Chapter 19 of 25
Depression and World War
The 1920s roared with new cars, radios and soaring stock prices. Then the bubble burst. The Great Depression startedQ104 with the stock market crash of 1929; on "Black Tuesday," October 29, panicked investors sold off shares and fortunes vanished.
The Great DepressionQ103 that followed was the longest economic recession in modern history. Banks failed, farms were lost, and by 1933 about one in four workers had no job.
The president during the Great Depression and World War IIQ105 was Franklin Roosevelt. His New Deal programs put millions back to work and created Social Security.
As war spread across Europe and Asia, the United States again tried to stay neutral. That changed on the morning of December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the naval base in Hawaii, killing about 2,400 Americans. Congress declared war the next day, and the United States entered World War IIQ106.
Voters elected Roosevelt four times, breaking the two-term tradition Washington had set. After his death in 1945, the nation wrote the limit into the Constitution with the 22nd Amendment in 1951. The President can serve only two termsQ37 to keep the president from becoming too powerful.