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Example research essay topic: Herbert Hoover Rural Areas - 2,296 words

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At th nd of World War I, many Americans wr lft with a fling of distrust toward foreigners and radicals, whom thy hld responsible for th war. Th Russian Revolution of 1917 and th founding of th communists' Third International in 1919 further find American fars of radicalism. Rac riots and labour unit and to th tension. Thus, when a sri's of series and indiscriminate bombings been in 1919, th unrelated incidents wr all assumdincorrctly in most casino b communist-inspired.

During th noting Rd Scar, civil liberties wr sometimes grossly violated and many innocent alin's wr deported. Th Rd Scar was ovr within a yar, but a general distrust of foreigners, library room moments, and organized labour remain throughout th 1920 s. In fact, many view Harding's landslid victory in 1920 as repudiation of Wilson's internationalism and of th rooms of th Progressive ra. Harding took offic with a clar mandate to restore business as usual, a condition he termed normalcy. Americans wished to put reminders of the Great War behind them, as well as the brutal strikes, the Red Scare, and the sharp recession of Wilson's last years in office.

Peace and prosperity were what people desired, and these would be achieved under Harding. As part of his policy of returning America to prewar conditions, Harding pardoned many individuals who had been convicted of antiwar activities or for being radicals. His main concern, however, was business. Reversing progressive and wartime trends, the Harding administration strove to establish pro business policies. Attorney General Harry M. Daugherty obtained injunctions against striking workers.

The Supreme Court sided with management in disputes over unions, minimum wage laws, child labour, and other issues. Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover expanded the size of his department fourfold during the next eight years in attempts to foster business growth and efficiency and to encourage trade associations and business labour cooperation. Secretary of the Treasury Andrew W. Mellon, one of the nation's richest men, drastically cut taxes, especially on the wealthy; he also cut federal spending to reduce the national debt. In foreign affairs the Harding administration tried to ensure peace by urging disarmament, and at the Washington Naval Conference in 1921 Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes negotiated the first effective arms-reduction agreement in history.

On the whole, however, the policies of the United States were narrow and nationalistic. It did not cooperate with the League of Nations. It insisted that Europeans pay their American debts but in 1922 passed the FordneyMcCumber Tariff, which raised duties so high that foreigners had great difficulty earning the necessary dollars. When immigration reached prewar levels, Congress gave in to the protests of organized labour, which believed immigrants were taking jobs away from American citizens, and to the objections of business leaders and patriotic organizations, who feared that some of the immigrants might be radicals. Reversing traditional American policy, Congress passed first an emergency restriction bill and then in 1924 the National Origins Act.

The quota did not pertain to North Americans, however. Harding's policies, his genial nature, and the return of prosperity made the president extremely popular. His sudden death, of a cerebral embolism, in the summer of 1923 resulted in a national outpouring of grief. Yet it soon became evident that his administration had been the most corrupt since Grant's.

Harding had appointed venal mediocrities, many of them old cronies, to office, and they had betrayed his trust. The most publicized scandal was the illegal leasing of naval oil reserves at Teapot Dome, Wyo. , which led to the conviction of Secretary of the Interior Albert B. Fall for accepting a bribe. Calvin Coolidge, Harding's vice president and successor, was a taciturn, parsimonious New Englander who restored honesty to government.

His administration suffered none of the stigma of the Harding scandals, and Coolidge, thanks to a buoyant economy and a divided Democratic Party, easily defeated the conservative Democrat John W. Davis in the election of 1924. Even though an independent campaign by Senator Robert M. La Follette of Wisconsin drew off insurgent Republicans, Coolidge received more popular, and electoral, votes than his opponents combined. For millions of Americans, the sober-minded Coolidge was a more appropriate symbol for the era than the journalistic terms Jazz Age or Roaring Twenties. These terms were exaggerations, but they did have some basis in fact.

