Transcript File - Belter`s US History

UNITS 3-4 Review
Take notes, no you cannot use them on the test.
Gross National Product
• Between 1922 and 1928, the gross
national product (GNP)—the total
value of goods and services
produced in a nation during a
specific period—rose by 30 percent
• At a time when most people’s
understanding of the economic
matters was relatively limited, such
rapid growth triggered a feeling of
optimism that proved contagious
• That optimism, however,
led to reckless activities
Buying on Margin
• Here is how it worked:
• Imagine an investor wanted to buy
100 shares of stock in Company A
at $10 a share
• The total purchase price would be
$1,000
• To make this purchase, the investor
would pay just a portion of the $1,000—
say, for example, $500
• The investor would borrow the
other $500 from a stockbroker
• The understanding was that the
investor would pay off the loan
when he or she sold the stock
• Buying stocks with loans
from stockbrokers is known
as buying on margin
Buying on Margin Risks
• The terms of a margin loan made the
gamble even riskier for the investor
• Under these terms, brokers could force
investors to repay their loans if the
stock’s value fell below a certain point
• Such a demand was called a margin call
• In theory, margin calls ensured that
brokers would get their loans repaid
• Margin calls also meant that investors
could be in big trouble if their stocks
lost value suddenly
Black Tuesday
• When traders returned to work on Monday,
however, the good feelings from Friday had
completely evaporated
• As trading began that day, the market sank
like a stone
• The next day—Tuesday, October 29—was
the worst of all
• As panic completely overcame the markets,
investors dumped more than 16 million
shares of stock
• While the sell-offs of earlier days had
affected mainly the stocks of weaker
businesses, the collapse on Black Tuesday
affected the stock of even
the most
solid companies
Hoboes
• At the height of the Great
Depression, as many as a
quarter of a million teenagers
were wandering the nation,
riding the railroads from town
to town
• With no families to support or
protect them, they joined the
ranks of the jobless, homeless
wanderers known as hoboes
Farm Failures
• The hard times farmers faced in
the 1920s only worsened with the
onset of the Great Depression
• Widespread joblessness, and
poverty reduced Americans’
ability to buy food
• Many people simply went hungry
• With farmers producing more than
they could sell, farm prices sank
• By 1933 prices were down more
than 50 percent from their already
low 1929 levels
• Lower prices meant lower income
for farmers
An Appearance of Prosperity
 As corporate profits swelled,
companies hired additional
factory workers to keep up
with production needs
 Unemployment between 1923
and 1929 remained very low,
averaging around 3 percent
 Low unemployment, in turn,
slowed the growth of organized labor
 Union membership dropped
as employers expanded welfare
capitalism programs
Hoovervilles
• With no jobs or income, many
Americans lost their homes
• Property owners evicted tenants
who couldn’t pay rent, and banks
foreclosed on homeowners
• In many communities, sprawling
neighborhoodsof shacks sprang
up on the outskirts of town or in
public parks to house the newly
homeless
• These shantytowns came to be
known as Hoovervilles
• This was a bitter reference to
President Hoover, whom many
people blamed for the Great
Depression
The greatest toll of the Great
Depression may have been on
the minds and spirits of the
American people
 Even though millions of
people shared the same fate,
many of the unemployed saw
their situation as a sign of a
personal failure
 Accepting handouts
deeply troubled many
proud Americans
 The grim despair people felt
was reflected in a rise in
suicide rates in the early
1930s
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The Emotional Toil
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Dust Bowl
When wind storms came,
they stripped away the
topsoil and blew it
hundreds of miles away
◦ In some of the worst storms,
dust reached as far as the
Atlantic Coast
◦ Drifting mounds of dust choked
crops and buried farm
equipment
◦ The fine dust blew into homes
through drafty windows and
under doors
◦ Year after year, storms came
and wreaked destruction
◦ The hardest hit area—including
parts of Oklahoma, Kansas,
Colorado, New Mexico, and
Texas—became known as the
Dust Bowl
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The plight of the migrants
captured the imagination
of some of America’s
greatest writers and
artists, including author
John Steinback and singersongwriter Woody Guthrie
◦ Guthrie’s songs about the Dust
Bowl describe the disaster’s
effect on the people it touched
◦ Guthrie’s lyrics speak to the
hardships and struggles not
only of the migrants who left
the Dust Bowl but also of all
Americans hit hard by the
Great Depression
◦ For much of the decade the
Depression seemingly defied most
government efforts to defeat it
◦ The American people were
forced to fend for themselves

