Chapter 32 Terms and Definitions

Normalcy: Warren G. Harding's 1920 campaign promise of a return to pre-war stability, simplicity, and isolation from foreign entanglements.
Ohio Gang: Harding's circle of corrupt Ohio cronies and appointees who looted federal agencies, including the Veterans' Bureau and Justice Department.
Teapot Dome Scandal: The bribery scandal in which Interior Secretary Albert B. Fall secretly leased federal oil reserves to private oilmen for personal profit.
Albert B. Fall: Harding's Secretary of the Interior, convicted for accepting bribes in the Teapot Dome affair and the first former cabinet officer imprisoned for corruption.
"Silent Cal" Coolidge: Nickname for Calvin Coolidge, Harding's taciturn successor, known for personal honesty and a strict laissez-faire economic philosophy.
Andrew Mellon: Coolidge's wealthy Treasury Secretary, who engineered major tax cuts for corporations and high earners and used surpluses to reduce the national debt.
Laissez-faire: An economic philosophy holding that government should not interfere with business and markets, dominant during the Harding-Coolidge years.
Installment Buying: Purchasing consumer goods, especially automobiles, through small periodic payments rather than cash, which fueled 1920s consumerism and debt.
Buying on Margin: Purchasing stock with a small cash down payment and borrowed money, which magnified gains but also losses when the market collapsed.
Florida Land Boom: A mid-1920s real-estate speculative bubble in Florida that collapsed in 1926, foreshadowing the larger crash to come.
Herbert Hoover: Republican president elected in 1928, a former mining engineer and relief administrator whose philosophy of "rugged individualism" shaped his response to the Depression.
Rugged Individualism: Hoover's philosophy that voluntary cooperation among business, communities, and limited government — not direct federal intervention — best preserved American prosperity and character.
Black Thursday / Black Tuesday: October 24 and October 29, 1929 — the days of panicked selling and market collapse that opened the Great Depression.
Great Crash of 1929: The catastrophic stock market collapse that exposed deep structural weaknesses in the U.S. economy and triggered the Great Depression.
Overproduction: A chronic surplus of factory and farm goods beyond what consumers could buy, one of the underlying causes of the Depression.
Hawley-Smoot Tariff: An 1930 law raising import duties to historic highs, which provoked foreign retaliation and worsened the collapse of world trade.
Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC): A 1932 Hoover-era agency that extended emergency government loans to failing banks, railroads, and businesses.
Hooverville: A shantytown of homeless and unemployed Americans during the Depression, named in bitter mockery of President Hoover.
Bonus Expeditionary Force (Bonus Army): A group of roughly 15,000–20,000 unemployed World War I veterans who marched on Washington in 1932 demanding early payment of a promised service bonus.
Douglas MacArthur: The army general who led the excessive military operation, including tanks and tear gas, that forcibly dispersed the Bonus Army in 1932.