But the Wall Street crash ended all those hopes and dreams. .
Hoover did not like the government to take too much control of business. He tried to solve the economic problem by trying to get employers not to reduce wages and not to get rid of any workers. He also lent money to banks, industrialists and farmers to save any of them from bankruptcy. .
In 1931 he declared a one-year pause on war debts so foreign governments could miss one instalment of their debts to the USA to encourage them to import more American goods. This had nearly no effect because it was brought in too late; American exports in 1932 were less than a third of what they were in 1929. Hoover barely did anything to solve the economic problem other than cutting taxes and encouraging business in the hope that the Great Depression would fix itself. But it didn't, many people blamed Hoover for being poor and unemployed, as a result he became extremely unpopular. .
Hoover eventually realised that something had to be done about the Depression, so he set up an organization to help industry. But this was too little too late because Hoover lost the presidential election to Franklin D. Roosevelt. .
Franklin Delano Roosevelt served for longer than any other U.S president. He brought hope back to millions of people and helped tho whole nation through the Great Depression. .
Roosevelt had 3 main ideas he wanted to focus on when he came into power, this was known as "the New Deal". These 3 things were relief, recovery and reform. Relief was to give help to the millions of poor, homeless people who had no food. Recovery was to reduce the huge numbers of unemployment and to get the economy back to a healthy state by stimulating demand for goods and reform was to disallow any chance of that sort of economic disaster to happen again. Roosevelt had to make some big changes to get the country out of the state of depression that it was in and his methods were far different from those of the laissez-faire republicans.
