Great Depression

The Great Depression is the common name given to the worldwide depression that began late in 1929.

Depression in North America
In North America, the Depression "officially" began when the United States Stock Market, headquartered on Wall Street in New York, crashed on October 27, 1929. Soon after, the Confederate Stock Market in Atlanta crashed as well. Both American nations were plunged into poverty. The U.S. President at the time, Democrat Herbert Hoover, had no success in dealing with the economic collapse. After the passage of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act in 1930, Vice President Warren Harding resigned in anger and resolved to run for the Senate election in Ohio later that year. Harding, as Senator, led the establishment of the NDP away from Hoover, and Harding took the party's nomination from Hoover in 1932, and barely won the presidency. The general belief is that Harding was responsible for the end of the depression in the United States with his declaration of war on the C.S.A. The ensuing Third Civil War, with its widespread recruitment and production of war materials, lifted the economy of the country. However, after the war ended in 1936, Harding, now in his second term as president, could not effectively protect the country from the postwar recession, and the NDP was voted out of Congress in 1938. In 1940, Republican Burton K. Wheeler was elected president, and succeeded in healing the nation's economic woes by 1945.

The Confederate President in 1929 was Socialist William Stephens. Immediately after the crash, Stephens and his administration built dams all over the Tennessee River Valley, creating many jobs and bringing electricity to rural areas. When the Third Civil War began in 1933, the C.S. was in much better shape than the U.S., and at first the war went in the Confederacy's favor, and the economy improved. After Huey Long succeeded Stephens as president, things went downhill, and the Confederacy lost the war. The CSA was subjected to very harsh terms in the surrender agreement, which prevented the economy from recovering. For three years after the war, President Long was a lame-duck, and his popularity was at the lowest ever of a Socialist president. In 1939, Democrat Fielding Wright was elected president. Throughout the early 1940s, Wright helped the Confederate economy the best he could. After U.S. President Wheeler allowed the C.S. to enter World War II, the Confederate economy surged, and had been fully repaired by 1945.

Depression in Europe
The economic collapse also hit Europe. With no war during the 1930s to heal any economy, the continent experienced ten straight years of rampant poverty. The terrible conditions in Germany caused the Coup of 1937, which replaced the Kaiser's government with one of a Chancellor, Heinrich Himmler. Other European nations continued to suffer until Himmler and his allies began World War II with the invasion of Poland in 1939. The war lasted until 1945, when the U.S. and C.S. helped defeat Himmler as well as the Japanese. But even after the war, poverty continued in Europe, and the effects of the depression had only just begun to disappear by 1950.