The Long Winter of our Discontent
How the West Shattered
By Waldemar Hirsch, 2023
How the West Shattered
By Waldemar Hirsch, 2023
The 24th October 1929 is a date that will forever scar the human soul, it was on that day a calamitous short sell led to the collapse of the entire American economy in three weeks, the devaluation of the American Dollar, and the fragmentation of the world from the "roaring 20s" to the "burning 30s".
The American economy had been involved in a ten year long speculative bubble which had led the U.S. to overtake Britain and become the most formidable economic power in the world. On the 24th October 1929, traders found their prices to be falling, causing an exponential collapse sending the stock market plummeting to desolation within five hours, many more businesses collapsed in the following days as the Dollar lost its value, causing over a million to be made redundant per day. On the 10th November 1929 - to prevent an all-out economic destruction - a state of emergency was declared by President Herbert Hoover, but the damage was done and the American economy was marked with a struggle as a new currency the "New Dollar" known colloquially as "Hoover Bucks", "Highs" (from their very high value), or "Depression Depressants" was put into place, but the American economy struggled to feed its population over the winter as the 1930s commenced, virtually all imports stopped until late February 1930 and the United States struggled for another fifteen years.
Due to the United States' financial reach, the domino effect struck South America by mid-November, by to which it spread to Britain by December and January, it also spread to France by late-November and by spring 1930 the effects were universal and hard hitting. The liberal democratic world order of the 1920s gave way to fascism and communism as they fought for supremacy in a divided and impoverished world.
The United States itself began declining, riots and rampant violence and decentralisation marked the remainder of Hoover's term, in 1932 he would be defeated in a 48-state-landslide by William Borah of the Democratic Party. Borah would oversee the new party system, divided between the Democrats, the Conservatives, and the Republicans, Borah was known for his isolationism, pro-fascism, socialist policies, and his authoritarian tendencies to which I shall cover later in more detail.