Okies
The migrants were called
Okies, after the state of
Oklahoma
◦ The term was inaccurate,
since the migrants came
from a number of
different states
◦ It was also meant
to be insulting
◦ The Great Plains migrants
were often met by
resistance and outright
discrimination
“Rugged Individualism”
 Hoover believed that unnecessary
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government not only threatened
prosperity but also dimmed the
very spirit of the American people
A key part of this spirit was what
he called “rugged individualism”
Hoover did not reject the idea
of government oversight or
regulation of certain business
Nor did he advocate letting people
and businesses do exactly as they
pleased
Yet he believed deeply that it was
vital for the nation’s well-being not
to destroy people’s belief in their
own responsibility and power
Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act
 The Smoot-Hawley Tariff
Act was a disaster
 The tariff rates were set
at historically high levels
 When European nations
responded with tariffs on
American goods, trade
plunged
 By 1934 global trade was
down roughly two thirds
from 1929 levels
The 1932 Campaign

During the campaign,
Roosevelt offered some
general ideas about what
he would do as president
 He
promised relief for the
poor and more public works
programs—governmentfunded building projects—that
would provide jobs

He also talked about
lowering tariffs
Eleanor Roosevelt
In her own right, Eleanor
became a powerful
political force
 She threw her energies into
several major social issues,
including the campaign to
stop the lynching of African
Americans
 In the process, she helped
change the role of First
Lady
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The Banking Crisis

Two days later, Roosevelt
took action
 The
shaky state of the nation’s banks
had led many people to withdraw
all their money from their accounts
 They feared losing their savings
if the bank collapsed
 Such large-scale withdrawals could—
and did—ruin even healthy banks
 To stop this cycle, Roosevelt issued an
executive order temporarily closing
all of the nation’s banks
 The president called
it a bank holiday
The New Deal

The New Deal came to include
a wide range of measures
aimed at accomplishing three
goals
 (1)
relief for those suffering the
effects of the Great Depression
 (2) recovery of the depressed
economy
 (3) reforms that would help
prevent serious economic crises
in the future
Emergency Banking Act

Within days, banks began
to reopen with government
assurances that they were
on solid footing
 Ordinary
people, who had been
frantically taking money out of
their banks, started to return funds
 Some banks never did reopen,
but the crisis was over

In just over a week, the nation
had regained crucial confidence
in its financial system
Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation

In the days ahead, Congress
enacted additional banking
reforms
 The
Glass-Steagall Act of 1933
created the Federal Deposit
Insurance Corporation, or FDIC
 This provided government
insurance for depositors’ savings
 Individual depositors no longer
needed to fear losing their
savings if their bank collapsed
Civilian Conservation Corps
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The Civilian Conservation Corps,
or CCC, was typical of the reform
programs passed during the
Hundred Days
Established in March 1933, it sought
to address an immediate problem:
unemployment among young men
18 to 25 years old
Americans enrolled in the CCC
were paid to work on a variety
of conservation projects, such as
planting trees and improving parks
CCC workers lived in army-style
camps and were required to send
most of their earnings to their families
“Alphabet Soup”

The NIRA also included
$3.3 billion for publicworks programs
 These
were managed through
a new agency called the Public
Works Administration, or PWA
 The New Deal was famous for
creating an “alphabet soup” of
government agencies known by
their initials
 Labor unions benefited, too, from
the NIRA
 For the first time, labor got federal
protection for the right to organize
The Federal Securities Act and the SEC

