sullat posted:

But what was the government doing in 1931 that turned the tide? I'm not familiar with Hoover's policies to recall anything beyond "balance the budget at all costs" and "save the gold standard". I guess using the army to club unemployed vets is certainly one way to incentivize employment, but other than that, I'm not aware of any helpful government actions until FDR. After all, he took office just as the entire US banking system was cratering and he managed to turn it around. So unless the argument is "the economy just does its thing" I really can't see a way to give Hoover any credit for the recovery.

sullat posted:

But what was the government doing in 1931 that turned the tide? I'm not familiar with Hoover's policies to recall anything beyond "balance the budget at all costs" and "save the gold standard". I guess using the army to club unemployed vets is certainly one way to incentivize employment, but other than that, I'm not aware of any helpful government actions until FDR. After all, he took office just as the entire US banking system was cratering and he managed to turn it around. So unless the argument is "the economy just does its thing" I really can't see a way to give Hoover any credit for the recovery.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Hoover#Great_Depression posted:

Hoover engaged in many unprecedented public works programs, including an increase in the Federal Buildings program of over $400 million and the establishment of the Division of Public Construction to spur public works planning. Hoover himself granted more subsidies to ship construction through the Federal Shipping Board and asked for a further $175 million appropriation for public works; this was followed in July 1930 with the expenditure of a giant $915 million public works program, including a Hoover Dam on the Colorado River.[103][104] In the spring of 1930, Hoover acquired from Congress an added $100 million to continue the Federal Farm Board lending and purchasing policies. At the end of 1929, the FFB established a national wool cooperative-the National Wool Marketing Corporation (NWMC) made up of 30 state associations. The Board also established an allied National Wool Credit Corporation to handle finances. A total of $31.5 million in loans for wool were made by the FFB, of which $12.5 million were permanently lost; these massive agricultural subsidies were a precedent for the later Agricultural Adjustment Act.[105][106] Hoover also advocated strong labor regulation law, including the enactment of the Bacon-Davis Act, requiring a maximum eight-hour day on construction of public buildings and the payment of at least the "prevailing wage" in the locality, as well as the Norris-LaGuardia Act in 1932. In the Banking sector, Hoover passed The Federal Home Loan Bank Act in July, 1932, establishing 12 district banks ruled by a Federal Home Loan Bank Board in a manner similar to the Federal Reserve System. $125 million capital was subscribed by the Treasury and this was subsequently shifted to the RFC. Hoover was also instrumental in passing the Glass-Steagall Act of 1932, allowing for prime rediscounting at the Federal Reserve, allowing further inflation of credit and bank reserves.[107]

...


Congress, desperate to increase federal revenue, enacted the Revenue Act of 1932, which was the largest peacetime tax increase in history.[117] The Act increased taxes across the board, so that top earners were taxed at 63% on their net income. The 1932 Act also increased the tax on the net income of corporations from 12% to 13.75%.

The final attempt of the Hoover Administration to rescue the economy occurred in 1932 with the passage of the Emergency Relief and Construction Act, which authorized funds for public works programs and the creation of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC). The RFC's initial goal was to provide government-secured loans to financial institutions, railroads and farmers. The RFC had minimal impact at the time, but was adopted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and greatly expanded as part of his New Deal.

cheerfullydrab posted:

Are you trying to say that the Poles deserved what happened to them?

Krispy Kareem posted:

I don't know if an unemployment graph really helps much.

quote:

quote:

It's tough to determine just how effective Roosevelt's New Deal was. The chart above makes it look like the New Deal saved us all, but those programs didn't start until 1933 while the unemployment rate's climb rapidly decreased in 1932. Obviously Roosevelt accomplished some very important goals. He can be credited with rescuing the banking system as well as employing a whole lot of idle young men (never a good thing to have). However, government interference with the economy takes at least a year to show up. So the improvements in 1934 and 35 may have been Hoover's work as much as Roosevelt's.

EvanSchenck posted:

Well, let's see!


Oh hey, it shows that unemployment was 25% when FDR took office and down to <15% before the '37-38 recession. That would actually seem to help a lot!


It's possible. In 1931-1932 Hoover was finally becoming convinced of the necessity of hands-on government action to get the economy moving again, and he made some limited steps in that direction, although the New Deal expanded the approach massively. It may be that the moderation in the rate of GDP loss and rate of job loss in 1933-34 was due in part to what Hoover was doing in '31-'32, but what he was doing was a sort of weak prototype to what the New Deal accomplished later--and the New Deal was considerably more successful in stimulating the economy.

The one-year thing is a rule of thumb to compensate for lagging indicators, not an actual law of economics. If the government takes actions that dramatically increase the supply of money in the economy it's not like everybody sits around for a full calendar year before making use of it. In a case like the first year of the Roosevelt administration, where major policy initiatives were rapidly passed to great public fanfare, you'd be looking at a stimulative combination of quickly increasing confidence and concrete changes to the structure of the economy. For example, FDR's rescue of the banking system went live almost as soon as he came into office, and that would have had a huge effect. Also, in the specific case of unemployment, you would also tend to see an immediate improvement within 1933 simply because of early New Deal programs that employed people directly, like the CCC and CWA. The CWA is a particularly obvious example, since it was active from March '33 to March '34 and in that time provided 4 million jobs.

And of course all of this is focusing on the 1930s, when in fact policy in the footstep and after the fashion of the New Deal continued through to the early 1960s, encompassing the period of greatest sustained growth in American economic history.

