Hoover example essay topic

In the 1920's, a complicated tangle of private loans, Allied war debts, and German reparations payments. After World War I was over, the United States had become a creditor nation in the sum of about $16 billion and Britain lost its position as the top lending nation. American investors loaned some $10 billion to foreigners in the 1920's but not as much as the British did during the prewar period. The debt that the US Treasury loaned to the Allies during and after the war totaled to $10 billion. When the US wanted to be paid, the Allies protested that it was unfair that they must repay since they used that loan to purchase America's goods and war supplies. Moreover, the Allies argued that America's isolationism made it impossible for them to earn money to pay their debts.

With America pressuring them, Britain and France in turn pressured Germany to pay them for their reparations. However, Germany did not have the income to repay all of its debt and it went crazy to come up with it. Its society teetered on the brink of mad anarchy and the whole international house of finance threatened to collapse into chaos. Charles Daw as and his proposal, the Dawes Plan of 1924, brought a solution to the financial mess of the European nations and the US. The plan helped improved every-nation's circumstances and helped Germany to repay its debt, except to the US. President Hoover was the ideal businessperson's choice.

He was a self-made millionaire and was against anything suggesting socialism, paternalism, or "planned economy". Herbert Hoover won in a landslide against Alfred E. Smith, four-time governor of New York, in the presidential election of 1928. When Hoover took office in the late 1920's, soaring stocks on the bull market continued to make financial gains. The "long boom" finally came to fevered freefall on October 29, 1919, also known as Black Tuesday.

Triggered by the British, they raised their interest rates in an effort to bring back capital lured abroad by American investments. This led to the panicky Black Tuesday when 16,410,030 shares of stocks were sold in a save-who-may scramble. Wall Street became a wailing wall as gloom and doom replaced boom, and suicides increased alarmingly. By 1930, the Great Depression had become a national calamity. Hoover's reputation as a wonder-worker and efficiency engineer crashed shortly after the stock market did. As a "rugged individualist", shrank from the heresy of government handouts.

He feared that a government doling out doles would weaken, perhaps destroying, the national fiber. He came up a compromise that would aid the hard-pressed railroads, banks, and rural credit corporations in hopes that if financial health were restored at the top of the economic pyramid then it would trickle down to the unemployed at the bottom. Critics sneered at the "Great Humanitarian" for feeding the faraway Belgians but would not use federal funds to feed needy Americans. Hostile commentators remarked that he was willing to lend federal money to the big bankers, who allegedly had plunged the country into the mess. In extreme cases, "ragged individualists" slept under "Hoover blankets" (old newspapers), fought over contents of garbage cans, and lived in tin-and-paper shantytowns called, "Hooverville's". Hoover began his office term with prosperity and success but his reluctance to become actively involved in the depression turned him into a symbol of depression failure.