The Federal Securities Act
emerged as a major reform
effort of the Hundred Days
 The
measure forced companies to
share certain financial information
with the public
 The purpose was to help investors
and to restore confidence in the
fairness of the markets
 In 1934 Congress established the
Securities and Exchange Commission
 The SEC would serve as a government
watchdog over the nation’s stock
markets
Civil Works Administration
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Yet FDR and the Congress
kept trying, passing significant
legislation in the period after
the Hundred Days
In November 1933, for example,
the Civil Works Administration
(CWA) was created
This agency provided winter
employment to 4 million workers
CWA crews built miles of
highways and sewer lines,
hundreds of airports, and more
Opposition from the Courts

The American people supported
the New Deal’s attempts to bring
change to the economy
 The
courts, however, were more
skeptical
 The New Deal changed in basic ways
the relationship between the American
people and their government
 It also threatened to alter the balance
of power among the president, the
Congress, and the courts
The court-packing plan
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Frustrated that the courts had struck
down many New Deal programs,
Roosevelt surprised Congress with a
plan to reorganize the nation’s courts
The plan would give the president
power to appoint many new judges and
expand the Supreme Court by up to
six justices
The president argued that changes
were needed to make the courts more
efficient
Most observers saw it as a clumsy
effort to “pack” the Supreme Court with
friendly justices—and a dangerous
attempt to upset the constitutional
balance of power
National labor relations act
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The law, also known as the National Labor Relations
Act, was stronger than NIRA
The act outlawed a number of anti labor practices,
such as the creation of company-sponsored unions
It also established a powerful new National Labor
Relations Board
The NLRB was given the authority
to
conduct voting in workplaces to determine whether
employees wanted union representation
The NLRB could require businesses
to accept
the voting results
With these new legal tools, organized labor
membership surged by millions in the years to come
AFRICAN AMERICAN SUPPORT
FOR ROOSEVELT
Although President Roosevelt’s
record was not perfect, African
American voters apparently
decided that their best hopes
lay with the Democratic Party
 Staunchly Republican since
the Civil War, a majority of
African Americans for the
first time in history voted
Democratic in the 1934
midterm elections
 This support continued in
the 1936 presidential election
as well
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MOVIES OF THE 1930S
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One study in 1935 showed that
nearly 80 million of the nation’s
127 million Americans attended
a movie each week
Throughout the decade, movie
studios produced some 5,000
feature-length films
A few of these movies focused
on the hardships of life during
the Great Depression
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Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath was
turned into a successful Hollywood film
in 1940
Another example of a successful
Depression-themed film was I Am
a Fugitive from a Chain Gang
This told the tale of a jobless man
who is lured into a life of crime
Make Way for Tomorrow portrayed
the financial hardships of an older
couple
Changing Relationships
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The new role for government
meant a much bigger government
Dozens of new programs and
agencies put people in contact
with their government in ways they
had not experienced before
Americans now began to look
regularly to government for help
Roosevelt and the New Deal were
both praised and hated for this
For some, this change brought
a welcome shift from the laissezfaire policies of the 1920s
To others, it threatened the basic
character that had always held
the country together
Joseph Stalin
 In the Soviet Union, communism
was already established when
Joseph Stalin came to power
in the mid-1920s
 Communism and fascism
represent opposite political
extremes
 Yet there were similarities
between the Soviet system
under Stalin and the Fascist
systems
 Like the Fascists, Stalin violently
crushed his political opponents
Joseph Stalin
 Also like Hitler and Mussolini,
Joseph Stalin created a myth
of his own greatness
 Throughout the Soviet Union,
towns and cities were renamed
for him
 His portrait was displayed
everywhere
 Stalin’s domination of all
aspects of Soviet life made him
one of the era’s most notorious
totalitarian dictators
Mussolini and the Birth of Fascism
 For Mussolini, fascism was
a system of government that
stressed the glory of the
state
 He summed up the principle
of fascism with the slogan,
“Everything in the State,
nothing outside of the State,
nothing against the State”
 The rights and concerns of
individuals were of little
importance
The Munich Conference
 Hoping to end the crisis, British Prime
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minister Neville Chamberlain and French
premier Edouard Daladier met with Hitler
As in the past, the British and French
seemed most interested in avoiding
armed conflict
At a meeting in Munich, Chamberlain and
Daladier agreed to allow Hitler to annex
the Sudetenland—that is, make it part of
Germany
Czechoslovakia, which had no
representative at the Munich
