Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?

 Intro.: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts.

Content: Late in the last decade of the twentieth century, with its attending prosperity, many historians and commentators have attempted to draw a reluctant people back to a time when simply sustaining life was very difficult. Six decades have passed since the world entered the Great Depression. The stock market disintegration during the fall of 1929, a strangely inert Federal Reserve, and the ineptitude of the Hoover Administration shooting the wounded economy with such economically disastrous measures as the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930 and severe taxes increases in 1932, turned what might have been a temporary decline into a precipitous drop. People were in trouble.