The Gilded Age and the first years of the twentieth century were a time of great social change and economic growth in the United States. Roughly …show more content…
After participating in World War I, the nation was ready to turn inward and concentrate on domestic affairs; a "return to normalcy," as 1920 presidential candidate Warren Harding called it. By the 1920s innovative forces thrusting into American life were creating a new way of living. The automobile and the hard-surfaced road produced mobility and a blurring of the traditional rural-urban split. The radio and motion pictures inaugurated a national culture, one built on new, urban values. The Nineteenth Amendment (1920) gave women the vote in national politics and symbolized their persistence in efforts to break out of old patterns of domesticity. The stock market crash of October 1929 initiated a long economic decline that accelerated into a world catastrophe, the Depression of the 1930s. By 1933, 14 million Americans were unemployed, industrial production was down to one-third of its 1929 level, and national income had dropped by more than half. In the presence of deep national despair, Democratic challenger Franklin D. Roosevelt easily defeated Hoover in the 1932 presidential election. After his inauguration, the New Deal exploded in a whirlwind of legislation. Recovery was Roosevelt's first task. In the First New Deal, he attempted to muster a spirit of emergency and rally all interests behind a common effort in which something was provided for everyone. Excessive competition and production were blamed for the collapse. Therefore, business proprietors and farmers were allowed to cooperate in establishing prices that would provide them with a profitable return and induce an upward turn (under the National Recovery Administration and the Agricultural Adjustment Administration). The Second New Deal was more anti-business and pro-consumer. Roosevelt turned to vastly increased relief spending (under the Works Progress