Chapter 25: Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? The Great Depression, 1929-1932
Key Terms
- American individualism
- the belief, strongly held by Herbert Hoover and others, that hard work and individual effort, absent government interference, comprised the formula for success in the U.S.
- bank run
- the withdrawal by a large number of individuals or investors of money from a bank due to fears of the bank’s instability, with the ironic effect of increasing the bank’s vulnerability to failure
- Black Tuesday
- October 29, 1929, when a mass panic caused a crash in the stock market and stockholders divested over sixteen million shares, causing the overall value of the stock market to drop precipitously
- Bonus Army
- a group of World War I veterans and affiliated groups who marched to Washington in 1932 to demand their war bonuses early, only to be refused and forcibly removed by the U.S. Army
- Clark Memorandum
- Hoover’s repudiation of the Roosevelt Corollary that justified American military intervention in Latin American affairs; this memorandum improved relations with America’s neighbors by reasserting that intervention would occur only in the event of European interference in the Western Hemisphere
- Dust Bowl
- the area in the middle of the country that had been badly overfarmed in the 1920s and suffered from a terrible drought that coincided with the Great Depression; the name came from the “black blizzard” of topsoil and dust that blew through the area
- Scottsboro Boys
- a reference to the infamous trial in Scottsboro, Alabama in 1931, where nine African American boys were falsely accused of raping two White women and sentenced to death; the extreme injustice of the trial, particularly given the age of the boys and the inadequacy of the testimony against them, garnered national and international attention
- Smoot-Hawley Tariff
- the tariff approved by Hoover to raise the tax on thousands of imported goods in the hope that it would encourage people to buy American-made products; the unintended result was that other nations raised their tariffs, further hurting American exports and exacerbating the global financial crisis
- speculation
- the practice of investing in risky financial opportunities in the hopes of a fast payout due to market fluctuations