On October 29, 1929, American markets collapsed in a single day, wiping out fortunes and triggering a decade of suffering. Frances Millicent Shaw traces the full arc of the Great Depression — from the structural causes of the crash through Hoover's failed response, FDR's Hundred Days, the alphabet agencies, and the human cost statistics cannot capture.
The book covers the banking crisis and the Fireside Chat that restored public confidence, Frances Perkins driving Social Security through Congress, the WPA's remarkable cultural output, and the racial inequalities baked into New Deal programmes that evicted 100,000 Black sharecroppers while excluding millions more. It also delivers an honest reckoning: court-packing, the 1937 Roosevelt Recession, and the uncomfortable conclusion that it was World War II — not the New Deal — that finally ended the Depression.
The institutions Roosevelt built — the FDIC, Social Security, the SEC — outlasted the decade. The question he left unresolved has not