Skills mattered less and less in an industrialized, mass-producing economy, and their strength as individuals seemed ever smaller and less significant when companies grew in size and power and managers gained wealth and political influence. Long hours, dangerous working conditions, and the difficulty of supporting a family on meager and unpredictable wages compelled workers to organize armies of labor and battle against the power of capital.

It was then that I issued the proclamation providing for the nation-wide bank holiday, and this was the first step in the Government's reconstruction of our financial and economic fabric.

The third stage has been the series of regulations permitting the banks to continue their functions to take care of the distribution of food and household necessities and the payment of payrolls.

A question you will ask is this—why are all the banks not to be reopened at the same time? The answer is simple. Your Government does not intend that the history of the past few years shall be repeated.

This law also gave authority to develop a program of rehabilitation of our banking facilities.

A rush so great that the soundest banks could not get enough currency to meet the demand.

I recognize that the many proclamations from State Capitols and from Washington, the legislation, the Treasury regulations, etc., couched for the most part in banking and legal terms should be explained for the benefit of the average citizen. I owe this in particular because of the fortitude and good temper with which everybody has accepted the inconvenience and hardships of the banking holiday.

we must move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline,

The people of the United States have not failed. In their need they have registered a mandate that they want direct, vigorous action.

For the trust reposed in me I will return the courage and the devotion that befit the time. I can do no less.

The task can be helped by definite efforts to raise the values of agricultural products and with this the power to purchase the output of our cities.

This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly.

Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment.

The end of the World War had reduced demand for American farm products as European farmers gradually got back to work.

Americans meanwhile feared foreign workers willing to work for even lower wages. The Saturday Evening Post warned that foreign immigrants, who were “compelled to accept employment on any terms and conditions offered,” would exacerbate the economic crisis.

Farmers plowed up their cotton and left fields fallow, and the market price did rise. But in an agricultural world of landowners and landless farmworkers (tenants and sharecroppers), AAA policies benefitted the landowners and bypassed the poor southerners who needed them most

The 1930s saw a significant reversal in the flow of people between rural and urban areas. Thousands of people fled the jobless cities and moved to the country looking for work.

Hoover had entered office with widespread popular support, but by the end of 1929 the economic collapse had overwhelmed his presidency.

Widespread soil exhaustion and erosion only compounded the problem.

Stores and homes were looted and set on fire. When Tulsa firefighters arrived, they were turned away by white vigilantes. A number of eyewitness accounts described private aircraft being used to shoot into black crowds and drop turpentine firebombs onto black-owned buildings, suggesting the well-organized attack might have been planned in advance.

Women gained increased opportunities to work outside the home. The number of professional women rose significantly in the 1920s. But limits still existed,

It was the decade of the “New Woman,” in which only 10 percent of married women (but nearly half of unmarried women) worked outside the home. It was a decade in which new technologies decreased time requirements for household chores, and one in which standards of cleanliness and order in the home rose to often impossible standards.

The 1920s also witnessed the maturation of professional sports. Play-by-play radio broadcasts of collegiate and professional sporting events marked a new era for sports, despite the racial segregation in most.

“Change is in the very air Americans breathe, and consumer changes are the very bricks out of which we are building our new kind of civilization,” announced marketing expert and home economist Christine Frederick in her influential 1929 book, Selling Mrs. Consumer (which she incidentally dedicated to Herbert Hoover).

In addition to his very clear support of business interests over labor, Harding’s presidency would go down in history as among the most corrupt.

If black soldiers fought and died on equal footing with white soldiers, black leaders believed, white Americans would see that they deserved full citizenship.

Racist attitudes among many white Americans mandated the assignment of white and black soldiers to different units. Despite racial discrimination, many African American leaders including W. E. B. Du Bois supported the war effort and encouraged service for black soldiers.

The government had moved quickly to eliminate any signs of dissent, passing the Espionage Act in June, 1917. Woodrow Wilson declared the act was designed to prosecute those who had “poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life; who have sought to bring the good name of our Government into contempt, to destroy our industries wherever they thought it effective for their vindictive purposes to strike at them, and to debase our politics to the uses of foreign intrigue.”