meeting, protested the agreement
Chamberlain, however, boasted of
having achieved “peace for our time”
In reality, the world was
on the verge of war
World War II
Starts
 British prime minister Neville Chamberlain
believed that his policy toward Hitler of
appeasement, or giving in to aggressive
demands to maintain peace, had prevented
the outbreak of a needless war
 Yet others believed that Hitler was
not going to stop after gaining the
Sudetenland, as he had promised
Chamberlain
 One such critic was a rival politician
named Winston Churchill
 He condemned Chamberlain’s
appeasement as cowardly and likely to
lead to war
Japan and Manchuria
 The League of Nations
strongly criticized Japan for
the invasion of Manchuria
 In response, Japan simply
withdrew from the League
of Nations, which was
unable or unwilling to take
any strong action against
Japan
 The powerlessness of the
League was clear for the
world to see
American Isolationism
 The desire to avoid involvement
in foreign wars was known as
isolationism
 This view was shared by both liberals
and conservatives in the 1930s
 Isolationists were not necessarily
pacifists, or people who do not
believe in the use of military force
 Most Americans remained ready to
defend their country and its
interests
 Isolationists simply wanted to
preserve America’s freedom to
choose the time and place for such
action
Tensions in East
Asia
 Then in 1937, Japan began
a
war against China
 The attack was marked
by great brutality
 Japanese troops massacred
an estimated 200,000 to 300,000
Chinese in the capital of Nanjing
 In 1940 Japan formed a military
alliance with Germany and Italy
 The three nations became known
as the Axis Powers
German Forces turn to
West8, 1939,
the
On September
Great Britain and France
declared war on Germany
 They became known as
the Allies
 There was little they could
do, however, to slow Hitler
in Poland
 And even before the
fighting there had ended,
Hitler was planning his
attack on his new enemies
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In World War I the Allies had
learned to protect ships against
U-boats by forming convoys
Early in World War II, however,
the British (and the Americans)
did not have enough vessels to
form effective convoys
This made it easy for U-boats
to attack supply ships bound
for Great Britain
The Germans also developed
new tactics to increase U-boat
effectiveness
One example was the so-called
wolf pack, in which U-boats
hunted in groups and often
attacked at night
Lend-Lease Act
 Following his re-election, Roosevelt
continued his drive to provide aid to
the Allies in their fight against
Hitler’s armies
 In a speech at the end of December
1940, Roosevelt declared his goal of
making the United States the
“arsenal of democracy”
 An arsenal is a place where weapons
are stored
 Soon afterward, Congress passed
the Lend-Lease Act
 This allowed the nation to send
weapons to Great Britain regardless
of its ability to pay
Quarantine Speech
 Roosevelt compared the spread
of war to the spread of a
contagious disease
 Such diseases can be stopped, he
said, by a quarantine
 This means identifying the sick
and separating them from the
healthy
 Roosevelt urged the
United
States to work with peace-loving
countries to quarantine
aggressive nations and stop the
spread of war
 For this reason, the speech was
referred to as the Quarantine
Speech
Japanese
Aggression
 American officials were correct:
Japan had decided on war
 For month, Japanese military leaders
had been developing plans for a
surprise attack on the American naval
base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii
 This base was home to the United
States Navy’s Pacific Fleet
 The Japanese plan called for aircraft
carriers to approach the island of
Oahu, where Pearl Harbor was
located, from the north
 Japanese war planes loaded with
bombs and torpedoes would lift off
from the carriers and destroy as
many American ships and planes as
possible
Declaration of War
 On December 8, 1941, he
asked Congress for a
declaration of war
 America was now at war with
Japan
 Three days later, Germany
and Italy declared war on the
United States
 The nation had entered World
War II as one of
the
Allies
The Atomic Bomb
 The U.S. had a program
to build an atomic bomb
 The Manhattan Project
continued throughout the
war
 In late 1944 leaders of the
project declared that the
bomb would be ready by
the summer of 1945
World War II placed huge
demands on the United States
 Not only did millions of
Americans serve in the armed
forces, but people at home had
to make do with less—including
less food and less fuel for
harvesting and transporting
goods
 To help overcome these
shortages and preserve
precious resources for
the military, Americans
by the millions planted
“victory gardens”
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Meeting the food needs of the
military took top priority in the United
States
The planting of victory gardens was
one way in which Americans filled
these needs
Victory gardens alone did not solve
all the nation’s food needs
Some foods could not be produced
in home gardens, and there was
simply not enough of certain
products to go around
As a result, the United States began
rationing food shortly after the nation
entered the war
Rationing means limiting the amount
of a certain product each individual
can get
Millions of Americans
made contributions to
the war effort by taking
jobs in factories or
offices
 In addition, life in the
American home
changed significantly
as citizens of all ages
did their part to help
the cause of victory in
Europe and the Pacific

