Test Your Knowledge of the Great Depression

Starting in 1879, the U.S. economy employed a monetary system in which the national currency was backed by gold. But after the bank failures of the Depression, many began hoarding gold, making the policy unsustainable. In the 1930s, President Franklin Roosevelt began restricting the trade, sale, and export of gold; the gold standard was officially terminated in 1971.

After studying photography at Columbia University, Dorothea Lange gained attention during the Great Depression when she began photographing people affected by the economic downturn. She was eventually commissioned by the federal government to photograph migrant rural workers. Her most famous photograph, “Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California” (1936) now hangs in the Library of Congress.

Herbert Hoover became President in 1929, mere months before the stock market crash that began the Great Depression. Though many factors contributed to the crash, Hoover took much of the blame and criticism as he struggled to rally federal power to ease the financial crisis. He was often viewed as insensitive to the plight of the American people, and lost the 1932 election to Franklin D. Roosevelt.

When FDR took office in 1932, he quickly got to work enacting federal relief programs to help bring the U.S. out of the economic depression. Within his first 100 days, FDR signed several legislative bills to give the economy a much-needed boost under the collective title “New Deal.” In his Second New Deal, he created the Works Progress Administration (WPA) to provide jobs for the unemployed.

While the true origins of rocky road ice cream are debated, Dreyer's ice cream company holds that the frozen flavor’s name is a reference to the 1929 stock market crash — as in, the "rocky road" that many had to navigate after the crash devastated the economy. According to the company, the name was meant to give customers something to smile about in a challenging time.

The Great Depression began in earnest on October 24, 1929, now known as “Black Tuesday.” In a single day, investors on Wall Street traded 16,410,030 shares on the New York Stock Exchange, decimating millions of dollars of investments and crashing the stock market. The crash sent the U.S. into a massive economic recession that was exacerbated by a number of other contributing factors.