The
stock market crash in the waning days of October 1929 heralded the beginning of the worst economic depression in U.S. history. The Great Depression hit the South, including Georgia, harder than some other regions of the country, and in fact only worsened an economic downturn that had begun in the state a decade earlier. U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt's programs for economic relief and recovery, known collectively as the New Deal, arrived late in Georgia and were only sporadically effective, yet they did lay the foundation for far-reaching changes. Not until the United States' entry into World War II (1941-45) did the depression in Georgia fully recede.