Hi, I'm John Green, this is Crash Course U.S. history
and Herbert Hoover's here, which is never a good sign.
Today we're gonna return to two of my favorite topics:
economics and inaccurate naming conventions.
That's right, we're gonna be talking about the Great Depression,
which was only great if you enjoy, like, being a hobo or selling pencils.
Now some of you might get a bit frustrated today because there's no real consensus about the Great Depression,
and simple, declarative statements about it really say much more about you than they do about history.
Why are you looking at me, Mr Green? I didn't say anything. I thought it.
Because, Me From the Past, you always want things to fit into this simplistic narrative:
she loves me, she loves me not, the Great Depression was caused by x or was caused by y.
It's complicated!
(Intro Music)
Many people tell you that the Great Depression started with the stock market crash in October 1929,
but a) that isn't true and b) it leads people to mistake correlation with cause.
What we think of as the Great Depression did begin AFTER the stock market crash,
but not because of it. Like, as we saw last week, the underlying
economic conditions in the U.S. before the stock market crash weren't all moonshine
and rainbows. The 1920s featured large-scale domestic consumption of relatively new consumer
products, which was good for American industry. But much of this consumption was fueled by
credit and installment buying which, it turned out, was totally unsustainable.
The thing about credit is that it works fine unless and until economic uncertainty increases
at which point POW. That's a technical historian term, by the way.
Meanwhile the agricultural sector suffered throughout the 1920s and farm prices kept
dropping for two reasons. First, American farms had expanded enormously during World
War I to provide food for all those soldiers, and second, the expansion led many farmers
to mechanize their operations. As you'll know if you've ever bought a
tractor, that mechanization was expensive, and so many farmers went into debt to finance
their expansion. And then a combination of overproduction and low prices meant that often
their farms were foreclosed upon . And other signs of economic weakness appeared
throughout the decade. Like by 1925, the growth of car manufacturing slowed, along with residential
construction. And, worst of all was what noted left wing
radical Herbert Hoover labeled "an orgy of mad speculation" in the stock markets
that began in 1927. By the way I'm kidding about him being a left wing radical. Just
look at him. According to historian David Kennedy, "By
1929, commercial bankers were in the unusual position of loaning more money for stock market
and real estate investments than for commercial ventures."[1]
I wonder if we would ever find ourselves in that position again. Oh right we did in 2008.
Anyway, it's tempting to see the stock market crash as the cause of the depression, possibly
because it turns American economic history into morality play, but the truth is that
the stock market crash and the depression were not the same thing. A lot of rich people
lost money in the market, but what made the Great Depression the Great Depression was
massive unemployment and accompanying hardship, and this didn't actually begin until, like,
1930 or 1931. The end of 1929 was actually okay. Unless
you were a farmer. Or a stockbroker obviously. So what did actually cause the Depression?
Well that's a big question and it's one that economists have struggled with ever since.
They want to find out so they can keep it from ever happening again. No pressure, economists.
Only 3% of Americans actually owned stock, and the markets recovered a lot of their value
by 1930, although they did then go down again because, you know, there was a depression
on. And even though big banks and corporations
were buying a lot of stock, much of it was with borrowed money, known as margin buying,
and all of that still was not nearly a big enough iceberg to sink the world's economy.
But if I had to name a single cause of the Great Depression, it might be America's
weak banking system. Alright. Let's go to the ThoughtBubble.
Although the Federal Reserve system had been created in 1913, the vast majority of America's
banks were small, individual institutions that had to rely on their own resources. When
there was a panic and depositors rushed to take the money out of the bank -- like they
do in the obscure arthouse movie Mary Poppins -- the bank went under if it didn't have
enough money on reserve. So in 1930, a wave of bank failures began
in Louisville that then spread to Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, and eventually Arkansas
and North Carolina. As depositors lined up to take their money out before the banks went
belly up, banks called in loans and sold assets. Ultimately this meant that credit froze up,
which was what really destroyed the economy. A frozen credit system meant that less money
was in circulation, and that led to deflation. Now you're probably thinking, "Big deal,
deflation, can't be as bad as inflation right?" No. Deflation is much worse, as
anyone who has ever slept on an air mattress knows.
When prices drop, businesses cut costs, mainly by laying off workers. These workers then
can't buy anything so inventories continue to build up and prices drop further. Banks
weren't lending money, so employers couldn't borrow it to make payroll to pay their workers
and more and more businesses went bankrupt leaving more and more workers unable to purchase
the goods and services that would keep the businesses open.
