Describe the human and economic scale of the Great Depression and evaluate President Hoover's response using evidence from multiple perspectives.
The Great Depression that followed the 1929 crash reached a scale hard to overstate: unemployment climbed toward 25 percent by 1933, roughly 9,000 banks failed as panicked depositors withdrew savings faster than banks could pay out, and homeless encampments nicknamed "Hoovervilles" -- a bitter joke at the president's expense -- sprang up in cities nationwide. In the Great Plains, years of drought combined with farming practices that had stripped away protective grassland turned soil to dust; massive dust storms during the 1930s "Dust Bowl" destroyed farms across Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, and neighboring states, driving hundreds of thousands of displaced farm families, often called "Okies" regardless of which state they actually came from, to migrate toward California in search of work, a migration captured in Dorothea Lange's Depression-era photographs and John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath.
President Herbert Hoover, a genuinely accomplished former engineer and humanitarian relief administrator, believed deeply in "rugged individualism" and voluntary cooperation between government and business rather than direct federal relief, which he worried would undermine self-reliance and expand government power dangerously. He did take some action -- creating the Reconstruction Finance Corporation in 1932 to loan money to banks and businesses -- but resisted the kind of direct aid to struggling families that the scale of suffering seemed to demand. His reputation was further damaged in the summer of 1932 when the "Bonus Army," thousands of unemployed World War I veterans camped in Washington demanding early payment of a promised bonus, were forcibly and violently dispersed by the U.S. Army under General Douglas MacArthur, on Hoover's orders. It is fair, and consistent with the evidence, to credit Hoover's sincere principles and some real initiatives while also concluding his response proved inadequate to a crisis of this scale -- both things were true, and voters would render their own verdict that November.
Mastery looks like: They can cite two specific statistics or events showing the Depression's scale, and evaluate Hoover's response by weighing his stated principles against the outcome, rather than only praising or only condemning him.
Common stumbles: Reducing Hoover to a simple villain who "did nothing," which both overstates his inaction and understates the genuine philosophical reasoning -- however ultimately inadequate -- behind his restraint.