APUSH Unit 7 Study Notes: Crisis, War, and a New Global Role (1929–1945)

The Great Depression and the New Deal

What the Great Depression was (and why it mattered)

The Great Depression was the most severe and prolonged economic crisis in modern U.S. history, beginning after the stock market crash of October 1929 and lasting through most of the 1930s. It wasn’t just “the stock market fell.” The crash was a dramatic signal, but the Depression was a deeper breakdown of the economy—banks failed, businesses closed, farms and factories produced goods people couldn’t afford, and unemployment skyrocketed.

It mattered because it fundamentally reshaped Americans’ expectations of the federal government. Before the 1930s, many Americans assumed economic security was mostly a personal or local matter—handled by families, charities, and state governments. The Depression made those solutions feel inadequate. The result was a new political idea: if the national economy could collapse nationwide, then the national government had to play a major role in stabilizing it.

Why it happened: interacting causes (not one single trigger)

A common misconception is that the Depression happened because of “the stock market” alone. On APUSH, you usually want to explain multiple, interacting causes:

  • Overproduction and underconsumption: During the 1920s, farms and factories produced huge amounts of goods, but wages and purchasing power didn’t rise enough to buy them all. Businesses may look “successful” on paper, but if consumers can’t buy products, profits eventually fall and layoffs begin.
  • Unequal distribution of wealth: Large shares of income and wealth sat with the very wealthy, limiting broad consumer demand.
  • Credit and debt: Many Americans bought goods on installment plans (buy now, pay later). That expands consumption temporarily, but it also creates fragile household finances.
  • Speculation in stocks: People bought stocks on margin (borrowed money), which magnified losses when prices fell.
  • Banking weaknesses: Bank failures wiped out savings and reduced lending. When banks stop lending, businesses can’t expand and consumers can’t borrow, which deepens contraction.
  • International economic problems: World War I-era debts and reparations, plus dependence on global trade, made the U.S. economy vulnerable to worldwide downturns.

These causes reinforce each other. If banks fail, lending contracts; if lending contracts, businesses cut production; if production falls, unemployment rises; if unemployment rises, consumer spending drops further.

Hoover’s response: limits of voluntarism

President Herbert Hoover (in office when the Depression began) believed strongly in individualism and limited federal intervention. He encouraged voluntarism—the idea that private businesses and local communities would cooperate to solve problems without major federal control.

Hoover did support some government actions, but typically in ways that avoided direct federal relief to individuals. For example, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) (created in 1932) provided loans to banks and major businesses in hopes that stability at the top would “trickle down” into jobs and recovery.

Why Hoover struggled politically: many Americans viewed his approach as too little, too slow, and too focused on helping institutions rather than suffering families. Events like the Bonus Army protest in 1932 (World War I veterans seeking early payment of a promised bonus) and its removal from Washington intensified perceptions that Hoover was out of touch.

The New Deal: what it was trying to do

When Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) took office in 1933, he launched the New Deal—a set of federal programs and reforms aimed at relief, recovery, and reform.

  • Relief meant immediate help for people in crisis (food, jobs, assistance).
  • Recovery meant restarting the economy—getting people working, increasing demand, and stabilizing key sectors like banking and agriculture.
  • Reform meant reducing the chance of another catastrophe through regulation and new institutions.

A helpful way to understand the New Deal is to see it as an experiment. FDR didn’t walk in with a single master plan. His administration tried different strategies, adjusted when programs failed or were ruled unconstitutional, and responded to pressure from Congress, the Supreme Court, labor movements, and critics on both left and right.

First New Deal (1933–1934): stabilize and provide emergency relief

The early New Deal focused on stopping panic and restarting economic activity.

Banking and finance: FDR declared a bank holiday (temporarily closing banks) and supported reforms like the Glass-Steagall Act (1933), which helped restore confidence by separating commercial and investment banking and creating the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) to insure deposits.

