Many Americans during most of the 1930’s suffered from the Great Depression. This was caused in many different ways, such as the Stock Market Crash on October 29th, 1929, also known as”Black Tuesday” and the “Dust Bowl” which caused extreme droughts and sandstorms. After the Stock Market Crash increased amounts of unemployment affected the country and the population worldwide. As America was going through the Great Depression, Germany was regaining their strength from their downfall of World War I, under the power of Adolf Hitler who created the Nazi Party which was a group that imperialized neighboring nations. America and Germany would go head to head and create World War II which officially ended The Great Depression in the United States. The themes of economics, politics, and society were essential parts of the war. The documents used within Richard Nixon’s American Standard of Living (1959) and John F.

Kennedy’s the Separation of Church and State (1960), express their points of view of these topics. First, economics is the main theme and reason that surrounds the progressive movement for society starting back in the 1930’s. The process of people making, selling, and buying goods in the United States was booming in the early 1920’s. Production, trade, and consumption of products that were bought and sold were increasing to unbelievable heights for the time. As a result, the stock market went through a fast act of getting bigger. It reached its peak in August 1929. Unfortunately once something hits its peak, it can go nowhere but down. The stock prices began to get worse in September and early October 1929.

Then officially hitting rock bottom on October 29th, 1929. The Great Depression had many causes not all which are economic, but the collapse of the stock market may have a bigger help in the international collapse. It was the longest and worst depression ever experienced by the United States, sparking basic changes in money-based institutions, macroeconomic policy, and money-based explanation of why something works or happens the way it does. On Wall Street, where the New York City Stock Exchange is located, became dangerous. Many individuals put their savings into stocks, thus losing their investments.

Although the economy was doing well in the United States in the 1920s, people still may have been unemployed or not at work. At the time, the individuals who entered the country entered into the nation’s most crowded industrial cities. But once World War II began, raw material production and trading had been on the rise for America and the Allied Nations. This created jobs for many immigrants. According to the Yawp text, “The Atlantic Charter, though, also set in movement the planning for a reorganized world-wide process of people making, selling, and buying goods and materials. The July 1944 United Nations related to managing money and Money-based Conference, more popularly known as the Bretton Woods Conference, created the International Money-based Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD). The “Bretton Woods system” was helped in 1947 with the addition of the General Agreements on Taxes and Trade (GATT), and the World Trade Organization (WTO).” (Yawp Text,Chapter 25, Doc.

II). The second theme that is important when talking about this matter of subject is politics. Many people were involved in political movements during the Great Depression and this was one of the most serious problems in American history. Herbert Hoover took most of the blame and people would name their crowded, dirty neighborhoods “Hooverville”.

Americans elected a string of conservative Republicans being president during the boom years of the 1920s. When the process of people making, selling, and buying things crashed in 1929, however, and the nation moved spiral down deeper into the Great Depression, people who voted for Hoover left and didn’t trust the Republican Party and conservative politicians as they struggled in office to help the people. During the Great Depression, President Hoover was the one who was often blamed for the U.S economy collapsing due to his lack of direct support to the middle and low class by using the Trickle Down Theory. Herbert Hoover exclaims on having a New Deal that, “We are told by the fighting force that we must have a change, that we must have a new deal. It is not the change that comes from usual development of national life to which I object but the proposal to change the whole foundations of our national life which have been builded through generations of testing and struggle, and of the ways of thinking upon which we have builded the nation.

” (Herbert Hoover on the New Deal (1932)). By 1933, America’s banks were beginning to fail. Many people who wanted to find work but couldn’t find a job. Many individuals could not believe that this was happening.

FDR would then come into play as he became president and helps out the middle and lower class with social welfare. According to the Yawp text, FDR addresses and promises that, ” ‘I promise you, I promise myself, to a new deal for the American people.’ Newspaper editors grabbed and focused attention on the phrase “new deal,” and it entered the American political list as shorthand for Roosevelt’s program to deal with the peak to the Great Depression.

” (Yawp Text, Chapter 23, Doc. VII) The New Deal was a series of programs and policies known as Relief, Recovery and Reform. All of the programs were put into effect to fight the Great Depression.. The New Deal had two major aspects. The first, included national planning laws and programs for the low class citizens from 1933 to 1934. The second was the period from 1935 to 1939 and worked on social reform, policies and programs to speed up the nation’s recovery.

The New Deal’s programs aided many Americans and give jobs for millions of people. Many New Deal programs still continue today. After World War II and during the Cold War, Richard Nixon became the 37th president of the United States right after Lyndon B. Johnson and looked for economic and social improvement since the Great Depression. He claimed that World War II helped many Americans get out of unemployment and poverty.

Nixon wanted the Normal American Standard of Living during an exhibit debate with the Soviet Union and the United Nations as he says, “The average weekly wage of a factory worker in America is $90.54. With this income he can buy and afford to own a house, a television set, and a car in the price range of those you will see in this show.

What is more, the great majority of American wage earners have done exactly that.”(Richard Nixon on the American Standard of Living 1959).The Great Depression had a major impact on the society of America. One factor was that the loss of jobs was affecting the standard of living. Due to individuals losing their jobs, many did not have the money needed to provide for the basic essentials. For example, food, clothing, electricity and water.

In addition, this would lead to separation of families because husbands would leave their wives. Due to the pressure of finding a job to pay the bill to keep their families together, there was an increase rate of suicide. To try keep families together, “Poor women and young children entered the labor force, as they always had. The ideal of the ‘male breadwinner’ was always a fiction for poor Americans, but the Depression decimated millions of new workers.

” (Yawp text, Chapter 23, Doc.VII). Inequality was, and still is, a major factor during the Great Depression. “Despite a concerted effort to appoint black advisors to some New Deal programs, Franklin Roosevelt did little to directly address the difficulties black communities faced. To do so openly would provoke southern Democrats and put his New Deal coalition–the uneasy alliance of national liberals, urban laborers, farm workers, and southern whites–at risk.

” (Yawp Text ,Chapter 23, Doc XII). This was an issue until the presidency of John F.Kennedy who envisioned a nation “where all men and all churches are treated as equal”(John F. Kennedy on the Separation of Church and State (1960)). In addition, one of the most arguably inequitable programs to help the Great Depression was the Social Security Act because “Southern politicians chaffed at the prospect of African Americans benefiting from federally-sponsored social welfare, afraid that economic security would allow black southerners to escape the cycle of poverty that kept them tied to the land as cheap, exploitable farm laborers.” (Yawp Text ,Chapter 23, Doc XII).

As one can see, inequality has kept America from reaching even greater heights. These documents shows the significant effects of valuing progression over economics, politics and social. They help lay the foundation for the industrialized civilization existent today, as well as the staggering divide between the rich and the poor. should be disregarded when interacting with others because the idea of social classes was designed solely to prevent an uprising of the masses. Instead of having money as a driving force; FDR, Nixon and JFK demonstrates how economics, politics and society are involved in everyday practices in the world to help create a stabilized civilization.