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Gov't Solutions Only Deepened '30s Downturn
...Let's start at square one, with the stock crash in October 1929. Was this what led to massive unemployment? Official government statistics suggest otherwise. So do new statistics on unemployment by two current scholars, Richard Vedder and Lowell Gallaway, in their book "Out of Work."

The Vedder and Gallaway statistics allow us to follow unemployment month by month. They put the unemployment rate at 5% in November 1929, a month after the stock market crash. It hit 9% in December — but then began a generally downward trend, subsiding to 6.3% in June 1930.

That was when the Smoot-Hawley tariffs were passed, against the advice of economists across the country, who warned of dire consequences. Five months after the Smoot-Hawley tariffs, the jobless rate hit double digits for the first time in the 1930s....

...The stock market crash, which has been blamed for the widespread suffering during the Great Depression of the 1930s, created no unemployment rate that was even half of what was created in the wake of the government interventions of Hoover and FDR....