Krispy Kareem posted:

Banking was a place where Roosevelt had an almost immediate impact and consumer confidence from Roosevelt's election could have boosted economic activity, but it's unlikely it did too much considering unemployment was still 3 to 5 times pre-Depression levels and household money supplies were tight.

I don't doubt Roosevelt did more than Hoover to help the country. Where I object is the distribution of credit. Unemployment levels stopped rising before Roosevelt took office and economic progress in 1933 and 34 probably had as much to do with Hoover as FDR.

Modern Day Hercules posted:

You make yourself look stupid when you post about counterfactual history like there's some absolute truth to it. There's like a million different ways that could have gone down that don't end up with a worse world. For instance, the Soviet Union tries to hold down the entire European continent like they did the Ukraine in our timeline, except they don't have the resources to do it right so the whole drat house of cards crashes, the USSR ends in the 1950's and now instead of having a bunch of countries in Eastern Europe that are only now overcoming a half century of oppression, we have a bunch of countries in Eastern Europe that never really got a chance to be oppressed in the first place. Would that be a worse world?

cheerfullydrab posted:

Again, these things were agreed upon in '43, when Roosevelt had at least one card to play: the removal of aid to the Soviet Union. But he never ever did that. He readily agreed to the loving over of Poland and the Polish people when there were few Soviet troops on the ground there and he had something with which to negotiate. Moving Poland to the west a little bit and ethnically cleansing millions of people, including Poles who were citizens of an Allied nation, wasn't a fait accompli. It was something that Roosevelt actively played a part in.

FAUXTON posted:

I've never seen "I shitpost in threads I dont read" put in so few letters before.

gradenko_2000 posted:

I heard about a speech made by Strom Thurmond during the dixiecrat campaign of 1948 where he explicitly racial epithets. The clip I heard started with something like "there aren't enough soldiers in the army" or something. Can someone help me narrow this down?

quote:

In 1948, according to the Web site stromwatch.com, which provides audio of the statement, Thurmond said:

"I wanna tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that there's not enough troops in the army to force the southern people to break down segregation and admit the friend of the family race into our theatres into our swimming pools into our homes and into our churches."

Berke Negri posted:

The South always seems to really underestimate how many troops the federal government has exist in a world outside of time and space where a boundless amount of uneducated, intensely jealous anger and disgust at the evolution of modern human life and social mores will, somehow, bring them an epic victory over tariffs abolitionism Republicans Martin Luther King Jr. people voting education standards women Democrats oh gently caress it whatever it is this decade that they are bound and determined to fight to their very last breath against secure in the knowledge that that victory will immediately and forever put the mud people BACK IN THEIR PLACE.

VideoTapir posted:

Can it have a white protagonist?

Frostwerks posted:

Like that Denzel Washington biopic of Touissant L'Overture?

Volkerball posted:

That would be pure comedy. US foreign policy is still poo poo, but drat have we come a long way.

Echo Chamber posted:

This is the American History thread, and I hate people pitching what they think would make the ULTIMATE HBO MINISERIES, but I'd kill for an epic Haitian Revolution series.

Echo Chamber posted:

huh?

Negative Entropy posted:

The Haitian Revolution was founded in the Enlightenment ideals that inspired the American and French Revolutions, and a logical consequence of the proposition that all men are created equal, yet the US government and Revolutionary France tried to suppress the rebellion because it was slaves rebelling against their masters.

Echo Chamber posted:

I know that; I was trying to figure out why Volkerball finds the Haitian Revolution funny.

Echo Chamber posted:

Getting back on subject, Jefferson hosed the Haitians over, yet stood to benefit from their success anyway with the acquisition of Louisiana from Napoleon... which expanded slavery territory in the U.S.

FuzzySkinner posted:

This is something more recent in history, but I kind of want to learn more about the LA Riots.

Having read about it, it seems pretty drat scary in retrospect.

Was there any goons that have any sort of memory of the event itself? I was only 3 at the time, so for me it's way too early to really have any knowledge of.

Grand Prize Winner posted:

Do you mean the Rodney King Riots? I wasn't much older, only 5 or so at the time. Shortly afterward my dad bought a gun then almost shot a hole in his foot while cleaning it then sold it back at a significant loss when my mom found the bullet hole in the floor.

White people just went a little nutty afterwards.

Star Man posted:

Your dad cleaned a gun while it was loaded?

Miltank posted:

hahaha what?

Frostwerks posted:

Some famous black actor in Hollywood's been trying to get a L'overture biopic done (pretty sure it's denzel) and the studios basically said, awesome, cool idea but um is there anyway we can have a white protagonist?

Frostwerks posted:

Some famous black actor in Hollywood's been trying to get a L'overture biopic done (pretty sure it's denzel) and the studios basically said, awesome, cool idea but um is there anyway we can have a white protagonist?

Echo Chamber posted:

Danny Glover, actually.

Edit beaten. I'd prefer a prestige historical miniseries over a film.

Echo Chamber posted:

If we're talking about western miniseries, I want a Hell on Wheels-type show but with Chinese people, rather than the "we're only doing the Union Pacific Railroad" whitewash.

Echo Chamber posted:

If we're talking about western miniseries, I want a Hell on Wheels-type show but with Chinese people, rather than the "we're only doing the Union Pacific Railroad" whitewash.

FuzzySkinner posted:

This is something more recent in history, but I kind of want to learn more about the LA Riots.

Having read about it, it seems pretty drat scary in retrospect.

Was there any goons that have any sort of memory of the event itself? I was only 3 at the time, so for me it's way too early to really have any knowledge of.