Though modern myth claims that the free market
"self-destructed" in 1929, government policy was the debacle’s principal
culprit. If this crash had been like previous ones, the hard times would have
ended in two or three years at the most, and likely sooner than that. But
unprecedented political bungling instead prolonged the misery for over 10 years.
Unemployment in 1930 averaged a mildly recessionary 8.9
percent, up from 3.2 percent in 1929. It shot up rapidly until peaking out at
more than 25 percent in 1933. Until March of 1933, these were the years of
President Herbert Hoover — a man often depicted as a champion of
noninterventionist, laissez-faire economics.
