year.

Huey Long's nickname 'The Kingfish' was borrowed from a character on which radio show?

Amos 'n' Andy featured George 'Kingfish' Stevens, a lodge leader forever luring the heroes into get-rich-quick schemes; Long was going by the con man's name by the time he ran for the Senate in 1930.

Which skyscraper, opened in May 1931, did not turn a profit until the early 1950s?

The Empire State Building, nicknamed the 'Empty State Building' for its vacant floors, stayed the world's tallest building until the World Trade Center's north tower overtook it in 1970.

Which board game did Parker Brothers begin selling after buying it from Charles Darrow?

Monopoly made Charles Darrow a millionaire, but he had learned it from friends: it descends from Lizzie Magie's Landlord's Game, invented thirty years earlier to show the harm monopolies do.

From 1933 until 1947, Roosevelt's Interior Department refused to say 'Hoover Dam' and called it what instead?

Boulder Dam was the name Interior Secretary Harold Ickes ordered in May 1933, weeks after Hoover left office; the dam's operators say the legal name never changed, and Congress reaffirmed 'Hoover Dam' in 1947.

Bonnie and Clyde were ambushed and killed in May 1934 in which state?

Louisiana was where gang member Henry Methvin's family lived, which is how lawman Frank Hamer traced the pair; his posse hid in the bushes beside a country road and opened fire as their car came up.

The 1936 Jarrow March saw about 200 unemployed men walk from north-east England to where?

They walked nearly 300 miles to London after Palmer's shipyard closed; their petition was received by Parliament and never debated.

Which Labour MP for Jarrow marched with her constituents and declared the town had been 'murdered'?

Ellen Wilkinson joined the march although her own Labour Party's leaders and the TUC kept their distance, wary of any link with communist-led hunger marches; her 1939 book was The Town That Was Murdered.

What helped set off the 1937 downturn that pushed US unemployment from 14.3% back up to 19%?

Cuts in federal spending and tax rises, notably the new Social Security payroll tax, came just as the Federal Reserve tightened credit; Roosevelt reversed course with a new spending programme in spring 1938.

Before politics, Herbert Hoover made his fortune in which profession?

Mining engineering made Hoover a multimillionaire: orphaned at nine, he took a geology degree at Stanford and ran mines in Australia and China before turning to wartime food relief.

What event is generally said to have finally ended the Great Depression?

The outbreak of World War II brought rearmament orders and then full mobilisation: manufacturing employment leapt from 11 million in 1940 to 18 million in 1943.

Roosevelt's Executive Order 6102 of April 1933 banned Americans from hoarding what?

The order required gold coin and bullion to be surrendered at $20.67 an ounce; issued under the 1917 Trading with the Enemy Act, it threatened violators with up to ten years in prison or a $10,000 fine.

The 1933 Agricultural Adjustment Act paid farmers to do what?

Plant less and sell off young pigs: over six million piglets were slaughtered in 1933 to lift prices, and the outcry over the waste led to an agency that sent surplus food to families on relief.

Farm subsidies under the first AAA were funded by a tax struck down in 1936; who paid it?

Food processors paid the tax that funded the payments to farmers; the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the scheme invaded powers reserved to the states, and Congress rewrote the farm law in 1938.

Which 1935 craze, launched in Denver, swamped post offices with dime-filled envelopes?

Chain letters told each recipient to post a dime to the name at the top of a list, add their own at the bottom and mail five copies; the flood swamped Denver's post office and spread to other cities.

Which 20-year-old directed the Federal Theatre Project's all-Black 'Voodoo' Macbeth in Harlem in 1936?

Orson Welles moved the play from Scotland to a Caribbean island and sold out ten weeks in Harlem; three years later Congress cut off the project's money, amid charges that it was full of communists.

The Federal Writers' Project produced the American Guide Series, a set of guidebooks to what?

Each of the 48 states got a guide; the project also recorded more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery from people who had lived through it.

