The Gilded Age to the Great Depression

1
The Gilded Age to the Great Depression

• What happened to the American economy?

2
What does it mean to be gilded?
3
Gilded Age Economy

• Big Business.
• Vertical and horizontal integration.
• Monopoly.
• Laissez-faire.
• Robber barons
• Unions, strikes, and scabs.

4
Govt Involvement in the Economy during the
Gilded Age

• Roosevelt
• The Trust Buster?
• Sherman Anti-Trust Act (1890).
• Man of the people or federal regulator?
• 1904 Northern Securities Company.
• 1906 Meat Inspection Act, Pure Food and Drug
  Act.
• Taft
• Payne-Aldrich Tariff make good cheaper.
• Wilson
• Clayton Anti-Trust Act strengthen Sherman
  Anti-Trust Act.
• 1914 Federal Trade Commission.
• 1913 Federal Income Tax why?
• Federal Reserve System.

5
The Economy during the Roaring Twenties

• Harding
• Fordney-McCumber Tariff 60 tax on imports.
• Reflective of what international relations
  policy?
• Dawes Act U.S. pays Germanys reparations.
• Teapot Dome Scandal.
• Increasing American Consumption
• Car, planes, household goods.
• Advertising.

6
Fake Prosperity

• Gap between rich and poor as business expands.
• Increased quantities of goods.
• Iron, railroads, and farms suffer losses.
• CREDIT!
• Buy goods over an extended period.

7
The Beginning of the End

• Key industries decline
• Textiles, steel, railroads.
• Diminished demand after the war.
• Workers face job loss, cant consume goods.
• American consumers in credit debt.
• Uneven distribution of income
• Wealthiest Americans income grows by 75, average
  growth 9.
• 1929 5 of Americas richest families took a
  third of the nations income.

8
The Beginning of the End

• Stock Market
• 1929 4 million American owned stocks.
• Speculation Buy risky stocks.
• Buying on the margin Pay a of the stocks price
  and borrow the rest.
• Black Tuesday
• October 24 Market drops, investors panic.
• October 29, 1929 the bottom falls out of the
  market.
• 16 millions shares dumped.

9
The Beginning of the End

• Causes of the Great Depression
• Old and decaying industrial base.
• Agricultural crisis.
• Availability of easy credit.
• Unequal distribution of income.

10
Hoover and the Great Depression

• Countrys worst president?
• Encourages Americans to have confidence in the
  market.
• In Hoovers presidency
• GNP Falls from 104 billion to 59 billion.
• 6,000 banks fail.
• 13 million workers unemployed (25).
• 1930 Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act Higher than the
  Ford-McCumber Tariff.

11
Hoover and the Great Depression

• Hoovervilles.
• Dust Bowl
• Grapes of Wrath and Okies
• No federal relief!
• Rugged individualism is the answer?
• Dams are the answer?
• 1932 Reconstruction Finance Corporation
• Emergency relief to industry.
• 1932 Bonus Army.