So if we have to lay the blame for the Great Depression on someone we can blame the banks,
which isn't completely wrong, and it gives us a chance to shake our fists at Andrew Jackson
whose distrust of central banking got us into this mess in the first place. That's probably
too simple, but the Federal Reserve does deserve a good chunk of the blame for not rescuing
the banks and not infusing money into the economy to combat this deflationary cycle.
Thanks, Thoughtbubble. So, economics fans out there might be saying, "Why didn't
the Hoover administration engage in some good old fashioned Keynesian pump priming?"
The thinking there is that if governments do large-scale economic stimulus and a bunch
of infrastructure projects, it can kind of create a bottom that stops the deflationary
cycle. And that does often work, but unfortunately
the Hoover Administration did not have a TARDIS. John Maynard Keynes' great work The General
Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (he wasn't very good at titles) wasn't published
until 1936, when the Depression was well under way.
Venturing into the green nightmare of not-America for a moment, Herbert Hoover offered a global
explanation in his memoirs for the global phenomenon that was the Great Depression.
He claimed that its primary cause was World War One. And to be fair, the war did set the
stage for a global economic disaster because of the web of debts and reparations that it
created. Like, under the Versailles Treaty, Germany
had to pay $33 billion in reparations mostly to France and Britain, which it couldn't
pay without borrowing money from ... American banks. In addition the U.S. itself was owed
$10 billion by Britain and France, some of which those countries paid back with German
reparations. But then once American credit dried up, as
it did in the wake of the stock market crash and the American bank failures, the economies
of Germany, France, and Britain also fell off a cliff.
And then with the largest non-U.S. industrial economies in total turmoil, fewer people abroad
could buy American products, or French wine, or Brazilian coffee, and world trade came
to a halt. And then when what the world really needed
was more trade, America responded by raising tariffs to their highest levels ever with
the Hawley Smoot tariff, a law that was as bad as it sounds.
The idea of the high tariff was to protect American industry, but since Europe responded
with their own high tariffs, that just meant that there were fewer buyers for American
goods, less trade, fewer sales, and ultimately fewer jobs.
So what did Hoover do? Not enough. It's important to remember that the American government
is not just the President. Hoover couldn't always get Congress to do what he wanted but
his political ineptitude was not particularly surprising because the first elected office
that he ever held in his life was President of the United States.
Like, let's take the foreign debt issue. Hoover proposed a moratorium on intergovernmental
debt payments and he actually got Congress to go along with it, but it wasn't enough,
mainly because the central bankers in Europe and America refused to let go of the gold
standard, which would have allowed the governments to devalue their currency and pump needed
money into their economies. And when Britain, rather heroically I might
add, did abandon the gold standard in 1931 and stopped payments in gold, the U.S. did
not follow suit, which meant that world financial markets froze up even further.
Like this is a little bit complicated, but if you and I have always used Cheetos as currency
to exchange goods and services and one day I announce that we can't do that anymore
because it doesn't give us the flexibility that we need to pull ourselves out of this
deflationary spiral. If I don't also agree to abandon Cheetos,
then it's going to be a total disaster, which it was.
And then, even worse, the Fed raised its discount rate, making credit even harder to come by.
By the end of 1931, 2,294 American banks had failed, double the number that had gone under
in 1930. Now, it's easy to criticize poor Herbert
Hoover for not doing enough to stop the Great Depression, and he probably didn't do enough,
but part of that is down to our knowledge of what happened afterward: the New Deal.
That FDR at least tried to do something about the Depression makes us forget that when Hoover
was president, orthodox political and economic theory counseled in favor of doing nothing.
And at least Hoover didn't follow the advice of his treasury secretary who, according to
Hoover anyway, argued that that the solution was to "liquidate labor, liquidate stocks,
liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate," which sounds like the worst milkshake ever.
Instead, Hoover believed that the best course of action was to "use the powers of government
to cushion the situation"[2] and in a White House meeting he persuaded a large number
of industrialists to agree to maintain wage rates.
He also got the Federal Farm Board to support agricultural production, and got Congressional
approval for $140 million in new public works. Overall, he nearly doubled the federal public
works expenditures between 1929 and 1931. It just wasn't nearly enough.
Because what Hoover didn't allow was for the federal government to take over the situation
completely. He relied primarily on private businesses
and state and local governments to stimulate the economy, and that was insufficient. It's
not surprising when you consider that in 1929 Federal expenditures accounted for 3% of our
gross domestic product. Today it's more like 20%.
