(Image: Shari Weisberg / WPA Poster Collection / Library of Congress)
IN 1933, the Democrats won the US election and Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office as president in strikingly similar circumstances to those faced by Barack Obama later this month. The Roaring Twenties had been a time of easy credit, cheap money and technological advance, notably the electrification of the US, but the bubble burst on Black Thursday, 29 October 1929, and by 1933 the US economy was in recession. Thousands of banks and factories were closed, industrial production halved, unemployment was approaching 25 per cent, the Dow Jones had…
