The Great Depression Flashcards
A high tariff enacted in 1930 during the Great Depression. By taxing imported goods, Congress hoped to stimulate American manufacturing, but it triggered retaliatory tariffs in other countries, which further hindered global trade.
Smoot-Hawley Tariff
A group of 15,000 to 20,000 unemployed World War I veterans who set up camps near the Capitol building in 1932 to demand immediate payment of pension awards due to be paid in 1945.
Bonus Army
A series of informal radio addresses Franklin Roosevelt made to the nation in which he explained New Deal initiatives.
fireside chats
A legendary session during the first few months of Franklin Roosevelt’s administration in which Congress enacted fifteen major bills that focused primarily on four problems: banking failures, agricultural overproduction, the business slump, and soaring unemployment.
Hundred Days
A 1933 law that created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), which insured deposits up to $2,500 (and now up to $250,000). The act also prohibited banks from making risky, unsecured investments with customers’ deposits.
Glass-Steagall Act
New Deal legislation passed in May 1933 that aimed at cutting agricultural production to raise crop prices and thus farmers’ income.
Agricultural Adjustment Act
Federal agency established in June 1933 to promote industrial recovery during the Great Depression. It encouraged industrialists to voluntarily adopt codes that defined fair working conditions, set prices, and minimized competition.
National Recovery Administration
A New Deal construction program established by Congress in 1933. Designed to put people back to work, the PWA built the Boulder Dam (renamed Hoover Dam) and Grand Coulee Dam, among other large public works projects.
Public Works Administration
Federal relief program that provided jobs to millions of unemployed young men who built thousands of bridges, roads, trails, and other structures in state and national parks, bolstering the national infrastructure.
Civilian Conservation Corps
An agency established by the Federal Housing Act of 1934 that refinanced home mortgages for mortgage holders facing possible foreclosure.
Federal Housing Administration
A commission established by Congress in 1934 to regulate the stock market; had broad powers to determine how stocks and bonds were sold to the public, to set rules for margin (credit) transactions, and to prevent stock sales by those with inside information about corporate plans.
Securities and Exchange Commission
A plan proposed in 1933 that would give $200 a month (about $3,600 today) to citizens over the age of sixty; mobilized mass support for old-age pensions.
Townsend Plan
A term applied to industrial democracies that adopt various government-guaranteed social-welfare programs; Second New Deal programs
welfare state
A 1935 act that upheld the right of industrial workers to join unions and established the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), a federal agency with the authority to protect workers from employer coercion and to guarantee collective bargaining.
Wagner Act
A 1935 act with three main provisions: old-age pensions for workers; a joint federal-state system of compensation for unemployed workers; and a program of payments to widowed mothers and the blind, deaf, and disabled.
Social Security Act
The political ideology of individual liberty, private property, a competitive market economy, free trade, and limited government. The ideal is laissez-faire or “let alone” policy, in which government does the least possible
classical liberalism
Federal New Deal program established in 1935 that provided government-funded public works jobs to millions of unemployed Americans during the Great Depression in areas ranging from construction to the arts.
Works Progress Administration
The theory, developed by British economist John Maynard Keynes in the 1930s, that purposeful government intervention in the economy (through lowering or raising taxes, interest rates, and government spending) can affect the level of overall economic activity and thereby prevent severe depressions and runaway inflation.
Keynesian economics
One of the final major laws of the New Deal, it outlawed child labor, made the 40-hour workweek standard (and mandated overtime pay), and established a national minimum wage.
Fair Labor Standards Act
A 1934 law that reversed the Dawes Act of 1887. Through the law, Indians won a greater degree of religious freedom, and tribal governments regained their status as semi-sovereign dependent nations.
Indian Reorganization Act
A 1934 law that provided for the independence of the Philippines, after a ten-year transition period. Though it granted Philippine independence, its origins were nativist, because the law’s proponents wished to classify Filipinos as “alien” and reduce their immigration to the United States.
Tydings-McDuffie Act
An area including the semiarid states of Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Arkansas, and Kansas that experienced a severe drought and large dust storms from 1930 to 1941.
Dust Bowl
An agency funded by Congress in 1933 that integrated flood control, reforestation, electricity generation, and agricultural and industrial development in the Tennessee Valley area.
Tennessee Valley Authority
An agency established in 1935 to promote nonprofit farm cooperatives that offered loans to farmers to install power lines.
Rural Electrification Administration
A program under the Works Progress Administration (WPA) from 1935 to 1939 in which historians, teachers, editors, novelists, poets, and playwrights were employed by the federal government to produce a variety of materials — this included, for example, interviews with hundreds of former slaves; a major survey of American foodways; and state-by-state guidebooks to history, geography, and culture.
Federal Writers’ Project