Many young men and women who had been disillusioned by their experiences in World War I rebelled against what they viewed as unsuccessful, outmoded prewar conventions and attitudes. Women who had been forced to work outside the home because of labour shortages during the war were unwilling to give up their social and economic independence after the war had ended. Having won the right to vote when the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1920, the new emancipated woman, the flapper, demanded to be recognized as man's equal in all areas. She adopted a masculine look, bobbing her hair and abandoning corsets; she drank and smoked in public; and she was more open about sex.

Social changes were not limited to the young. Productivity gains brought most Americans up to at least a modest level of comfort. People were working fewer hours a week and earning more money than ever before. New consumer goods radios, telephones, refrigerators, and above all the motor cascade life better, and they were easier to buy thanks to a vastly expanded consumer credit system.

Leisure activities became more important, professional sports boomed, and the rapid growth of tabloid newspapers, magazines, movies, and radios enabled millions to share in the exciting world of speakeasies, flappers, and jazz music, even if only vicariously. On the darker side, anti foreign sentiment led to the revival of the racist, anti-Semitic, and anti-Catholic Ku Klux Klan, especially in rural areas. During the early 1920 s the Klan achieved a membership of some 5, 000, 000 and gained control of, or influence over, many city and state governments. Rural areas also provided the base for a Christian fundamentalist movement, as farmers and small-town dwellers who felt threatened and alienated by the rapidly expanding, socially changing cities fought to preserve American moral standards by stressing religious orthodoxy. The movement grew steadily until 1925, when John T. Scopes, a biology teacher in Dayton, Tenn. , was tried for violating a law common to many Southern states prohibiting the teaching of the theory of evolution.

Although Scopes was found guilty of breaking the law, both the law itself and fundamentalist beliefs were ridiculed during the course of the trial, which attracted national attention. One fundamentalist goal that was achieved was the passage in 1919 of the Prohibition (Eighteenth) Amendment, which prohibited the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors. Millions of mostly Protestant churchgoers hailed Prohibition as a moral advance, and the liquor consumption of working people, as well as the incidence of alcohol-related diseases and deaths, does seem to have dropped during the period. On the other hand, millions of otherwise law-abiding citizens drank the prohibited liquor, prompting the growth of organized crime. The illegal liquor business was so lucrative and federal prohibition enforcement machinery was so slight that gangsters were soon engaged in the large-scale smuggling, manufacture, and sale of alcoholic beverages. As in legitimate business, the highest profits came from achieving economies of scale, so gangsters engaged in complex mergers and takeovers; but, unlike corporate warfare, the underworld used real guns to wipe out competition.

In 1931 a national law-enforcement commission, formed to study the flouting of prohibition and the activities of gangsters, was to report that prohibition was virtually unenforceable; and, with the coming of the Great Depression, prohibition ceased to be a key political issue. In 1933 the Twenty-first Amendment brought its repeal. In the meantime, prohibition and religion were the major issues of the 1928 presidential campaign between the Republican nominee, Herbert Hoover, and the Democrat, Governor Alfred E. Smith of New York. Smith was an opponent of prohibition and a Roman Catholic. His candidacy brought enthusiasm and a heavy Democratic vote in the large cities, but a landslide against him in the dry and Protestant hinterlands secured the election for Hoover.

In October 1929, only months after Hoover took office, the stock market crashed, the average value of 50 leading stocks falling by almost half in two months. Despite occasional rallies, the slide persisted until 1932, when stock averages were barely a fourth of what they had been in 1929. Industrial production soon followed the stock market, giving rise to the worst unemployment the country had ever seen. By 1933 at least a quarter of the work force was unemployed. Adjusted for deflation, salaries had fallen by 40 percent and industrial wages by 60 percent. The causes of the Great Depression were many and various.

Agriculture had collapsed in 1919 and was a continuing source of weakness. Because of poor regulatory policies, many banks were overextended. Wages had not kept up with profits, and by the late 1920 s consumers were reaching the limits of their ability to borrow and spend. Production had already begun to decline and unemployment to rise before the crash. The crash, which was inevitable since stock prices were much in excess of real value, greatly accelerated every bad tendency, destroying the confidence of investors and consumers alike.