Ferdinand Pecora, whose 1933 hearings exposed Wall Street abuses, held what role?

As Senate committee chief counsel, Pecora made the head of the House of Morgan admit he had paid no income tax in 1931 or 1932, and drew confessions from National City's chairman that wrecked his reputation.

Which Hoover-era agency, set up early in 1932, lent to struggling banks and railroads?

The Reconstruction Finance Corporation was chartered in January 1932 with $500 million of capital; its first president, former Vice President Charles Dawes, resigned within months to rescue his own failing bank.

Creditanstalt, whose May 1931 collapse spread the crisis across Europe, was based where?

Austria's government had pressed Creditanstalt, the country's dominant bank, to absorb a failing rival in 1929; the bad loans it took on helped sink it in May 1931, and the panic crossed the border within weeks.

Which 'radio priest' cheered Roosevelt's election, then turned on the New Deal?

Charles Coughlin broadcast from his church in Royal Oak, Michigan, to some 30 million listeners; he went on to preach open antisemitism, until his archbishop ordered him to give up politics in 1942.

Townsend's plan promised over-60s $200 monthly on what condition?

Spend it in 30 days was the point of Dr Townsend's 1933 scheme: the money would flow straight back into the shops and revive the economy, and more than a thousand Townsend Clubs were soon pressing Congress to act.

Upton Sinclair's 1934 EPIC campaign for governor pledged to 'End' what 'in California'?

Poverty was the P in End Poverty in California; Hollywood studios docked their employees a day's pay to fund the campaign against Sinclair, who lost.

In his 1936 landslide, Roosevelt lost only two states: Vermont and which other?

Maine was the bellwether of the saying 'As Maine goes, so goes the nation', which Roosevelt's campaign manager Jim Farley rewrote after 1936 as 'As Maine goes, so goes Vermont'.

Which magazine mailed out ten million ballots in 1936 and wrongly forecast a Landon win?

The Literary Digest had picked the winner of the previous five elections; its ballots went to its own readers, car owners and telephone subscribers, who were richer than most voters, and it was gone within two years.

Which 1938 law set a federal minimum wage of 25 cents an hour?

The Fair Labor Standards Act also banned oppressive child labour; Mary Norton of New Jersey, who chaired the House Labor Committee, had to use a little-used discharge petition to force the bill out of the Rules Committee.

How did Ida May Fuller draw over 900 times her Social Security taxes?

Living to 100 did it: Fuller had paid $24.75 in tax and drew $22,888.92 over 35 years, having stopped at the Rutland office in 1939 only to ask, she said later, without expecting anything.

'Hunger Chancellor' Brüning pushed through his austerity in 1930–32 using the emergency decrees of which German president?

Paul von Hindenburg issued the decrees because the Reichstag would not pass Brüning's cuts, then withdrew his backing in May 1932, which brought the chancellor down.

Which Swedish 'Match King' was found dead in his Paris flat in March 1932?

Ivar Kreuger, who controlled up to three-quarters of the world's match production, was found shot in his Paris flat on 12 March 1932; police ruled it suicide, and his companies' books proved to be falsified.

Which big-city mayor was fatally wounded in the February 1933 Miami attempt on President-elect Roosevelt?

Anton Cermak, who had come to greet the president-elect, died of his wound 19 days later; gunman Giuseppe Zangara went to the electric chair two weeks after that, on 20 March 1933.

Adopted in 1933, the 20th Amendment moved presidential inaugurations from 4 March to when?

20 January replaced 4 March to shorten the four-month 'lame duck' gap between election and inauguration; ratified in January 1933, it came too late for Roosevelt, the last president sworn in on the old date.

Months before Prohibition's repeal, the Cullen–Harrison Act of March 1933 made which drink legal again?

Beer of up to 3.2% alcohol went back on sale on 7 April 1933; signing the act, Roosevelt is said to have remarked that it would be a good time for one.

