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The Long-Term Cause Of The Great Depression

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Imagine having no food on the table for days because it is too expensive to eat. Imagine your aunts, uncles, mom and dad getting laid off from their jobs because the company can’t afford to pay their workers. Imagine trying to take money out of your bank account and they tell you their all out of money. All those issues occurred from the Great Depression. The buying on credit was a long term cause of the Depression. Since the 20’s was a period of great economic boom, not many people took the future into consideration. Many people bought expensive luxury items using money they did not have. Installment buying allowed people to make a monthly, weekly, or yearly payment on an item that they wanted or needed. Buying on credit and installment buying left millions of people in debt. Also, the continuous scamming in the stock market caused a loss of a lot of money. Buying on margin was a problem because people would only pay 10% and borrowing the rest from the bank. In 1928 Herbert Hoover was elected for president, when the Great Depression hit he did nothing about it. He thought it wasn’t the government’s problem and the people had to deal with it themselves. His approach was “rugged individualism” which means just waiting the depression out, he was a proponent …show more content…
For example, the National Youth Administration helped youths get an education and find jobs to support their families. (Doc 1 DBQ pt. 2) “This was a good program”. This program gave relief and reformed many jobs. Roosevelt never gave up and he sent out new programs as often as possible, in Document 4 an author drew a political cartoon, it shows all the “medicines” healing America. Also, in Document 5, it shows how the unemployment rate successfully went down when Roosevelt was president. Roosevelt being president helped a lot of people recover from poverty, bringing the unemployment rate to a 4.7% his last year as

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