So, it was just really hard to imagine the Federal government doing anything on such
a large scale to address a national problem because it had never really done that much
before. Hoover also hiked taxes as part of a plan
to stabilize the banks by balancing the federal budget, providing confidence for foreign creditors,
and stopping them from buying American gold. This would support bonds and also keep the
federal government out of competition with private borrowers. The Revenue Act of 1932
passed Congress, but it didn't do much to stop the Depression. In fact, arguably it
made it worse. Though ultimately, this dire situation forced
Hoover into a truly radical move. In January 1932 he and Congress created the Reconstruction
Finance Corporation, which was basically a federal bailout program that borrowed money
to provide emergency loans to banks, building-and-loan societies, railroads, and agricultural corporations.
The problem was that by 1932 bailing out the banks wasn't enough and the Great Depression
started to take shape. By early 1932 well over 10 million people were out of work, 20%
of the labor force. And in big cities the numbers were even worse, especially for people
of color. Like, in Chicago, 4% of the population was African American, but they made up more
than 16% of the unemployed. Although Hoover famously claimed that no one
starved, which was a little bit let-them-eat-cake-y, people did search trash cans for food. And
many Americans were forced to ask for relief. Hoover's response was to try to encourage
private charity through the unfortunately acronymed President's Organization on Unemployment
Relief. Or "POUR." New York City's government relief programs
rose from $9 million in 1930 to $58 million in 1932, and private charitable giving did
increase from $4.5 million to $21 million, and that sounds great until you realize that
the total of $79 million that New York City spent on relief in 1932 was less than ONE
MONTH's lost wages for the 800,000 people who were unemployed.[3]
Oh, it's time for the Mystery Document? I hope it's a break from the unrelenting
misery. Probably not. The rules here are simple. I guess the author
of the Mystery Document and then usually fail and get shocked with the shock pen, which
is a real shock pen no matter what you people say.
Alright, what do we got here?
"We sit looking at the floor. No one dares think of the coming winter. There are only
a few more days of summer. Everyone is anxious to get work to lay up something for that long
siege of bitter cold. But there is no work. Sitting in the room we all know it. This is
why we don't talk; much. We look at the floor dreading to see that knowledge in each
other's eyes. There is a kind of humiliation in it. We look away from each other. We look
at the floor. It's too terrible to see this animal terror in each other's eyes."
I mean, Stan, unemployment was 25% and this could be literally any of those people. I'm
gonna guess that it's a woman, because men were usually on the road trying to find work
while women would go to these offices to look. I - I mean it could be many - I have no idea.
Ummm Janet Smith. Meridel Le Sueur? She's a good writer. Maybe
we should hire her. AH! So, often at Crash Course we try to show how
conventional wisdom about history isn't always correct. But in the case of the hardships
experienced during the Great Depression, it really is.
The pictures of Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, and Steinbeck's description in Grapes
of Wrath of Okies leaving the dust bowl in the usually vain hope of a better life in
California, they tell the story better than I can.
Thousands of Americans took to the road in search of work and thousands more stood in
breadlines. There were shantytowns for the homeless called Hoovervilles, and there were
protests, like the Bonus March on Washington by veterans seeking an early payment of a
bonus due to them in 1945. A lot of the debate around the Great Depression
revolves around the causes, while still more concerns the degree to which the federal government's
eventual response, the New Deal, actually helped to end the Depression.
Those questions are controversial because they're still relevant. We're still talking
about how to regulate banking. We're still talking about what the government's
role in economic policy should be and whether a strong federal government is ultimately
good for an economy or bad for it. And how you feel about the government's
role in the Great Depression is going to depend on how you feel about government in general.
That said, we shouldn't let our ideological feelings about markets and governments and
economics obscure the suffering that millions of Americans experienced during the Great
Depression. For generations of Americans, it was one of
the defining experiences of their lives. Thanks for watching. I'll see you next week.
Crash Course is produced and directed by Stan Muller, written by Raoul Meyer, and made with
the help of all of these nice people. And it is possible because of your support through
Subbable. These videos are only possible because of
the support Crash Course viewers give the show on a monthly basis through Subbable.
There's a link in the video info if you'd like to join those subscribers.
Cool perks and stuff, but mostly educational video available for free to everyone forever.
Thank you for watching and supporting Crash Course and as we say in my hometown, don't
forget to be awesome...I'm gonna hit the globe! Nailed it.