ABSTRACT
By March 4, 1933, the day Franklin D. Roosevelt was sworn in as the thirtysecond president of the United States, over thirteen million Americans had lost their jobs and many millions more had seen their wages cut or feared that they too would become unemployed. The stock market had crashed three and onehalf years earlier and the country was faced with an unprecedented economic and financial crisis. Throughout the country banks had collapsed, wiping out the savings of hundreds of thousands of families; farmers, who had experienced Depression-like conditions for nearly a decade, saw the value of their produce plummet; makeshift shanty towns, Hoovervilles, became the last shelter for the desperate and unemployed. More than half the country lived on less than subsistence wages. Workers, small business owners, industrialists, financiers, and politicians feared the worst: an unending stagnant economy, failed businesses, lost jobs, and shattered dreams.
