The stock market crash of 1929 combined with the other weaknesses in the nation's economy to bring on the Great Depression of the 1930's, the worst and longest depression in U.S. history. The Great Depression was not limited to the United States. It struck almost every country in the world. In some countries, the hard times helped bring to power dictators who promised to restore the economy. The dictators included Adolf Hitler in Germany and a group of military leaders in Japan. Once in power, both Hitler and the Japanese rulers began seizing neighboring lands. Their actions led to World War II, the most destructive conflict in history.

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Great Depression

The United States in the Great Depression. The United States suffered through the Great Depression for more than 10 years. During the Depression, millions of workers lost their jobs, and large numbers of farmers were forced to abandon their farms. Poverty swept through the nation on a scale never before experienced.

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Dust Bowl in the Great Plains

At the height of the Depression in 1933, about 13 million Americans were out of work, and many others had only part-time jobs. Farm income declined so sharply that more than 750,000 farmers lost their land. The Dust Bowl, the result of a terrible drought on the western Great Plains, wiped out many farmers (see Dust Bowl). Hundreds of thousands of people lost their life savings as a result of bank failures.

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Bread lines

Throughout the Depression, many Americans went hungry. People stood in "bread lines" and went to "soup kitchens" to get food provided by charities. Often, two or more families lived crowded together in a small apartment. Some homeless people built shacks of tin and scraps of wood in vacant areas. They called these clumps of shacks Hoovervilles, a scornful reference to Herbert Hoover, president when the Depression struck.

Recovery and reform. Early in the Great Depression, Hoover promised that prosperity was "just around the corner." But the Depression deepened as the election of 1932 approached. The Republicans slated Hoover for reelection. The Democrats chose Franklin D. Roosevelt. In his campaign, Roosevelt promised government action to end the Great Depression and reforms to avoid future depressions. He won a landslide victory.

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Civilian Conservation Corps

Roosevelt's program for recovery was called the New Deal. Its many provisions included public works projects to provide jobs, relief for farmers, aid to manufacturing firms, and regulation of banks. A solidly Democratic Congress approved almost every measure Roosevelt proposed. Many new government agencies were set up to help fight the Depression. They included the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration (later the Work Projects Administration), both of which provided jobs; the Farm Credit Administration, which extended credit to farmers; and the Social Security Board, which developed the Social Security system of payments to retired workers and workers with disabilities.

The New Deal offered direct aid to the American people. It provided subsidies (payments) for farmers, tuition grants for needy students, public works jobs for the unemployed, pensions for the elderly, electric power for rural homes, and food for the desperate and hungry.

Roosevelt's efforts to end the Depression made him one of the most popular U.S. presidents. The voters elected him to four terms. No other president had ever won election more than twice, and in 1951 the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution provided that no one could be elected to the presidency more than twice.

The New Deal helped relieve the hardship of many Americans. However, hard times dragged on until World War II military spending stimulated the economy. See Great Depression; New Deal.

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Attack on Pearl Harbor

World War II began on Sept. 1, 1939, when German troops overran Poland. The United Kingdom, France, and other countries (called the Allies) went to war against Germany. At first, the United States stayed out of the war. But on Dec. 7, 1941, Japanese planes bombed the U.S. military base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The United States declared war on Japan on December 8. Three days later Germany and Italy, Germany's chief ally, declared war on the United States.

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Women factory workers during World War II

The American people backed the war effort with fierce dedication. About 15 million American men served in the armed forces. They ranged from teen-agers to men well over 40. About 338,000 women served in the armed forces. At home, automobile plants and other factories were converted into defense plants where airplanes, ships, weapons, and war supplies were made. The country had a shortage of civilian men, and so thousands of women worked in the defense plants. "Rosie the Riveter," described in a popular song as “making history working for victory,” became the symbol of women workers. Even children took part in the war effort. Boys and girls collected used tin cans, old tires, and other "junk" that could be recycled and used for war supplies.

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Atomic bomb blast

On May 7, 1945, after a long, bitter struggle, the Americans and other Allies forced the mighty German empire to surrender. Vice President Harry S. Truman had become president after Roosevelt's death about a month earlier. The Allies demanded Japan's surrender, but Japan continued to fight. Truman then made one of the major decisions in history. He ordered the use of the atomic bomb, a weapon many times more destructive than any previous weapon. An American plane dropped the first atomic bomb used in warfare on Hiroshima, Japan, on Aug. 6, 1945. A second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki on August 9. Japan formally surrendered on September 2, and the war ended. For more details, see World War II.

Postwar prosperity. After World War II, the United States entered the greatest period of economic growth in its history. Periods of inflation (rapidly rising prices) and recession (business slumps) occurred. But overall, businesses and people prospered. Prosperity spread to more Americans than ever before, resulting in major changes in American life. However, not all people shared in the prosperity. Millions of Americans, including a high percentage of the nation's blacks, lived in poverty. The persistence of poverty amid prosperity brought on a period of active social protest and sparked an ambitious and controversial series of reforms.

Military spending during World War II drew the United States out of the Great Depression. Major industries, such as automobile manufacturing and housing construction, had all but stopped during the war. After the war, these industries resumed production on a much larger scale than ever. Such relatively new industries as electronics, plastics, frozen foods, and jet aircraft became booming businesses.

