The Great Depression, Pearl Harbor, WWII, Capitalism V.S Communism, Nuclear Bomb ...
America boom, but now it's bust. The Great Depression exploded across America.
Social upheaval, poverty, drought. The American spirit is forged in the fires of Great Depression.
The 1920s is the boom time in America. Money flows and oil wells explode.
1929
More money is spent on advertising than on education.
We got a little carried away with consumerism and capitalism and it bite us in the butt.
The boom is built on credit. 6 billion goods are bought credit, but 80% of Americans have no saving at all. Some stocks value are valued at 50 times what they are really worth. A giant bubble is ready to burst.
October 1929
It happens. The stock market loses 12times more money in three week than US government uses in a year. For a year after the stock-market crash, America's economy teeters on the edge of the abyss.
December 1930
Only 2% of the population own stocks. The other 98% get on with their lives.
The man will shake the economy of the nation.
I would like to withdraw my shares from my account.
Bank regulations are virtually nonexistent at the time. Bad real-estate investments mean the bank had only kept itself afloat by cooking the books.
The last thing the bank needs is to hand out all its cash.
The next morning, the Bank of United States has collapsed.
1933
There are 28 states without a single bank open. Unlike today, the federal government does not
bail out the banks.
Unemployment goes from 4million in 1930 to 12 million in 1932. Everyday, a thousand homes are repossessed. Many vagrant children wonder the country.
** Free-Market, Laisser Faire ?? So, the government didn't intervene the market.
Vast building projects, publicly funded private built.
The water and hydroelectricity will transform the whole Southwest.
** " Keynes " economic concept.
march 4, 1931.
" Hoover Dam " establishing...
42,000 men come from across the country.
" Frank Crowe " takes 5,000 men to work harder and faster than anyone else.
The survival of the fittest.
Two steps to build the dam.
First, divert the river around the work site.
Second, the build the colossal wall.
To divert the raging Colorado river, four massive tunnels are drilled through 3 miles of solid rock.
The tunnels can only be dug when the river is low.
Workers desperately want to keep the job.
Something is going wrong.
How to pour that much concrete and get it's needed ??
Giant bottom-opening buckets.
The curing generates the heat. If the dam was constructed in a single, continuous pour.
But worse, the dam would takes 125 years to harden.
The secret of cooling the concrete lies within the dam itself. 528 miles of 1- inch pipes carry
ice-cold water from the river the dam is taming.
Hoover Dam
The Hoover Dam workers make something else boom as well. A little town 60 miles away where
they go to drink and gamble.
As the wife of one Hoover Dam worker said:
When men worked in such dangerous surroundings, you couldn't blame a lot of fellas for sort of
letting their hair down. They were having fun.
1934
Darkness falls across America. The worst environmental disaster in America history.
Dust storm hit New York, Chicago, and Boston.
The Great Plains is once the most fertile grasslands on earth.
It have been plowed up and used up by four generations of farmers. Now, the sun is dried it up.
The tiny particles of soil are suspended in the air. Then a freakish phenomenon happens.
Static electricity builds between the earth and the dust. Like a magnet, the static electricity
sucked more and more the dust, growing in size and power.
April 15, 1935.
Lamar Colorado. 49 dust storms in the last three months.
Dust Bowl
People tied themselves to the ropes before going to a barn a few hundred feet away.
People stay in the ranch houses all day long. The dust is so severe that you can't see anything.
There is an" Exodus of Biblical " proportions under way on the Great Plains.
1936
Farming is no longer possibility. The " Great Depression " takes hold.
Their mortgage come to due, they can't pay it. There are not growing crops.
" The Grapes of Wrath "
2/3 of Dust Bowlers stick it out.
They are nothing left, but their determination and will.
Radio is one of the few things to bring comfort to those who stay. In connects them to the rest
of the country.
1935
A network of stations with 10,000 watt-transmitters links the country together. The same voice can be heard from coast to coast.
Radio becomes the country's most popular household item.
1934
Over 18 million radio sets. America was built for the introduction of radio. This is vast land.
America was learning about itself through news from across the country and around the world.
Germany is rearming will ties Hitler's ambition.
Bring international events straight into American homes. Little do Americans realize that news from so far away will change America forever.
Blasted out of solid rock, Mount Rushmore is created. The first step of the world's largest monument is finished.
South Dakota. A desolate corner as the way to attract tourists. Now it's a federally funded project, part of President Roosevelt's New Deal to reinvigorate the country.
The 500 feet cliff has been sculpted by dynamite.
Behind him, a mighty Midwestern storm is brewing. He has no idea what is happening 5 miles away. The electrical charge runs straight down the power lines into Mount Rushmore and the detonator.
Three extra inches of granite cover the presidents' faces to avoid corrosion.
1936
One in six are still out of jobs. Despite the government's public-work programs, there is little
economy recovery. Public works are not working. Free entrepreneur is stagnating.
It will take the World War II to pull America out of its economy slump.
June 19, 1936.
American " Joe Louis " fights German Max Schmeling for the heavyweight Championship of the world.
Joe Louis is taking a beating.
The grandson of slaves, his family drove out of Alabama by the " Ku Klux Klan ".
The Depression takes his family's jobs. Unemployment among urban African-Americans is up to 50%. Joe keeps his family by boxing.
There are not just two boxers, they're symbols of " Totalitarianism " against " Democracy ",
" Supremacy " against " a nonracial kind of society ".
Schemeling gets over two more hard rights to Louis' jaws. he has puffed up Louis' left cheek.
And Louis is down. Hanging through the rope, hanging badly. He is blinking his eyes, shaking his head. The count is done, the fight is over.
Schemeling wins against all the odds.
Germany is on the rise. America is on its knees. But not for long.
Germany is triumphant, America is in shock. It's a publicity dream for the Nazis.
Adolf Hitler called Schemeling an " Aryan Superman ". Hitler considers America a mongrel race,
doomed to the trash heap of history. Hitler says their mistake was freeing their slaves.
I had been humiliated, I have to prove I am the best heavyweight boxer.
June 22,1938.
The first time in America history, America symbolically was being represented by a black man.
It's the battle of ideology. Schemeling represented everything that Americans dislike.
70 million people tune in via radio across the country.
The second-shortest heavyweight title fight in history is over in just only 124 seconds.
Joe Louis is America's hero again. His victory is the comeback the whole country needs.
At the end of the fight, Joe Louis, this inferior, the former slave's child, defeats the master race.
Schemeling is down.
He knows what he defeat will mean to the Nazis. After the defeat, I no longer existed for Hitler.
My name simply disappear from the news paper.
Something's gonna knock you down, but you can't stay down. You got to get back on, and plow on. You can't sit around feeling sorry for yourself, and you certainly can't look back and reminisce what the good old times. You just got to keep on going forward and reinvent things.
The United States of America will be attacked. Over 400,000 Americans will die.
World War II will transform America into the greatest power on earth.
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