Learn › Economic history › The Great Depression

The Great Depression

The New Deal

The hundred days

Seven steps, about ten minutes, a question at each. You need no economics and no preparation, only a willingness to guess before you are told.

Step 1 of 7

The question

President Roosevelt took office with every bank in America closed, and had them opening again within nine days.

Roosevelt was sworn in on 4 March 1933. Every bank in the country was shut, about 12.8 million people had no work, and the economy had been falling for forty-three months.

Why it matters and what it covers

In two years he built things that are still standing: a government promise behind bank savings, a regulator for the share markets, a state pension. He also built one that the Supreme Court cancelled, and that some economists believe held the recovery back.

Seven steps cover the first week, what lasted, the millions put on public payrolls, the argument about the industry codes, the right to organise, and why the pension law passed in 1935.

What this module covers

  • The law that opened the banks again, five days in
  • Insured savings and a regulator for shares
  • The millions put on public payrolls
  • The industry codes, and the argument about them
  • The right to join a union and bargain
  • The pension, signed in August 1935
  • The movements that made it pass

Written for every level. Tap any underlined word for what it means, and open the boxes below for the economics behind each decision. If you already know the theory, skip both and the history reads straight through.

Step 1 · March 1933

He started with the banks

A new president arrived to find every bank in the country shut. He had a week.

Roosevelt took office on 4 March 1933 with every bank in America shut, and had a law through Congress five days later.

A customer standing outside a bank in March 1933 could not tell a sound bank from one about to fail. The Emergency Banking Act of 9 March was written to settle that.

Banks began opening again on 13 March, and within two days the ones open again held 90 per cent of the country's banking money.

About 4,000 banks never opened again, and their customers did not get their savings back.

Take a guess. You are not expected to know the answers, and being wrong is what makes a number stick.

What did the Emergency Banking Act actually change?

For scaleWithin two days of opening again, those banks held 90 per cent of the country's banking money.

Step 2 · 1933 and 1934

What is still standing

The Banking Act of 16 June 1933 created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

Savings were covered by from 1 January 1934. The Securities Exchange Act of the same year set up the Securities and Exchange Commission as a for dealing.

The Securities Act of the year before had already forced companies selling shares to publish real information about themselves.

American states had insured deposits since 1908, and Congress had been sent proposals since 1886. Deposit insurance was not a new idea, and it took the collapse of 1933 to pass it into law.

deposit insurance
A government promise to pay savers back, up to a set amount, if their bank fails. It stops a queue at one bank turning into a queue at every bank.
regulator
An official body set up by law to watch over an industry, with the power to cap its prices or set its rules, without owning it.
share
A part-ownership of a company. Its price is whatever somebody will pay for that part, so it moves with what buyers think the company is worth.

Insurance covered savings up to a set amount from January 1934. How much was covered for each customer?

For scaleAmerican states had insured deposits since 1908, and Congress had been sent proposals since 1886.

Step 3 · 1933 to 1943

Relief and jobs

The Civilian Conservation Corps put 2.5 million young men to work planting trees and building parks.

The Works Progress Administration hired people directly for public work: roads, schools, bridges and, famously, wall paintings and plays.

The two schemes ran side by side through the 1930s.

These were wages paid by the government to people who would otherwise have had none. They are what most people mean by the New Deal, which is the name given to the laws and schemes Roosevelt's government built from 1933.

The Civilian Conservation Corps took 2.5 million. How many people did the Works Progress Administration employ?

For scaleAbout 12.8 million Americans were out of work in 1933.

Step 4 of 7
What happened next Next module Next: The End of the Great Depression1933 to 1942. Recovery began six years before the war, broke in 1937, and was never finished. Five respectable answers to what ended it, and the Federal Reserve holds two of them.

Module 6 of 7 in The Great Depression

Your score
0 points

Your score will appear here.

Next module Back to The Great Depression

Take it further

🏁Next: what actually ended the Great Depression→ 🇺🇸United States: the numbers today→ 🎯Guess the Value, which trains you to estimate numbers like the ones these questions asked for→

Where every figure came from

[1] What he did in the first week: Federal Reserve History, Emergency Banking Act of 1933.
[2] The promise behind savings: Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, The First Fifty Years, via FRASER.
[3] The regulator for shares: US Securities and Exchange Commission, The laws that govern the securities industry.
[4] The recovery law and the right to organise: US National Archives, Milestone Documents: National Industrial Recovery Act and National Labor Relations Act.
[5] What happened to unions: US Department of Labor, History, Chapter 5: Americans in Depression and War.
[6] The pension, and the pressure behind it: Social Security Administration, Historian's Office, Brief history.
[7] The case against the codes: Cato Institute, Chris Edwards, The government and the Great Depression, Tax & Budget Bulletin 25.

Country data from the World Bank (CC BY 4.0) and the UNDP Human Development Report (CC BY 3.0 IGO)
Games · Learn · Atlas · Privacy