  • Why this mattered: banking is built on trust. If people believe their money can vanish, they rush to withdraw cash, which can collapse even healthy banks. Deposit insurance and regulation were designed to prevent that spiral.

Job and relief programs: Agencies such as the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) aimed to provide work and aid.

Agriculture and industry: The Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) tried to raise farm prices by paying farmers to reduce production. The National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) attempted to stabilize industry through codes on wages, hours, and competition.

  • Common pitfall: students sometimes say “the government forced farmers to destroy food while people starved” as if that was the whole point. The logic (whether you agree with it or not) was that chronic overproduction depressed prices so severely that farmers couldn’t survive. Reducing supply was intended to raise prices and farm income.

Second New Deal (1935–1938): rights, security, and labor power

By the mid-1930s, demands grew for deeper reforms. The Second New Deal included some of the most lasting changes.

Social Security Act (1935): created a federal old-age pension system, unemployment insurance, and aid for certain vulnerable groups.

  • Why it mattered: it institutionalized the idea that the federal government has responsibility for a baseline of economic security, especially for the elderly.

Wagner Act / National Labor Relations Act (1935): protected workers’ rights to unionize and bargain collectively, creating the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to enforce those rights.

  • How it worked: the federal government became a referee in labor-management disputes, making it harder for employers to crush unions through intimidation.

Works Progress Administration (WPA): provided jobs building infrastructure and supporting arts and culture projects.

  • Why APUSH cares: the WPA shows that New Deal “relief” often came through employment, reflecting a belief that work preserved dignity and pumped wages into the economy.

Opposition, limits, and the Supreme Court

The New Deal was controversial. Critics on the right feared it expanded government too much; critics on the left argued it didn’t go far enough.

  • The Supreme Court struck down several New Deal measures (including key parts of AAA and NIRA). This contributed to FDR’s attempted court-packing plan (1937), which proposed adding justices. The plan failed politically and is often used as evidence of tension between executive power and constitutional checks and balances.

A key limitation: the New Deal did not fully end the Great Depression. The economy improved in periods, but unemployment remained high, and the “Roosevelt Recession” of 1937–1938 showed the recovery was fragile. Massive wartime spending during World War II ultimately produced full employment.

New Deal coalitions and who benefited (and who didn’t)

The New Deal reshaped party politics by building a New Deal coalition—often including urban workers, many immigrants, many African Americans (especially in Northern cities), labor unions, and white Southern Democrats.

But benefits were uneven:

  • Many New Deal programs excluded or limited coverage for agricultural and domestic workers, categories that included large numbers of African Americans and many Latinas/os. This wasn’t accidental; it reflected political compromises needed to keep Southern Democrats in the coalition.
  • Women gained some opportunities in government and work programs, but policies often assumed men were the primary breadwinners.
  • Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants faced discrimination and, in many places, repatriation campaigns during the Depression years.

Seeing these tradeoffs helps you write stronger arguments: the New Deal expanded the welfare state and federal power, but it also preserved existing social hierarchies in important ways.

“Show it in action”: how to write Depression/New Deal causation and argument

Example thesis move (causation): If asked why the New Deal emerged, a strong answer links economic collapse to political change.

The Great Depression exposed structural weaknesses in the U.S. economy—especially banking instability and underconsumption—which overwhelmed local and voluntary relief. In response, Roosevelt’s New Deal dramatically expanded federal responsibility through emergency banking reforms and long-term programs like Social Security, redefining Americans’ expectations of government.

Example comparison move: If asked to compare Hoover and FDR, avoid caricatures.

  • Hoover: limited intervention, emphasis on voluntarism, but did expand federal action in business lending (RFC).
  • FDR: more direct federal programs, experimentation, and regulation.
Exam Focus
  • Typical question patterns:
    • Causation prompts asking how and why the federal government’s role in the economy changed in the 1930s.
    • Comparison prompts contrasting Hoover’s and FDR’s approaches or First vs Second New Deal goals.
    • Evidence-based questions (SAQ/DBQ) using documents like political cartoons, speeches, or data about unemployment/bank failures.
  • Common mistakes:
    • Treating the 1929 crash as the only cause; you need multiple reinforcing causes.
    • Claiming the New Deal ended the Depression by itself; wartime mobilization is a key part of the full-employment story.
    • Listing agencies without explaining their purpose (relief vs recovery vs reform) and historical significance.

