The stock market crash marked the beginning of a decade of high unemployment, famine, poverty, low profits, deflation, plunging farm incomes, and lost opportunities for economic growth as well as for personal advancement.

[1] The usual explanations include numerous factors, especially high consumer debt, ill-regulated markets that permitted overoptimistic loans by banks and investors, and the lack of high-growth new industries.

Three years into the depression, President Herbert Hoover, widely blamed for not doing enough to combat the crisis, lost the election of 1932 to Franklin Delano Roosevelt by a landslide.

[citation needed] In the late 20th century, Winner of the Swedish Central Bank Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences economist Milton Friedman and his fellow monetarist Anna Schwartz argued that the Federal Reserve could have stemmed the severity of the Depression, but failed to exercise its role of managing the monetary system and ameliorating banking panics, resulting in a Great Contraction of the economy from 1929 until the New Deal began in 1933.

[8] This view was endorsed by Fed Governor Ben Bernanke who in 2002 said in a speech honoring Friedman and Schwartz: Let me end my talk by abusing slightly my status as an official representative of the Federal Reserve.

Throughout the corn and cotton belts real estate increases drove the demand for more local funding to continue to supply rising agricultural economics.

Crop failures beginning in 1921 began to impact this poorly regulated system, the expansion areas of corn and cotton suffered the largest due to the Dust Bowl era resulting in real estate value reductions.

With a lack of consumer confidence in the economic direction given by the federal government panic started to spread across the country shortly after the Wall Street Crash of 1929.

One visible effect of the depression was the advent of Hoovervilles, which were ramshackle assemblages on vacant lots of cardboard boxes, tents, and small rickety wooden sheds built by homeless people.

The federal programs launched by Hoover and greatly expanded by President Roosevelt's New Deal used massive construction projects to try to jump-start the economy and solve the unemployment crisis.

The alphabet agencies CCC, FERA, WPA and PWA built and repaired the public infrastructure in dramatic fashion, but did little to foster the recovery of the private sector.

There he supported the complicated coalition built around the nominal Republican Fiorello La Guardia, and based on Jewish and Italian voters mobilized by labor unions.

[25] In the 1938 United States elections the Republicans made an unexpected comeback, and Roosevelt's efforts to purge the Democratic Party of his political opponents backfired badly.

The conservative coalition of Northern Republicans and Southern Democrats took control of Congress, outvoted the urban liberals, and halted the expansion of New Deal ideas.

[31] Women in the United States have a long history of activism regarding housing and the cost of food despite the common and longstanding misconception that homemakers are passive and apolitical.

[32] The boycotts done by housewives predominantly revolved around targeting unfair businesses in their communities that price-gauged their shops or refused to support their workers' livelihoods to an acceptable degree.

Historian Annelise Orleck recounts the following demonstrations from a variety of communities: In New York City, organized bands of Jewish housewives fiercely resisted eviction, arguing that they were merely doing their jobs by defending their homes and those of their neighbors.

Barricading themselves in apartments, they made speeches from tenement windows, wielded kettles of boiling water, and threatened to scald anyone who attempted to move furniture out on to the street.

Due to the downturned economy, jobs were scarce and Black men were a huge target of the lay-offs, making up a large population of the unemployed during the Depression.

In search of work, men would board trains and travel across the country, in hopes of finding a way of sending money to their families back home.

Large urban areas, such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, and New York City, became flooded with transients searching for work, causing major train stations to be overcrowded with illegal passengers.

[44][45] Facing plummeting demand with few alternate sources of jobs, areas dependent on primary sector industries such as grain farming, mining and logging, as well as construction, suffered the most.

The boom of the US economy in the 1920s was based on high indebtedness, and the rupture of the debt chain caused by the collapse of the bank had produced widespread and far-reaching adverse effects.

President Hoover began to expand federal spending, setting up the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to provide emergency assistance to banks and financial institutions that were on the verge of bankruptcy.

In December 1929, as means of showing government confidence in the economy, Hoover reduced all income tax rates by 1% in 1929 due to the continuing budget surplus.

He justified his call for more federal assistance by noting that "We used such emergency powers to win the war; we can use them to fight the Depression, the misery, and suffering from which are equally great."

Roosevelt understood that traditional political and financial policy was not an adequate response to the crisis, and his administration chose to pursue the more radical measures of the New Deal.

[59] President Hoover and many academics believed that high wage rates would maintain a steady level of purchasing power, keeping the economy turning.

[64] Reforms that had never been enacted in the 1920s now took center stage, such as the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) designed to electrify and modernize a very poor, mountainous region in Appalachia.

The military's own training programs concentrated on teaching technical skills involving machinery, engines, electronics and radio, preparing soldiers and sailors for the post-war economy.