Robert S. McElvaine in his book The Great Depression considers the causes and effects of that terrible time in American history when American confidence was shaken and her optimism made to suffer. McElvaine does not find that there was one cause of the Great Depression but rather than it was the result of various outdated economic theories, a laissez-faire attitude on the part of the government, some of the effects of World War I, and excessive and unquestioning optimism on the part of the American people by the latter part of the 1920s. McElvaine first notes that the industrialization of the nineteenth century took place with little government planning, and the economy continued on its way with little control into this century. The economy was growing larger and more complex in this century, but the government was still using nineteenth-century economic ideology as its base.
McElvaine next notes that international tensions and problems after the Great War contributed to the development of the problem. For one thing, the war altered economic relations among and within nations, and the United States in p
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