IN the autumn of 1932, Hoover presided over one last humiliation—a nationwide banking crisis. Three years of deflation had eroded the collateral behind many loans. As banks called them in, the business slump worsened and produced more bank runs and failures. Before 1932, the thousands of bank closings were mostly confined to small rural banks. Then, that October, Nevada’s governor shut the state’s banks. There followed a frightening crescendo of state bank closings—euphemistically called holidays—climaxed by an eight-day closing of Michigan banks in February. The contagion spread so fast that thirty-eight states had shut their banks by Roosevelt’s inauguration.
Between the November election and the March 1933 inauguration was a time of paralysis and glowering hos