In this episode, we finish up a couple of New Deal programs we didn't get to talk about last time, and examine the Roosevelt Administration's efforts to restore confidence in Wall Street and in a dollar no longer backed by gold.
Franklin Roosevelt's administration began with a bang.
In the four-month period between Roosevelt's election and his inauguration, the American economy went from bad to worse.
New York Governor Franklin Roosevelt was the wide favorite for the 1932 Democratic Presidential nomination, while Herbert Hoover's popularity, like the US economy, was declining every month.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, scion of two old and wealthy New York families, former Assistant Secretary of the Navy and candidate for Vice President of the United States, had a bright future ahead of him. Then he came down with polio.
Rutherford's hypothetical neutron was proved to exist in 1932. Atomic physics in the 1930s was regularly producing dramatic--and disturbing--new results.
The British economy hadn't fully bounced back from the war when the Depression hit, eventually forcing Britain off the gold standard once again.
The Indian National Congress had declared independence, but waited for Gandhi to propose a strategy for resisting British rule. Gandhi came up with a characteristically unusual suggestion.
Stalin claimed the mantle of successor to Lenin and made the claim stick. He would go on to gain a degree of power in the USSR far greater than anything Lenin ever held, or even dreamed of.
Strangely, although motion pictures and sound recording were invented around the same time, it took thirty years before the technology to link them came together. Sound changed motion pictures, not always for the better.