LYCOS RETRIEVER 
The Great Depression: Governments
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Great Britain departed from the gold standard in September 1931, allowing the pound sterling to float internationally. The value of the pound then dropped significantly and British exports became cheaper. In April 1933, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 6102 prohibiting citizens of the U.S. from owning other-than-token amounts of gold and from using gold as money. Citizens were forced to sell all gold holdings (apart from jewelry and "coins of special collector value") to the federal government at a price of $20.67 per ounce. In January 1934, Roosevelt raised the official price of gold to $35 per ounce, thereby devaluing the U.S. dollar by 41%.
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During the Great Depression of the 1930s, when as many as one out of four Americans could not find jobs, the federal government stepped in to become the employer of last resort. The Works Progress Administration (WPA), an ambitious New Deal program, put 8,500,000 jobless to work, mostly on projects that required manual labor. With Uncle Sam meeting the payroll, countless bridges, highways and parks were constructed or repaired.
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A number of poor land management practices in the Great Plains region increased the vulnerability of the area before the 1930s drought. Some of the land use patterns and methods cultivation in the region can be traced back to the settlement of the Great Plains nearly 100 years earlier. At that time, little was known of the region’s climate. Several expeditions had explored the region, but they were not studying the region for its agricultural potential, and, furthermore, their findings went into government reports that were not readily available to the general public (Fite, 1966). Misleading information... was plentiful. “Boosters” of the region, hoping to promote settlement, put forth glowing but inaccurate accounts of the Great Plains’ agricultural potential.
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[I]n 1933 the nation turned to a pragmatist--Franklin Delano Roosevelt--who ... did not have solutions but who had promised to try to remedy the Great Depression through bold actions. Roosevelt began deliberately in March. He declared a national "bank holiday," closing all financial institutions across the country so that federal inspectors could examine their books. If a bank reopened, it would do so because the government found it sound. It could be trusted. If a bank's affairs were beyond redemption, it remained closed.
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The Federal Labor Standards Act (FLSA) is a product of the Great Depression, created in 1938 to protect workers by setting a minimum wage and establishing an overtime system. The government used the time-and-a-half overtime provision as an incentive to get employers to offer more jobs to out-of-work Americans, as well as to reward workers for long shifts.
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Economists Harold Cole and Lee Ohanian have emphasized the unusually slow recovery from the Great Depression[2]. After most recessions, productivity and output generally return quickly to normal growth rates. Although output returned to 1929 levels by 1937, it was well below the extrapolation of historical trends, the equivalent of eight years of zero growth. Productivity, by contrast, returned to its usual growth rate by 1936. Good explanations for this slow recovery must explain why labor supply remained well below 1929 levels during the 1930s. Similar studies of other countries[3] find variations in the recovery rate due to different government policies.
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