Herbert Hoover was President for the first three and a half years of the Depression. He was widely criticized for his slow reaction, then not reacting strongly enough as it became obvious that the nation was falling further and further into economic decline.

In what became known as the run on banks, many people rushed to their banks to withdraw their money, only to find the bank had no money to give them. Banks do not keep anywhere near enough money to cover the value of all their accounts, so after the first wave of people the banks had no more money to hand out, and due to defaulting loans and the market crash, had no money coming in. This meant many banks went under and the account holders would not get back the money they had deposited.

Most of the industrial base in America had, at this point, been built at least 30 to 40 years earlier. This meant that most of the technology in the industrial space was very old and outdated. This coupled with the toll the years and constant ware that the equipment and the buildings themselves had been through, and it helped to cause a massive slowdown in industrial output as the system ground down.

Although the Smoot-Hawley Tariff was well-intentioned, it was a major contributing factor to the Great Depression. Without going into needlessly complicated detail, foreign trade is a major component of basically every developed economy—the U.S. in 1930 was no exception. The Tariff (because it artificially increased the prices of many imported goods) caused a major slump in foreign trade, leading (in part) to the Great Depression.

Belgian engineer, Étienne Lenoir, is generally credited with having invented the first commercially viable internal combustion engine.

Ferdinando Nicola Sacco (b. April 22, 1891) and Bartolomeo Vanzetti (b. June 11, 1888) were convicted of murder and executed on August 23, 1927.

The New Deal was a widespread series of government programs undertaken by Roosevelt when he became President to boost the American economy during the depths of the Great Recession.  In general, the programs sought to expand government’s role in the economy, making the answer about lowering taxes the only answer choice that does not fit in as a New Deal program.

Although many of the New Deal actions were later pushed through the fireside chats for public appeal, the original intent of the broadcast was to disseminate the panic related to the closing of the banks as the unemployment skyrocketed, and the markets crashed dramatically.  This was later dubbed the Emergency Banking act.

The Stock Market Crash of 1929, which began the 10-year Great Depression, is also known as Black Tuesday, as it happened on a Tuesday.

The Federal income tax is progressive for both individuals and corporations. This, essentially, means that the higher your personal income the greater percentage of that income is subject to taxation. The history of personal income tax in the United States is, perhaps, surprisingly recent. The first income tax was levied on wealthy individuals during the Civil War, but was repealed following the war’s end. Not until 1895 did the Federal government institute its first peacetime income tax. Shortly thereafter Congress passed the Sixteenth Amendment that enabled the government to levy taxes on all personal income. From that moment until now there has been a gradual trend of taxation increases and increases on the proportion of income that the wealthy are required to pay. This reflects the trends of much greater government spending and much greater social awareness in the twentieth and twenty-first Centuries.