The document discusses the Great Depression and World War II. It describes how the stock market crash of 1929 led to widespread unemployment and economic struggles in the United States and Germany. By 1933, both countries had over 25% unemployment. Franklin Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler rose to power in the U.S. and Germany respectively and employed different strategies to try and reform their economies, with Roosevelt enacting the New Deal and Hitler reorganizing German industries. The document then discusses the lead up to World War II, with Germany and Japan aggressively expanding territorially and the U.S. eventually entering the war after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

1. The Great Depression & World War II Andrew Lelja History 141 71154

2. The Great Depression October 29, 1929, “Black Tuesday” the New York stock market began a tumble that lowered stock prices by almost half within three weeks. The crash crippled American banks, investors and consumers. It spread overseas and triggered declines in securities markets, decreasing lending, and deflating prices. Over 11,000 banks failed, national production was cut in half, and 13 million people unemployed.

3. The Great Depression Since the nineteenth century, business man have accepted the fact that every seven to eleven years there is a slump or slower time in the economy. Ever since the Industrial Revolution, the world was advancing quicker and the time between a slump was growing, except when we were at war. Before the war, migration numbers were at an all time high, but they slowed greatly during the war. After World War 1, some European economics monetary value decreased to nearly zero, and peoples incomes and savings disappeared.

4. The Great Depression In 1933, the Great Depression was at its low point, and the worst-hit countries were Germany and the United States. Unemployment was around 25% of the work force, somewhere between 13-16 million in America, and 6 million more in Germany. Both countries experience poor leadership which lead up to these poor unemployment figures Only a month apart, the two most powerful leaders took office on both of these countries. Franklin D. Roosevelt became president of the United States, and Adolf Hitler became Chancellor for Germany. Their methods and their personalities had enormous effects, both on their own nations and on the rest of the world.

5. The Great Depression Roosevelt appealed to the industrial workers, farmers, and the unemployed. Americans like Roosevelt because of his charm, calm confidence, gaiety, his rather cavalier approach to the problems of the day, and most of all because he cared about the mass suffering people were going through and wanted to reverse this. Hitler appealed to hard-working shopkeepers and peasants, and then after he achieved power he appealed to industrialists, large landowners, and the military. Hitler appealed to the Germans because his resentment of the rich and well born, ruthless and terrifying determination, always teetering on the brink of hysteria, combined with the aura of encapsulated remoteness that he projected to paralyze his opponents and turn his supporters into toadies.

6. The Great Depression Both Roosevelt and Hitler employed the latest technologies to dramatize themselves and to influence public opinion. They both increased their popularity by making public speaking events, utilized speaking on public radio, and being on the front lines where the problems were happening to show their support for their people. Roosevelt enacted the New Deal, which was a series of economic programs to help provide Relief, Recovery and Reform in America. Relief for the unemployed, recovery of the economy to normal levels, and reform of the financial system to prevent a repeat depression. Hitler reformed his economy by creating the 13 “estates” that governed all branches of industry.

7. World War II During the 1930s, Adolf Hitler rejected the Treaty of Versailles and boldly reasserted Germany's military power. The Nazi leader took Germany out of the League of Nations, then formed an alliance with Italy's fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini. He began a series of territorial seizures that culminated with the invasion of Poland in 1939, which plunged Europe into war. Roosevelt tried to stay out of the war, until France fell to Germany, he resolved to save England at all costs. In 1941, Congress passed Roosevelt’s Land-Lease bill, which gave billions of dollars to military aid to Britain and the Soviet Union. The Japanese launched their surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, and this definitely meant the U.S. was now in the war.

8. World War II If Britain and America had stood up to the dictators in the 1930s, the Second World War would never have happened. By the early 1930s, the world economy had collapsed into depression, and threats to peace were already apparent. In 1931, Japan had taken Manchuria on the Asian mainland from China, with only ineffectual protest from the League of Nations. After Hitler came to power in January 1933, he rapidly rearmed Germany and planned a vast Aryan empire in Europe and beyond. Mussolini invaded Ethiopia virtually unchallenged in 1935. Britain and America watched these events from the sidelines as they were busy recovering from the depression.

9. World War II Roosevelt used the Atlantic Charter, the agreement signed at the end of the Placentia Bay conference, to try to bind Britain and America in common war aims that would satisfy the American people and embody America's distinctive vision of the postwar world. Americas attempts to break down Britain's Imperial Preference system was weakened by the saving condition, inserted at British insistence, of "due respect for their existing obligations.“ What mattered to Churchill in the heat of war was how to identify America firmly with Britain's cause. A U-boat attacked the U.S. destroyer Greer, and Roosevelt used the opportunity to announce a state of virtual, though still undeclared, naval war. American warships now began escorting British and Canadian convoys, laden with vital military supplies and food.

10. World War II During World War II, Americans were spared the terrors of an occupying army, the destruction of their cities, the mass killing of civilians, and the ordeal of homelessness because the war wasn’t on U.S. soil. While factories in Europe and Japan were being bombed, wartime production finally lifted the United States out of the Great Depression. Unemployment disappeared, wages were high, and white women and African Americans were recruited to work in war industries. The American public rallied behind the war with far more conviction and unity than during World War I. Few Americans questioned fighting this war because of Hitler and Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor.

11. World War II After Pearl Harbor, dehumanizing, racist stereotypes of the Japanese pervaded the American media and stirred up popular hatred. Americans held the Japanese responsible for the war, and were targets of revenge for soldiers and civilians. The Japanese were racist too toward the white enemy, and in conspicuously different ways toward the other Asians who fell within their "Co-Prosperity Sphere. The “white man” thought of the Japanese as subhuman; they were little men, inferior to white Westerners in every physical, moral, and intellectual way.