Hoover met the crisis energetically, in contrast to earlier administrations, which had done little to cope with panics except reduce government spending. He extracted promises from manufacturers to maintain production. He signed legislation providing generous additional sums for public works. He also signed the infamous Smoot Hawley Tariff of 1930, which raised duties by as much as 50 percent. These steps failed to ease the depression, however, while the tariff helped to export it. International trade had never recovered from World War I.

Europe still depended on American sales and investments for income and on American loans to maintain the complicated structure of debt payments and reparations erected in the 1920 s. After the crash Americans stopped investing in Europe, and the tariff deprived foreigners of their American markets. Foreign nations struck back with tariffs of their own, and all suffered from the resulting anarchy. In the 1930 elections the Democratic Party won control of the House of Representatives and, in combination with liberal Republicans, the Senate as well. Soon afterward a slight rise in production and employment made it seem that the worst of the depression was over. Then, in the spring of 1931, another crisis erupted.

The weakening western European economy brought down a major bank in Vienna, and Germany defaulted on its reparations payments. Hoover proposed a one-year moratorium on reparations and war-debt payments, but, even though the moratorium was adopted, it was too little too late. In the resulting financial panic most European governments went off the gold standard and devalued their currencies, thus destroying the exchange system, with devastating effects upon trade. Europeans withdrew gold from American banks, leading the banks to call in their loans to American businesses. A cascade of bankruptcies ensued, bank customers collapsing first and after them the banks. Hoover tried hard to stabilize the economy.

He persuaded Congress to establish a Reconstruction Finance Corporation to lend funds to banks, railroads, insurance companies, and other institutions. At the same time, in January 1932, new capital was arranged for federal land banks. The GlassSteagall Act provided gold to meet foreign withdrawals and liberalized Federal Reserve credit. The Federal Home Loan Bank Act sought to prop up threatened building and loan associations.

But these measures failed to promote recovery or to arrest the rising tide of unemployment. Hoover, whose administrative abilities had masked severe political shortcomings, made things worse by offering negative leadership to the nation. His public addresses were conspicuously lacking in candor. He vetoed measures for direct federal relief, despite the fact that local governments and private charities, the traditional sources for welfare, were clearly incapable of providing adequate aid for the ever-rising numbers of homeless and hungry. When unemployed veterans refused to leave Washington after their request for immediate payment of approved bonuses was denied, Hoover sent out the army, which dispersed the protesters at bayonet point and burned down their makeshift quarters. Hoover's failures and mistakes guaranteed that whoever the Democrats nominated in 1932 would become the next president.

Their candidate was Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt of New York. He won the election by a large margin, and the Democrats won majorities in both branches of Congress. The New Deal established federal responsibility for the welfare of the economy and the American people. At the time, conservative critics charged it was bringing statism or even socialism. Left-wing critics of a later generation charged just the reverse that it bolstered the old order and prevented significant reform. Others suggested that the New Deal was no more than the extension and culmination of progressivism.

In its early stages, the New Deal did perhaps begin where progressivism left off and built upon the Hoover program for fighting the depression. But Roosevelt soon took the New Deal well beyond Hoover and progressivism, establishing a precedent for large-scale social programs and for government participation in economic activities. Despite the importance of this growth of federal responsibility, the New Deal's greatest achievement was to restore faith in American democracy at a time when many people believed that the only choice left was between communism and fascism. Its greatest failure was its inability to bring about complete economic recovery. Some economists, notably John Maynard Keynes of Great Britain, were calling for massive deficit spending to promote recovery; and by 1937 the New Deal's own experience proved that pump priming worked, whereas spending cutbacks only hurt the economy. Roosevelt remained unpersuaded, however, and the depression lingered on until U.

S. entry into World War II brought full employment.


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Research essay sample on Herbert Hoover Rural Areas

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