Americans supported the
war effort not just with their
trash but also with their
treasure
 They did this by buying
billions of dollars worth
of war bonds
 The money invested by
millions of ordinary citizens
helped pay for the vast
quantities of shipping,
aircraft, and other
weaponry being produced
in American factories
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Hitler, however, was not
going to let the Allies simply
march through Italy and into
Europe
German forces rushed to
stop them
Despite German resistance,
the Allies made steady
progress at first
Taking part in the fighting
were the Tuskegee Airmen
This was a segregated unit
of African Americans, the
first ever to receive training
as pilots in the U.S. military
African Americans in the Workforce
 The war created an enormous demand for
factory workers
 White women took many of these jobs
 African Americans found new opportunities
as well
 As factories increased war production,
thousands found jobs that had in the past
been unavailable to them
 Yet even with these new opportunities came
harsh reminders of widespread
attitudes
racist
 For example, African Americans were often
forced to take the lowest-paying jobs,
regardless of their skills or experience
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This judgment, it turned out,
was premature
On December 16, 1944, the
Germans launched a surprise
offensive of their own
The attack was known as the
Battle of the Bulge
This referred to the bulge in
the Allied battle lines created
by the German advance
For several days, Hitler’s
forces threatened to win back
vital ground from the Allies
 Why
did the Nazi government
single out Jews especially for
mistreatment?
 The answer has to do with
anti-Semitism, which is hostility
toward or prejudice against Jews
 Germany after World War I suffered
blows to its economy and pride
 Adolf Hitler rose to power in part
by promising to return Germany
to its former glory
 He also told the Germans that
they came from a superior race—
the Aryans
Kristallnacht sent a strong
message to those Jews still in
Germany: “Get out!”
 Over 100,000 managed to leave
Germany in the month following
the attacks
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• Many others found it difficult to leave
the country
Nazi laws had left many German
Jews without money or property,
and most countries were
unwilling to take in poor
immigrants
 Other countries, such as the
United States, had limited the
number of Germans who could
enter the country
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 From
the first days of World
War II, instances of Nazi
mass-killings of Jews and
other civilians occurred
 In many Polish towns, German
soldiers rounded up Jews and
shot them on the spot
 In Bedzin, soldiers forced
several hundred Jews into
the local synagogue, or
Jewish house of worship,
and set it on fire
 Stories such as these were
repeated across Poland
 As
bloody as the work of the
Einsatgruppen was, Nazi
leaders were not satisfied
 For them, the killing was not
going quickly enough
 It was also proving difficult
on the men who performed
it
 Thus, Nazi officials adopted
a plan known as the Final
Solution
 This involved the
establishment of
six new camps
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After Pearl Harbor, government
officials began to fear that
people of German, Italian, and
especially Japanese descent
would help the enemy
Many Italians and Germans
who had immigrated to the
United States were forced
to carry identification cards
Thousands were placed
in prison camps
But the worst treatment
was reserved for Japanese
Americans
In general, Hollywood was a
willing helper in the war effort
 The big movie studios made
a series of patriotic films that
featured soldiers and workers
on the home front
 To assist the studios, the OWI
produced a guide called
“The Government
Information Manual
for the Motion Picture”
 This offered tips to
ensure that Hollywood films
helped promote what the
government felt were the
right attitudes about the war