American attitudes toward international affairs followed the advice given by President George Washington in his 1796 Farewell Address. Washington had urged his countrymen to avoid “foreign alliances, attachments, and intrigues”, warning against “those overgrown military establishments which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty.”

war offered the United States a unique opportunity to shift from being a debtor nation, dependent on loans from Europe and Britain, to becoming a global creditor. “

. The threat of war in Europe also enabled passage of the Naval Act of 1916. President Wilson pledged to insure the U. S. Navy was “incomparably, the greatest…in the world.”

In the second half of the nineteenth century, Chicago became a symbol of the triumph of American industrialization. Its meatpacking industry represented many of the troubling changes occurring in American life. In the last decades of the century Chicago became America’s butcher.

Addams decided to start her own in Chicago. She returned home and opened Hull House in 1889

In addition to engineers and city planners addressing growing cities’ needs for drinking water and sanitation, idealistic nineteenth-century reformers began working to improving social conditions in American cities.

Addams’ approach to solving problems of urban poverty included equal parts of direct aid to poor city people, scientific study into the roots of poverty and dependency, and political activism to bring this information to the public and government officials and to advocate change.

By 1911, six western states had passed suffrage amendments to their constitutions. Women’s suffrage was typically part of a package of reform efforts. Many suffragists argued that women’s votes were necessary to clean up politics and combat social evils.

oosevelt believed there were good and bad trusts, necessary monopolies and corrupt ones. Although his reputation as a trust buster was wildly exaggerated, he was the first major national politician to at least speak against the trusts.

Presidents Taft and Wilson continued the practice during their own administrations. Lenders took advantage of the region’s need for cash and exacted punishing interest rates on massive loans, which were then sold off in pieces on the secondary bond market.

According to the racial theory of the day, humans progressed through stages of civilization in an orderly, linear fashion.

Although the growing U.S. economy needed large numbers of immigrant workers for its factories and mills and corporations supported immigration to keep wages low, many Americans resented the arrival of so many immigrants.

Civilization, while often cloaked in the language of morality and Christianity, was very much an economic concept. The stages of civilization outlined by racial theorists and social Darwinists were described by their economic character, progressing from hunter-gatherer to agricultural and then industrial societies.

Under the leadership of President Theodore Roosevelt, the United States entered the twentieth century ambitious to achieve global power by military might, territorial expansion, and economic influence.

New conflicts and territorial problems forced Americans to confront the ideological elements of imperialism.

Mormons incorporated into their faith the belief that Americans were exceptional—chosen by God to spread truth across the world and to build a New Jerusalem in North America. However, many Americans were suspicious of the Latter-Day Saint movement and its unusual rituals, especially the practice of polygamy, and most Mormons found it difficult to practice their faith in the eastern United States.

. All told, over one thousand socialist candidates won American political offices. Julius A. Wayland, editor of the socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason, proclaimed that “socialism is coming. It’s coming like a prairie fire and nothing can stop it. You can feel it in the air.”

He believed that reissuing silver dollars, by inflating American currency, could alleviate farmers’ debts.

Populism, however, still faced substantial obstacles, especially in the South. The failure of Alliance-backed Democrats to live up to their campaign promises had driven some southerners to break with the party of their forefathers and join the Populists.

The platform proposed nationalizing the country’s railroad and telegraph systems to ensure that essential services would be run in the interests of the people rather than for the profits of wealthy investors.

Finally, a graduated income tax would protect Americans from the establishment of an American aristocracy. Populists believed these efforts would help shift economic and political power back toward the nation’s producing classes.

The post–Civil War era saw revolutions in American industry.

Unless an industrial process was protected by a patent, the process and the product could be duplicated by competitors. The first US patent laws, passed in 1790 and 1793, granted fourteen years of protection to patent-holders, but after that period products and processes were open to copying.

Nearly 100 Americans died in “The Great Upheaval.” Workers destroyed nearly $40 million worth of property. The strike galvanized the country. It convinced laborers of the need for institutionalized unions, persuaded businesses of the need for even greater political influence and government aid, and foretold a half century of labor conflict in the United States.

Retailers and advertisers helped create the massive markets needed for mass production, and corporate bureaucracies facilitated the management of giant new firms. A new class of professional managers operated between the worlds of workers and owners and ensured the efficient operation and administration of mass production and mass distribution.

Federal control and concentrated economic power seemed to promise a new era of rational economic management for the newly reunified, continental nation.