Introduction

The sun was breaking through the clouds in Washington DC when Franklin Roosevelt gave his inaugural presidential address. It was Saturday 4 March 1933 and the United States had just started the slow ascent from the bottom of the economic abyss to which it had sunk in the three years after the Wall Street Crash of 1929. A 50% drop in industrial production meant that factories lay idle and with a quarter of the working population jobless, the dole queue was a feature of every American city. Nor was the malaise confined to the world’s biggest economy; the crisis had put paid to the minority Labour government in Britain 18 months previously, while in Germany, a new chancellor, Adolf Hitler, had been in power for little more than a month. A week earlier fire had destroyed the Reichstag building.