<span>March 4, 1933, was perhaps the Great Depression's darkest hour. The stock market had plunged 85% from its high in 1929, and nearly one-fourth of the workforce was unemployed. In the cities, jobless men were lining up for soup and bread. In rural areas, farmers whose land was being foreclosed were talking openly of revolution. The crowd that gathered in front of the Capitol that day to watch Franklin D. Roosevelt's Inauguration had all but given up on America. They were, a reporter observed, "as silent as a group of mourners around a grave."</span>
The answer to the first question is Bold experimentation & He closed the banks temporarily to stop panic withdraws to allow banks to organize their accounts. And the answer to your second question is that if we're talking about the roaring twenties, it would be that he means the stock market crash where the dollar bill became worth nothing.
