DEPRESSION OF 1873

And

PROBLEMS OF GOVERNING

Panic of 1873

Industrial Capitalism

The Panic of 1873 stands as the first global depression brought about by industrial capitalism. It began a regular pattern of boom and bust cycles that distinguish our current economic system and which continue to this day.

While the first of many such market "corrections," the effects of the downturn were severe and, in 1873, unexpected.

Unlike earlier mercantile capitalism, which is dependent on local markets and periodic shortages of labor or materials, industrial capitalism is controlled by access to venture capital and the productivity of capital investments in stocks, bonds, and large-scale mechanization.

CAUSAL REALISM

RETURN OF THE PHOENIX

Money, not labor or goods, remains the critical factor in economic growth.

In a sense, the money supply acts like oxygen for a fire.

In a sense, the money supply acts like oxygen for a fire: too little and the flame dwindles, too much and it rages uncontrolled.

In today's market, currency and stock regulation try to limit rapid swings in value of our nation's currency. But in 1873 these adjustments were unknown and the ability of national authorities to control the money supply was immature.

As a result, the Panic of 1873 led to the longest recorded economic downturn in modern history, spanning from October 1873 to March 1879, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research.

COURTESY - https://teachinghistory.org/history-content/beyond-the-textbook/24579

SIGOURNEY WEAVER TEST-FIRING

THE DYNAMICS OF CAPITALISM

+WORLD WAR I - 1914-1918 and THE GREAT DEPRESSION OF 1929- 1939

THE GREAT WAR ALONG WITH THE DEPRESSION IT SPAWNED -

= WORLD WAR IIEconomists and historians continue to this day to debate the proximate causes of the Great Depression.

WWI Nov. 1918 – GREAT DEPRESSION Oct. 1929

PRECEPT 1. ……the Great Depression and World War II had their origins outside the United States—a reminder of the increasing interdependency among nations that was such a salient feature of the twentieth century. The Great Depression was a worldwide catastrophe whose causes and consequences alike were global in character.

"The primary cause of the Great Depression," reads the first sentence of President Herbert Hoover’s Memoirs, "was the war of 1914–1918."

And that so-called Great War, along with the Depression it spawned, was the driver that eventually produced the even greater catastrophe of World War II.

PRECEPT 2. …………abundant physical and institutional ills might be added a rigidly doctrinaire faith in laissez-faire, balanced national budgets, and the gold standard. All of this added up to a witches’ brew

of economic illness, ideological paralysis, and consequent political incapacity as the Depression relentlessly enveloped the globe.

Dust Bowl Songs & Photographs

PRECEPT 3. ……………...The long-suffering countryside was home to nearly half of all Americans in the 1920s; one out of every five workers toiled on the nation’s fields and farms.

Virtually none enjoyed such common urban amenities as electricity and indoor plumbing.

Other maladies began to appear, faintly at first, but with mounting urgency as the Depression began to unfold.

A ramshackle, woefully under-regulated private banking system, a legacy of Andrew Jackson’s long-ago war on central banking, had managed to wobble its dysfunctional way into the modern era.

Some twenty-five thousand banks, most of them highly fragile "unitary" institutions with tiny service areas, little or no diversification of clients or assets, and microscopic capitalization, constituted the astonishingly vulnerable foundation of the national credit.

PRECEPT 4.……..for most of the 1920s the mood of much of the country, impervious to news of accumulating international dangers and buoyed by wildly ascending stock prices as well as the congenital optimism long claimed as every American’s birthright, remained remarkably upbeat.

Then in the autumn of 1929, the bubble burst.

The Great Crash in October sent stock prices plummeting and all but froze the international flow of credit.

Banks failed by the thousands.

Businesses collapsed by the tens of thousands.

Millions—nobody knew at first how many, so primitive were the government’s fact-finding organs—went unemployed.

Great Depression: What Happened, Causes, How It Ended

The Balance

PRECEPT 5. ………..Roosevelt, like Hoover before him, never did find a remedy for the Great Depression. It hung heavily over the land for nearly a dozen years of suffering and anxiety without equal in the history of the republic.

How did World War 2 bring the U.S. out of depression? - My Class Project on World War 2

Before World War II wiped out the Depression at a stroke, none of FDR’s exertions managed to wrestle the unemployment rate………

PRECEPT 6. The challenges of the Great Depression and the accomplishments and shortcomings of the New Deal, and of FDR, cannot be understood outside of that framework.

Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR)

PRECEPT 7…….And just as the story of the Great Depression is not simply the story of the American people in a moment pregnant with both danger and opportunity, the story of World War II is a tale of peoples around the world violently swept up in its frightful cataclysm—though the Americans, as it happened, were uniquely spared the worst of the war’s ravages.

Fashion During the Great Depression and World War II

US forces relentlessly closed in on the Japanese home islands, culminating in months of intensive firebombing raids against Japan and ultimately the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, which clinched the Japanese decision to surrender.

In that same month Winston Churchill declared that the triumphantly victorious United States, restored to economic health, flush with energy, morally and politically self-confident, stood "at the summit of the world."

AMERICA – ‘Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow’

PRECEPT 8. Gathered here are images of some of these tent cities, from Seattle, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., St. Louis, Las Cruces, and Honolulu.

Why are people on the West Coast so much more likely to be unsheltered than homeless people in other parts of the country? It reflects differing government priorities.READ MORE- https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/rise-californias-tent-cities

THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION

WW III

WWIII ALLIANCES MAP: Military-strategy-and-tech

NOTES