World War II: Mobilization and Military

From neutrality to war: why the U.S. entered

At the start of World War II, many Americans supported neutrality—shaped by the memory of World War I, disillusionment with international politics, and the Depression’s domestic priorities. Congress passed Neutrality Acts in the 1930s to reduce the chance of being drawn into war.

However, as fascist aggression expanded—Nazi Germany in Europe and Imperial Japan in Asia—U.S. policy gradually shifted from strict neutrality to aiding the Allies.

Key steps included:

  • Lend-Lease Act (1941): allowed the U.S. to supply nations deemed vital to American security (especially Britain and, later, the Soviet Union). The logic was that supporting Britain could prevent a direct U.S. war later.
  • Pearl Harbor (December 7, 1941): Japan’s attack on the U.S. naval base led to a declaration of war against Japan; Germany and Italy then declared war on the U.S.

A frequent misconception is that the U.S. entered the war solely to “save democracy.” Ideals mattered, but APUSH answers are strongest when they combine ideology with strategy: U.S. leaders feared threats to global stability, trade routes, and national security.

Wartime mobilization: how the U.S. transformed its economy

Mobilization means shifting a society’s resources toward war—industry, labor, government planning, and public life.

The federal government dramatically expanded its role in coordinating production and controlling shortages:

  • The War Production Board (WPB) coordinated industrial conversion (for example, car factories producing tanks or aircraft).
  • The Office of Price Administration (OPA) used price controls and rationing to limit inflation and manage scarcity.
  • The Selective Training and Service Act (1940) established the first peacetime draft in U.S. history (a major signal that neutrality was fading).

Why mobilization matters historically: it demonstrated that the federal government could manage the economy on a massive scale—far beyond New Deal experiments—and it accelerated the long-term shift toward a military-industrial partnership between government and private corporations.

The home front: social changes and conflicts

World War II is often remembered as a unifying moment, but the home front also revealed tensions over race, gender, and civil liberties.

Women and work

With millions of men in uniform, women entered industrial jobs in large numbers—popularized by the cultural symbol “Rosie the Riveter.”

  • How it worked socially: the government and media encouraged women’s wage labor as patriotic, but often framed it as temporary “until the boys come home.” After the war, many women were pushed out of higher-paying industrial positions, even though women’s labor force participation remained an important long-term trend.
African Americans: Double V and pressure for rights

African Americans fought for victory abroad and against racism at home, often called the Double V Campaign.

  • A. Philip Randolph threatened a 1941 march on Washington to protest discrimination in defense industries.
  • In response, FDR issued Executive Order 8802 (1941), creating the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) to ban discrimination in defense jobs.

Why this matters: it shows civil rights advances often came through organized pressure, not simply wartime goodwill. It also helps explain the postwar civil rights movement—wartime service, migration, and activism reshaped expectations.

Mexican Americans and wartime labor

Wartime labor shortages contributed to the Bracero Program (began in 1942), which brought Mexican laborers to the U.S. temporarily (especially for agriculture). The period also saw racial tensions, including the Zoot Suit Riots (1943) in Los Angeles.

Japanese American incarceration

After Pearl Harbor, the U.S. government forcibly removed and confined over 100,000 Japanese Americans—most of them U.S. citizens—from the West Coast.

  • Executive Order 9066 (1942) authorized military zones and enabled mass removal to incarceration camps (often called internment camps, though legally many were not formal “internment” in the narrow sense).
  • The Supreme Court upheld the policy in Korematsu v. United States (1944).

