THE DARKEST DECADE

About this book

<b>The complete narrative history of the Great Depression, 1929–1941 — Black Tuesday, the New Deal, FDR, the Dust Bowl Okies, and the human cost of America's darkest decade.</b> <p>On October 29, 1929, 16.4 million shares changed hands on the New York Stock Exchange. General Electric lost $1.7 billion in a single day. Radio Corporation of America fell from $505 per share to $26 before the year was out. American stocks shed $14 billion in one week — more than four times the entire federal budget. The ticker tape ran until midnight, still printing transactions from a world that had ceased to exist.</p> <p>This is the story of what followed. <b>Frances Millicent Shaw</b> traces the full arc of America's Great Depression history across twenty-four chapters — from the structural causes of collapse, through Hoover's principled but catastrophic response, through FDR's Hundred Days and the New Deal's experiments, to the human stories statistics cannot tell. Named throughout: <b>FDR, Eleanor Roosevelt, Frances Perkins, Dorothea Lange, and the 400,000 depositors of the Bank of the United States</b> who lost everything on December 11, 1930.</p> <h4>Inside this Great Depression history:</h4> <ul> <li><b>Black Tuesday and its causes</b> — margin calls, 30,000 undiversified banks, Smoot-Hawley, and Mellon's "liquidate everything" philosophy (Chapters 1–4)</li> <li><b>The banking crisis and FDR's response</b> — the national banking holiday, the Emergency Banking Act passed in 38 minutes, and the Fireside Chat that put deposits back in banks (Chapter 4)</li> <li><b>Social Security and the Second New Deal</b> — Frances Perkins, the first female cabinet member, who drove both landmark laws through twelve years as Labor Secretary (Chapter 11)</li> <li><b>The New Deal and race</b> — Walter White on anti-lynching, Mary McLeod Bethune's NYA division, and 100,000 Black sharecroppers evicted under AAA controls (Chapter 15)</li> <li><b>The WPA cultural explosion</b> — Orson Welles in Harlem, John Cheever and Ralph Ellison on the Writers' Project payroll, Dorothea Lange's "Migrant Mother" (Chapter 16)</li> <li><b>Women and survival</b> — women's employment rose from 10.7 to 13 million despite dismissal campaigns; flour-sack clothing, "Depression cake," and boarders kept families alive (Chapter 17)</li> <li><b>The honest reckoning</b> — court-packing, the 1937 Roosevelt Recession, and why World War II — not the New Deal — ended the Depression (Chapters 21–24)</li> </ul> <p>The New Deal left behind the FDIC, Social Security, the SEC, and the TVA. It left behind, too, an unfinished question: how much can democratic government do when markets fail? The Depression decade's answer was provisional. The debate has never ended.</p> <p><b>For readers of David Kennedy's FREEDOM FROM FEAR and Jonathan Alter's THE DEFINING MOMENT.</b></p>