The Search for Stability
By Erica Bradshaw, Greg Ludden, and Adrian De La Garza
The Great Depression
There were two factors that played in the start of the Great Depression. One factor was a series of downturns in the economies of individual nations in the second half of the 1920’s. The second factor was the international financial crisis involving the U.S stock market. A lot of the European prosperity between 1924 and 1929 was built on U.S bank loans to Germany. During the 1920’s, the U.S was booming. By 1928, investors began to pull out money out of Germany to invest in the stock market. In 1929 the U.S stock market crashed and then the investors with fear.
Democratic States After the War
Germany, The imperial Germany of William II had come to an end in 1918 after the defeat of the war. Germany had gone through a depression from 1924-1929 causing fear and extremist parties to rise up. France, After the defeat of Germany France had become the strongest power on the European continent. Its greatest need was to rebuild areas devastated by the war. However France too had suffered financial problems after the war. Great Britain, During the war, Britain had lost many of the markets for its industrial products to the United States and Japan. Such as coal steel and textiles declined after the war, leading to the rise of unemployment. In 1929, Britons had faced the effects of the great depression, causing a group called the Labour Party to take charge, but only to be unable to solve the problem. The United States, after the war, the U.S suffered the most out of all from the depression. In 1932 the industrial production had fallen 50% from its 1929 level of production. Because of this event, President Roosevelt (FDR) decided that capitalism needed to be put in place to solve the problem, FDR was a democrat.