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Fashions of 1950's

The shortage of goods during the war and other factors combined to create a vast market for American products. A population boom increased the number of consumers. Between 1950 and 1960 alone, the population of the United States grew by about 28 million. Labor unions became stronger than ever, and they gained high wages and other benefits for their members. Minimum wage laws and other government regulations also helped give workers a greater share of the profits of business. These developments also meant that more Americans had more money to spend on goods.

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Spread of television

Prosperity and technological advances changed American life in other ways. Television, an experimental device before the war, became a feature of most American homes during the 1950's. This wonder of modern science brought scenes of the world into American living rooms at the flick of a switch. Fascinated, large numbers of people made watching TV one of their main leisure-time activities. New appliances made household work easier. They included automatic washers, driers, dishwashers, and garbage disposals.

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Suburban housing developments, 1954

Suburban growth. After the war, millions of people needed, and could afford, new housing. Construction companies built huge clusters of houses in suburbs around the nation's cities. The suburbs attracted people for many reasons. They offered newer housing, more open space, and—usually—better schools than the central cities could provide.

The growth of suburbs also deepened racial divisions. Between 1950 and 1970, about 7 million white Americans left central cities for overwhelmingly white suburban communities. In the same period, almost 3 million blacks moved from the South to northern cities.

A rise in automobile ownership accompanied the suburban growth. The majority of suburbanites worked in the central cities and depended on cars to get to and from work. Most suburbs lacked good local transportation systems, and so families relied on cars to go shopping or almost anywhere else. By 1960, over three-fourths of all American families owned a car, and almost a fifth owned more than one. Increased automobile traffic led to the building of a nationwide network of superhighways. Increased car ownership and greater prosperity enabled more people than ever to take vacation trips. New motels, fast-service restaurants, and gas stations sprang up to serve the tourists.

Poverty and discrimination. Despite the general prosperity, millions of Americans still lived in poverty. The poor included members of all ethnic groups, but the plight of the nation's poor blacks seemed especially bleak. Ever since emancipation, blacks in both the North and South had faced discrimination in jobs, housing, education, and other areas. A lack of education and jobs made poverty among blacks widespread.

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Troops escort black students into school

During the early 1900's, blacks, joined by many whites, had begun a movement to extend civil rights to blacks. The movement gained momentum after World War II. Efforts of civil rights leaders resulted in several Supreme Court decisions that attacked discrimination. In the best-known case, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954), the court ruled compulsory segregation in public schools illegal.

Despite the gains, many civil rights leaders became dissatisfied with the slow progress of their movement. In the mid-1950's, black Southerners began organizing demonstrations protesting discrimination. In 1955, Martin Luther King, Jr., a young Baptist minister, led a successful bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama. A supporter of nonviolent civil disobedience, King became a prominent leader of the emerging civil rights movement. Public protests soon became a major tool of Americans seeking change.

The Cold War. The United States and the Soviet Union both fought on the side of the Allies during World War II. But after the war, the two countries became bitter enemies. The Soviet Union, as a Communist country, opposed democracy. It helped Communists take over most of Eastern Europe and also aided Communists who seized control of China.

The Soviet Union and China then set out to spread Communism to other lands. The United States, as the world's most powerful democratic country, took on the role of defending non-Communist nations threatened by Communist take-over. The containment of Communism became the major goal of postwar U.S. foreign policy.

The struggle between the U.S.-led non-Communist nations and the Soviet Union and its Communist allies became known as the Cold War. The conflict was so named because it did not lead to fighting, or a "hot" war, on a major scale.

Both the United States and the Soviet Union built up arsenals of nuclear weapons. The nuclear weapons made each nation capable of destroying the other, and the threat of nuclear war made both sides cautious. As a result, Cold War strategy emphasized propaganda, threats of force, and aid to weak nations. The United Nations (UN), founded in 1945, provided a forum where the nations could try to settle their Cold War disputes.

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Dwight Eisenhower

Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower, the first two presidents of the Cold War era, pledged U.S. military support to any nation threatened by Communism. In 1949, the United States and 11 other nations established the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a military alliance designed to discourage Soviet attack. In addition, the United States provided billions of dollars to non-Communist nations. See Cold War.

The Korean War resulted from the Cold War friction. On June 25, 1950, troops from Communist North Korea, equipped by the Soviet Union, invaded South Korea. The UN called on member nations to help restore peace. Truman sent U.S. troops to aid South Korea, and the UN sent a fighting force made up of troops from many nations. The war lasted three years, ending in a truce on July 27, 1953. See Korean War.

McCarthyism. The spread of Communism caused deep divisions within the United States. Conservatives blamed the Roosevelt and Truman administrations for allowing Communism to make its postwar gains. Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, a Wisconsin Republican, made numerous charges—usually with little evidence—that Communists had infiltrated the government, the entertainment industry, and other fields. The charges led to widespread accusations and investigations of suspected Communist activities in the United States. Conservatives believed the investigations were needed to save the country from Communist control. Liberals charged McCarthy and his followers with conducting "witch hunts”—that is, trying to fix guilt on people without evidence. See McCarthyism.