How to understand it historically: it combined wartime fear, racism, and political pressure. A common mistake is to write as if incarceration was based on proven espionage. In reality, it was a broad, group-based policy not grounded in individualized evidence.

The military war: major strategy and turning points

APUSH generally expects you to know the “shape” of the war rather than every battle.

Allied strategy: Europe first

After U.S. entry, the Allies adopted a “Germany first” strategy—defeating Nazi Germany as the primary objective while still fighting Japan in the Pacific.

European theater highlights
  • The U.S. and Allies fought in North Africa and Italy before opening a direct Western Front.
  • D-Day (Normandy invasion, June 1944) marked the major Allied push into Western Europe.
  • Germany surrendered in May 1945 (V-E Day).
Pacific theater highlights

The war against Japan involved vast distances and intense naval and air combat.

  • Battle of Midway (June 1942) is widely treated as a turning point, weakening Japan’s offensive capability.
  • The U.S. pursued island hopping—capturing key islands to move closer to Japan while bypassing some heavily fortified positions.

“Show it in action”: using mobilization and home-front evidence in a response

Example SAQ-style explanation (civil liberties):

World War II expanded federal power not only through economic planning but also through restrictions on civil liberties. After Pearl Harbor, Executive Order 9066 enabled the removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans, and the Supreme Court upheld this in Korematsu v. United States (1944), demonstrating how wartime fears can override constitutional protections.

Example causation link (war and economy):

Wartime mobilization reduced unemployment by massively increasing federal spending and industrial production. Agencies like the WPB coordinated manufacturing while the OPA used rationing and price controls, showing a level of economic management beyond the New Deal and helping create expectations of continued federal involvement after the war.

Exam Focus
  • Typical question patterns:
    • Causation prompts linking WWII mobilization to economic recovery and shifts in federal power.
    • Questions about civil liberties and minority experiences (Japanese American incarceration, FEPC, Double V).
    • Comparison prompts between World War I and World War II home-front policies (propaganda, economy, civil liberties).
  • Common mistakes:
    • Treating the home front as uniformly patriotic and harmonious; include conflict and inequality.
    • Explaining Japanese American incarceration as a purely military necessity without addressing racism and lack of individualized evidence.
    • Listing battles without connecting them to strategy (Europe first, island hopping, total war).

Postwar Diplomacy and the Atomic Age

Planning the postwar world: what “postwar diplomacy” means

Postwar diplomacy refers to the negotiations and institutions designed to shape the world after the fighting stopped. U.S. leaders believed that the mistakes after World War I—especially failure to join the League of Nations and the instability that followed—should not be repeated. The goal was to build a new international order that could prevent another global depression and another world war.

This diplomacy mattered because it marked a turning point: the United States emerged from WWII with unmatched industrial capacity and military power, and it took a leading role in designing global institutions.

The “Big Three” conferences and the end of the war

As Allied victory approached, leaders negotiated how to handle defeated powers and liberated territories.

  • Yalta Conference (February 1945): Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin discussed postwar Europe, including the future of Poland and plans for a new international organization (the United Nations). Historians debate how much freedom of action the Western Allies really had given the Red Army’s presence in Eastern Europe.
  • Potsdam Conference (July–August 1945): Truman (after Roosevelt’s death), Stalin, and Attlee (replacing Churchill during the conference) dealt with Germany’s occupation and Japan’s surrender demands.

A common misconception is that these conferences were simple “betrayals” or simple “handshakes.” They were complex negotiations shaped by military realities on the ground—especially Soviet control of Eastern Europe by the time agreements were made.

The United Nations: learning from the League’s failure

The United Nations (UN) was created in 1945 to provide a forum for diplomacy, collective security, and international cooperation.

  • Why it mattered in U.S. history: unlike after World War I, the U.S. did join the UN. That decision reflected a broader acceptance that the U.S. could not isolate itself from global crises.
  • How it was designed to work: major powers were given special influence through the Security Council (including veto power), reflecting the belief that the UN could only function if the strongest countries remained committed.