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The Allies make Progress
 The Battle of Midway had
changed the entire balance
of power in the Pacific
 Japanese naval power, which
had been a key to its early
success, was greatly reduced
 Now on a more equal
footing with the Japanese, the
Americans began to make plans
of their own in the Pacific
Kamikaze Attack
 The Battle of Leyte Gulf
also saw the first major use
of a new Japanese weapon—
the kamikaze attack
 The term kamikaze is a Japanese
word meaning “divine wind”
 It refers to a famous event in Japanese
history—a sudden storm that drove
off a fleet preparing to invade Japan
in the 1200s
 In World War II, however, a kamikaze
was a pilot who loaded his aircraft
with bombs and deliberately crashed
it into an enemy ship
Battle of Okinawa
 The Japanese lost a staggering
110,000 troops in the fighting
 As on Iwo Jima, their willingness
to fight on when death was certain
filled the Americans with
amazement—and dread
 In spite of the terrible losses, the
Americans finally gained control
of the island in June 1945
 The lessons learned on Okinawa
would have a major impact
on the final days of the war
Bataan Death March
 The Japanese provided little food
or water
 Thousands of soldiers perished
on this so-called Bataan Death
March
 Those who completed this
terrible journey did not fare
much better
 In the Japanese prison camp, lack
of food and medicine claimed
hundreds more American and
Filipino lives
The Allies Press On
 American ingenuity and diversity also
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played a role in the Allied success
One example was the hundreds of Native
Americans of the Navajo nation who
served in the Marines as code talkers
Their main job was translating messages
into a coded version of the Navajo
language
This unwritten language is so complex
that the Japanese code-breakers were
never able to figure it out
Navajo code talkers could quickly and
accurately transmit vital information
about troop movements, enemy
positions, and more
Their contributions helped the Allies
win many major battles
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Soon after the fall of France
in June 1940, the British and
Italians began a battle for
North Africa
◦ This territory was vital to the Allies
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By controlling it, the British
could protect shipping on the
Mediterranean Sea against
Italian attack
This shipping was a lifeline
by which the British could
efficiently get oil through the
Suez Canal from the Middle
East
Without oil Great Britain would
not be able to defend itself,
much less defeat the Axis
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The fighting in Italy
was slow and difficult
partly because the
Allies could not devote
all their fighting
resources to the battle
Many of these
resources were being
held for the planned
invasion of France
This plan came to be
known as Operation
Overlord
Rebuilding Europe and Japan
 The United States also faced
the difficult task of helping to
rebuild Europe and Japan
 In Japan, General Douglas
MacArthur directed the effort
to create a new, democratic
government and rebuild the
nation’s economy
 MacArthur skillfully walked
a fine line between showing
respect for Japanese traditions
and insisting on democratic values
 He helped the Japanese create
a new constitution that reflected
many American ideals, such as
equality for women
The Yalta Conference
 A key goal of the Yalta
Conference was to reach
an agreement on what to do
with the soon-to-be-conquered
Germany
 The three leaders agreed to
divide the country into four
sectors
 The Americans, Soviets, British,
and French would each occupy
one of these sectors
 To occupy means to take
control of a place by placing
troops in it
The Atomic Bomb
 Truman formed a group to
advise him about using the
bomb
 This group debated where
the bomb should be used and
whether the Japanese should
be warned
 After carefully considering all
the options, Truman decided
to drop the bomb on a Japanese
city
 There would be no warning