John Moser

Hoover was a lame duck.

There was very little that he could do at that point.

He was calling on Roosevelt to make guarantees that he wouldn't abandon the gold standard or do stuff like that.

FDR says, I'm not going to tie myself in advance of anything.

Fact is, FDR wasn't sure what he was going to do in those months.

But meanwhile, there's almost chaos.

And it's during this point that unemployment shoots up to like 25% that has never been exceeded in American history.

That at least where we've kept records, it was during that period that you saw the worst wave of bank failures.

You had states announcing that all the banks in their states are going to close.

And you have to think about in a day before debit cards and ATMs where everybody paid by cash, or I guess they could write a check, but most people paid with cash.

If the banks were closed, you were not going to get money.

You were not going to be able to buy stuff.

So this was a really terrifying several months.

Yeah, that's more associated with the actual stock market crash, the ideas of brokers jumping out of windows because they've lost everything.

It happened.

It's definitely exaggerated.

If you look at the suicide rate, it doesn't really make a difference in the overall suicide rate.

Yeah, especially the most memorable images are from rural America.

And rural America was suffering from a number of problems.

The 1920s weren't all that good for farmers either because the high prices for agricultural products that characterized World War I, the prices throughout the 20s were much lower than they had been during the war.