the NEW DEAL COALITION: FDR, Frances Perkins, and Rise of American Labor

When confidence broke in late October, it broke fast. On October 24, 1929, later called Black Thursday, nearly thirteen million shares changed hands in a single panicked session, roughly three times the normal volume. A group of major bankers intervened to buy stock and stabilize prices, briefly calming the market. The reprieve did not last. On October 29, remembered as Black Tuesday, investors sold off more than sixteen million shares in a single day, and the market lost billions of dollars in value within hours. By mid-November, the market had lost nearly half its September value. The crash alone did not cause the Depression. What turned a financial panic into a decade-long catastrophe was what followed: a wave of bank failures that wiped out ordinary people's savings, a collapse in consumer spending that forced factories to lay off workers, and a contraction in international trade made worse by the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930, which raised import duties and provoked retaliatory tariffs from other countries. Farmers, who had already been struggling with low prices through the 1920s, were pushed further into poverty, a crisis made even worse later in the decade by the ecological disaster of the Dust Bowl across the Great Plains. By 1933, roughly one in four American workers was unemployed, industrial production had fallen by more than half from its 1929 peak, and there was no federal unemployment insurance, no federal deposit insurance, and no federal safety net of any kind to catch the millions of families who had lost their income, their savings, or their homes.