The Great Depression

Factors Leading to the Great Depression

The stock market crash on October 24, 1929, marked the beginning of the Great Depression in the United States. The day became known as "Black Thursday." Many factors had led to that moment. World War I, changing American ideas of debt and consumption, and an unregulated stock market all played pivotal roles in the economic collapse.

World War I transformed the United States from a relatively small player on the international stage into a center of global finance. American industry had supported the Allied war effort, resulting in a massive influx of cash into the US economy. As the war interrupted existing global trade relationships, the United States stepped in as the main supplier of goods, including weapons and ammunition. These purchases left European countries deeply in debt to the United States.

After the war, the United States began a period of diplomatic isolation. It enacted and raised tariffs in 1921 and 1922 to bolster American industry and keep foreign products out.

In the 1920s (the “Roaring Twenties”) many American consumers, assuming economic prosperity would continue indefinitely, took on large amounts of personal debt, sometimes at extremely high interest rates. Factories depended on these consumers continuing to purchase their goods.

Finally, the stock market, based on Wall Street in New York City, was loosely regulated. There were few rules to ensure invested money was safe. Speculators began to deliberately manipulate stock prices, buying and selling in order to increase their returns. Only a small number of Americans purchased stock directly, most believing that the market values would continue to increase. Many investors, comfortable with debt, bought stocks “on the margin,” using a small personal investment to pay a portion of the actual share value while borrowing the rest from a bank or other lender. They assumed the stock price would rise and they would be able to repay the balance of the loan from their investment profits. This system worked well, until the stock decreased in value.

The Crash

Impact on Immigration

The Great Depression also had a serious impact on an already xenophobic and exclusionary American immigration system.

As a result of the worsening Depression, President Herbert Hoover instructed the State Department to begin rigorously enforcing a “likely to become a public charge” (LPC) clause from a 1917 immigration law.

This clause was designed to exclude any immigrant who lacked the economic means to be self-sufficient and who could potentially become a financial burden on the state. By 1930, unemployment had reached 8.7%, and consular officials were instructed to more rigidly enforce the LPC clause. They were informed that “any alien wage earner without special means of support coming to the United States during the present period of depression is, therefore, likely to become a public charge,” and should be rejected for an immigration visa.

These regulations, forcing potential immigrants to prove they were financially stable and could support themselves indefinitely without getting a job, limited the number of applicants who qualified for immigration visas. In the 1930s, when the Nazis began stripping Jews of their financial holdings prior to allowing them to immigrate, many had trouble passing the rigorous financial qualifications for entry to America.

Throughout the 1930s, the majority of Americans opposed increasing immigration to the United States. Many cited economic concerns, fearing that immigrants would compete for jobs, which were scarce during the Depression.

The Global Great Depression

The United States was a central part of the international economic system, and its national economic disaster could not be contained. It spread across the globe. It hit particularly hard in Europe where multiple nations were indebted to the United States. During World War I, the Allies (Britain and France) had bought a great deal of military weapons and products using loans from the United States. When the United States called for those loans to be repaid to stabilize its own economy, it threw foreign economies into economic depression as well.

In Germany, depression hit in a different but no less powerful way. The new Weimar Republic had weathered a period of intense inflation in the 1920s due to reparations required by the Versailles Treaty. Rather than tax German citizens to pay the reparations, Germany borrowed millions of dollars from the United States and went further into debt. American demands for loan repayment had disastrous repercussions for an already fragile German economy, with banks failing and unemployment rising. As in the United States, the Weimar Republic decided to cut spending rather than increase it to spur the economy, further worsening the situation.

The Great Depression and the Rise of the Nazis

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The Great Depression also played a role in the emergence of Adolf Hitler as a viable political leader in Germany. Deteriorating economic conditions in Germany in the 1930s created an angry, frightened, and financially struggling populace open to more extreme political systems, including fascism and communism.

Hitler had an audience for his antisemitic and anticommunist rhetoric that depicted Jews as causing the Depression. Fear and uncertainty about Germany’s future also led many Germans in search of the kind of stability that Hitler offered.

While the Great Depression (and German economic conditions in general) were not solely responsible for bringing Hitler to power, they helped create an environment in which he gained support.