Need help? The myth of the Great Depression, S. Donate this book to the Internet Archive library. If you own this book, you can mail it to our address below. Not in Library. Want to Read. Check nearby libraries Library. Share this book Facebook. October 18, History. An edition of The myth of the Great Depression, This edition was published in by Macmillan , St. Martin's P. Melbourne [etc. New York. His Reconstruction Finance Corporation ladled out billions more in business subsidies.
To compound the folly of high tariffs and huge subsidies, Congress then passed and Hoover signed the Revenue Act of It doubled the income tax for most Americans; the top bracket more than doubled, going from 24 percent to 63 percent. Exemptions were lowered; the earned income credit was abolished; corporate and estate taxes were raised; new gift, gasoline, and auto taxes were imposed; and postal rates were sharply hiked. Franklin Delano Roosevelt won the presidential election in a landslide, collecting electoral votes to just 59 for the incumbent Herbert Hoover.
This is what candidate Roosevelt promised, but it bears no resemblance to what President Roosevelt actually delivered. Between and , government expenditures rose by more than 83 percent.
Federal debt skyrocketed by 73 percent. Roosevelt secured passage of the Agricultural Adjustment Act AAA , which levied a new tax on agricultural processors and used the revenue to supervise the wholesale destruction of valuable crops and cattle. Federal agents oversaw the ugly spectacle of perfectly good fields of cotton, wheat, and corn being plowed under. Healthy cattle, sheep, and pigs by the millions were slaughtered and buried in mass graves.
Even if the AAA had helped farmers by curtailing supplies and raising prices, it could have done so only by hurting millions of others who had to pay those prices or make do with less to eat.
Under the NIRA, most manufacturing industries were suddenly forced into government-mandated cartels. Codes that regulated prices and terms of sale briefly transformed much of the American economy into a fascist-style arrangement, while the NRA was financed by new taxes on the very industries it controlled.
Some economists have estimated that the NRA boosted the cost of doing business by an average of 40 percent—not something a depressed economy needed for recovery. Like Hoover before him, Roosevelt signed into law steep income tax rate increases for the high brackets and introduced a 5 percent withholding tax on corporate dividends. The New Deal even paid researchers to study the history of the safety pin, hired Washington workers to patrol the streets with balloons to frighten starlings away from public buildings, and put men on the public payroll to chase tumbleweeds on windy days.
Roosevelt created the Civil Works Administration in November and ended it in March , though the unfinished projects were transferred to the Federal Emergency Relief Administration.
Roosevelt had assured Congress in his State of the Union message that any new such program would be abolished within a year. I am not willing that the vitality of our people be further stopped by the giving of cash, of market baskets, of a few bits of weekly work cutting grass, raking leaves, or picking up papers in the public parks.
But in the Works Progress Administration came along. Freed from the worst of the New Deal, the economy showed some signs of life. Unemployment dropped to 18 percent in , 14 percent in , and even lower in But by , it was back up to 20 percent as the economy slumped again.
The stock market crashed nearly 50 percent between August and March This law revolutionized American labor relations. It took labor disputes out of the courts of law and brought them under a newly created Federal agency, the National Labor Relations Board, which became prosecutor, judge, and jury, all in one. Labor union sympathizers on the Board further perverted this law, which already afforded legal immunities and privileges to labor unions.
The U. Armed with these sweeping new powers, labor unions went on a militant organizing frenzy. Threats, boycotts, strikes, seizures of plants, and widespread violence pushed productivity down sharply and unemployment up dramatically. From the White House on the heels of the Wagner Act came a thunderous barrage of insults against business.
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