ct, indeed, had profited from supplying both sides with provisions during the early years, and had emerged the healthiest of the contenders once the great battles were over, having suffered less than twenty-four months of mobilization. The United States' trading partners, however, were in no position to take in American goods during the 1920s; international trade in foodstuffs and industrial goods slide into a malaise fueled by European hyper-inflation.
The American farmer was particularly hard hit: years of bumper crops - with no overseas markets toward which to divert the excess - depressed agricultural prices drastically. Indeed, even before the "official" beginning of the Great Depression in 1929, the agricultural sector was suffering mightily. When the domestic market began withering in the face of massive industrial layoffs that rippled from the four years' wake of the October '29 Crash, the drastically over-valued dollar resulted in farmers being forced to sell their produce for less than it cost to grow.
There was another, more ironic, cause for agricultural over-production as well: improved farming methods. In the rapid-fire improvement of technology on all fronts that characterized the early decades of the 20th Century, by the time Franklin Roosevelt began his presidency it took half as many farmers, utilizing half as much land, to produce twice as much as thirty years earlier. Those excess farmers and their extra fields posed a dilemma with which the laissez-faire federal ideology of Herbert Hoover's presidency could not begin to cope. Analyzing the situation, Roosevelt's advisors saw the need for a decisive government hand to forcibly cut the bonds with the past - rather than let the pressures of the marketplace draw out the execution in more slow, cruel fashion. In the new president they served, those advisors had a personality not afraid to act.
Acting upon the impetus of crisis which made Congress ...