Erica Steinbach's List: Businessmen

• The long contraction and painfully slow recovery led many in the American population to accept and even call for a vastly expanded role for government, though most businesses resented the growing federal control of their activities.
• he Smoot-Hawley Tariff was another piece of Hoover’s strategy. Though there was not a general call for tariff increases, Hoover proposed it in 1929 as a means of aiding farmers. He quickly lost control of the bill and it ended up<!----> protecting American businesses in general with much less real protection for farmers.

• As businesses saw their lines of credit and money reserves fall with bank closings, and consumers saw their bank deposit wealth tied up in drawn-out bankruptcy proceedings, spending fell, worsening the collapse in the Great Depression.

       

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• The Depression inflicted a heavy psychological toll on jobless men. With no wages to punctuate their ability, many men lost power as primary decision makers. Large numbers of men lost self-respect, became immobilized and stopped looking for work, while others turned to alcohol or became self-destructive or abusive to their families.  

• Because of the banking crisis, thousands of small businesspeople failed because they could not secure loans. Thousands more went bankrupt because they had lost their working capital in the stock market crash. A heavy burden of consumer debt also weakened the economy. Consumers built up an unmanageable amount of consumer installment and mortgage debt, taking out loans to buy cars, appliances, and homes in the suburbs. To repay these loans, consumers cut back sharply on discretionary spending. Drops in consumer spending led inevitably to reductions in production and worker layoffs. Unemployed workers then spent less, and the cycle repeated itself.