5/5/2023 0 Comments Four score and seven years ago![]() ![]() The opening words to his speech, ‘Five score years ago’, allude to a specific speech Lincoln himself had made a century before: the Gettysburg Address. In his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, King was doing more than alluding to Abraham Lincoln’s signing of the Emancipation Proclamation one hundred years earlier. No sooner has the dream gathered momentum than it becomes a more concrete ‘hope’. What’s more, in moving from ‘dream’ to a different noun, ‘hope’, King suggests that what might be dismissed as an idealistic ambition is actually something that is both possible and achievable. The shift is natural and yet it is a rhetorical masterstroke, since the vision of a better nation which King has set out as a very personal, sincere dream is thus telescoped into a universal and collective struggle for freedom. Bank failures, drought, falling commodities prices, and restrictive tariffs sparked a spiraling world-wide depression that found new bottoms for nearly a decade.Nevertheless, in working from ‘I have a dream’ to a different four-word phrase, ‘this is our hope’. ![]() ![]() Chamber of Commerce on May 1, 1930: ‘We have passed the worst and with continued effort we shall rapidly recover.’ Later that month he told reporters asking about the Great Depression that they ‘were sixty days too late. Recovery was in the air, so Hoover proclaimed to the U.S. The stock market recouped nearly all of its losses from the previous October. Things appeared to turn around by spring 1930. Fixing Wall Street was nowhere to be seen. Thus they focused on preserving full employment, maintaining wages, increasing public works projects, and creating a voluntary committee to provide relief to the temporarily unemployed. They agreed that the highest economic priority should be jobs. In the wake of the crash, Hoover convened the Conference for Continued Industrial Progress in November 1929, bringing together 400 leaders from business, government, labor and banking. While many were content to adopt a wait and see attitude, Hoover acted. The Federal Reserve Board had mixed opinions on the importance of the crash. President Hoover described it as a Wall Street problem, not a Main Street problem. Secretary of Treasury Andrew Mellon saw the crash as a needed correction, to remove speculative liquidity from the market. At the time, especially at the onset, it was not so clear. The Great Depression saw unemployment in America rise to nearly 25%, with another 20% working less than full-time hundreds of banks closed their doors thousands of homes and farms fell into foreclosure GDP fell precipitously. While they cannot agree on the weight to assign to the Crash, all agree that it marked the beginning of the Great Depression. In less than one week, investors in the stock market lost more than 40%.įor historians and economists looking back, the Stock Market Crash of 1929, is seen as a pivotal point in American history. The next day was no better, as the market dropped 12% on Black Tuesday. After a quiescent Friday, the stock market resumed its slide on Monday, October 28, 1929, losing nearly 13%. Black Thursday, October 24, 1929, saw the New York Stock Exchange lose 11% of its value in heavy trading. This has to do with the Stock Market Crash of 1929.įour score and seven years ago, the America nation was rocked by a Wall Street, NY NY near the time of the stock market crash. ![]()
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