Economic diplomacy: Bretton Woods and global stability

U.S. policymakers also believed that economic chaos helped cause political extremism in the interwar period. In 1944, Allied representatives met at Bretton Woods to design a postwar economic system.

Two major institutions that emerged were:

  • The International Monetary Fund (IMF), intended to promote currency stability and help countries manage balance-of-payments problems.
  • The World Bank (originally the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development), intended to support rebuilding and long-term development.

You don’t need to memorize technical details for APUSH, but you should understand the core logic: the U.S. supported institutions that made global trade and financial stability more likely, because U.S. prosperity and security were increasingly tied to an interconnected world.

The atomic age: the bomb and its consequences

The atomic age began when the U.S. developed and used atomic weapons in 1945.

The Manhattan Project and decision-making

The Manhattan Project was a top-secret U.S.-led program to build an atomic bomb. The U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima (August 6, 1945) and Nagasaki (August 9, 1945). Japan announced its surrender shortly after.

APUSH often expects you to understand the main arguments leaders used at the time, as well as later debates:

  • Arguments commonly given to justify use: ending the war faster, avoiding a costly invasion of Japan, and saving lives that would be lost in prolonged fighting.
  • Concerns raised then and later: civilian casualties, ethical implications of mass destruction, and the role of the bomb in postwar power politics.

A frequent student mistake is to treat the decision as obviously “right” or “wrong” with no historical reasoning. Strong historical writing shows you understand the context: intense casualty estimates, brutal fighting in the Pacific, and emerging distrust among Allies.

Atomic diplomacy and the early Cold War context

Even before WWII fully ended, U.S.–Soviet tensions were rising over Eastern Europe’s political future. The existence of atomic weapons added a new layer to diplomacy.

  • Why the bomb changed diplomacy: it introduced an unprecedented level of destructive power, making military confrontation between great powers potentially catastrophic.
  • Why it changed government priorities: it accelerated attention to intelligence, military planning, and the long-term question of how to prevent (or prepare for) future conflict.

You can think of the atomic bomb as both a weapon and a political fact: it shaped bargaining power, fear, and strategy. While the Cold War is mainly Unit 8, APUSH Unit 7 expects you to see its origins in WWII’s endgame.

War crimes trials and redefining international norms

After the war, the Allies held trials to prosecute major Nazi leaders for war crimes, including the Nuremberg Trials (beginning in 1945).

  • Why they mattered: they promoted the idea that individuals (not just states) could be held accountable under international law for crimes against humanity and aggressive war.

“Show it in action”: building an argument about postwar turning points

Example continuity/change argument:

After World War II, the United States moved decisively away from interwar isolationism by joining the United Nations and helping create Bretton Woods economic institutions. At the same time, wartime alliances fractured as disputes over Eastern Europe and the emergence of atomic weapons increased mistrust, setting the stage for a new era of geopolitical rivalry.

Example sourcing insight for documents: If you see a Truman speech or government poster, consider audience and purpose. A leader speaking to Congress may emphasize security and unity; a diplomatic memo may reveal concerns about Soviet intentions or the leverage provided by U.S. industrial and military strength.

Exam Focus
  • Typical question patterns:
    • Causation prompts about why the U.S. abandoned isolationism and supported new international institutions (UN, Bretton Woods).
    • Argument prompts evaluating the significance of the atomic bomb for ending WWII and shaping postwar relations.
    • Questions connecting WWII’s end to early Cold War tensions (especially Eastern Europe and differing visions of postwar order).
  • Common mistakes:
    • Treating Yalta/Potsdam as simple “agreements” without mentioning the military reality of Soviet control in Eastern Europe.
    • Reducing the atomic bomb to a single-cause explanation for Japanese surrender; include broader context (Pacific war intensity, strategic considerations, Soviet entry into the war against Japan in August 1945).
    • Describing the UN as “the League of Nations again” without explaining what changed (U.S. membership and Security Council structure).