As New York's governor, Roosevelt recruited his 'Brain Trust' of professors Moley, Tugwell and Berle from which university?

Columbia supplied all three after Roosevelt's counsel Samuel Rosenman suggested in March 1932 that he gather a team of academics to advise his campaign.

Why was 'Migrant Mother' Florence Owens Thompson stranded at a pea-pickers' camp in 1936?

A broken timing chain on the car stranded the family, so they pulled into the Nipomo camp while it was repaired; Thompson later said she never got a penny from the picture and wished it had never been taken.

Which Australian racehorse, a Depression-era hero, won the 1930 Melbourne Cup days after being shot at?

Phar Lap was fired at from a car on 1 November 1930 and won the Cup three days later; he took the 1932 Agua Caliente Handicap in Mexico, then died suddenly weeks later amid rumours of poisoning.

The September 1931 Invergordon Mutiny saw Royal Navy sailors refuse orders over what?

Pay cuts of 25% for the longest-serving junior ratings were the grievance, and the men of the Atlantic Fleet learned of them from newspapers when their ships reached Invergordon.

Workers saved by the safety net under which 1930s bridge formed the 'Halfway to Hell Club'?

Golden Gate Bridge builder Joseph Strauss strung a movable safety net beneath the work; nineteen men fell into it and lived, and the bridge opened in May 1937.

Milo Reno's Farmers' Holiday Association of 1932 urged Midwestern farmers to do what?

Members were to withhold produce from market until prices rose; pickets blocked the highways into Sioux City and dumped farm goods by the roadside under the slogan 'Stay at Home—Buy Nothing—Sell Nothing'.

How did Canada's 1935 On-to-Ottawa Trek strikers travel east?

On freight trains: more than a thousand relief-camp strikers rode the boxcar roofs as far as Regina, where a riot on 1 July 1935 left a policeman dead and the trek broken.

The 1936–37 sit-down strike that forced GM to recognise the UAW happened in which city?

In Flint, strikers repelled a police assault on the Fisher Body 2 plant with hinges and bolts, a skirmish they mocked as the 'Battle of the Running Bulls'; GM signed on 11 February 1937.

Seabiscuit, the Depression's favourite underdog, beat which Triple Crown winner in their 1938 Pimlico match race?

War Admiral was the favourite and expected to lead from the start, so Seabiscuit's trainer drilled his horse with a starting bell to break fast; he led early and won by four lengths.

The 'Century of Progress' world's fair of 1933–34 was staged in which American city?

Chicago switched on the fair's lights with starlight: rays from Arcturus were detected and used to trip the switch, the star chosen because its light had set out at about the time of the city's 1893 fair.

Prohibition ended on 5 December 1933 when which state became the 36th to ratify repeal?

Utah voted at 5:32 p.m. Eastern time, after Pennsylvania and Ohio had ratified earlier in the day, and its convention was unanimous; within minutes the amendment was certified and Prohibition was over.

Which economist's 1936 General Theory argued that governments should spend their way out of a slump?

Keynes had become famous in 1919 by quitting his Treasury post at the Paris peace talks and attacking the treaty in print; years of mass unemployment between the wars drove him to write the General Theory.

Alfred Butts devised Scrabble in the early 1930s after losing his job in which profession?

Butts, an out-of-work New York architect, first called the game Lexiko, then Criss-Crosswords; every maker he approached turned it down before James Brunot bought the rights in 1948.

Alf Landon, Roosevelt's Republican challenger in 1936, was governor of which state?

Kansas re-elected Landon as governor in the Democratic sweep of 1934, yet two years later, as the Republican presidential candidate, he lost even his home state to Roosevelt.

Congress met on 9 March 1933 to take up Roosevelt's Emergency Banking Act; how long before it was law?

The same day: the bill was introduced, passed by both houses and signed that evening, before many members had even had a chance to read it.