Answer:
Unemployment was the overriding fact of life when Franklin D. Roosevelt became President of the United States on March 4, 1933. An anomaly of the time was that the government did not systematically collect statistics on joblessness, actually did not start doing so until 1940. The Bureau of Labor Statistics later estimated that 12,830,000 persons were out of work in 1933, about one-fourth of a civilian labor force of over fifty-one million. March was the record month, with about fifteen and a half million unemployed. There is no doubt that 1933 was the worst year, and March the worst month for joblessness in the history of the United States.
Explanation:
1934 marked a turning point for labor during the Great Depression. In that year, the number of strikes more than doubled to 1,856, while the number of workers on strike increased five-fold, to 1,470,000, compared to the period 1929–32.1 The San Francisco General Strike of July 16–19 was one of three key outbreaks of class struggle in 1934. As Art Preis observes in Labor’s Giant Step, victorious strikes for union recognition in “Minneapolis, Toledo and San Francisco…showed how the workers could fight and win. They gave heart and hope to labor everywhere for the climactic struggle that was to build the CIO. In each of these strikes, militants from left-wing organizations in Toledo, and Communists in San Francisco played a key role in providing leadership in the fight. Communists and socialists rose to national prominence, confrontation by workers with the employers and the state became a common occurrence, and industrial solidarity blossomed.
