Hervert Hoover's aloof attitude toward intervening in the economy, opulent speculation and an extreme over-optimism had crashed the stock market. With the US economy rapidly collapsing, extremely reactive measures were put into place, such as the Smoot-Hawley Tariffs Act, which raised tariffs on many imports necessary for America's industry. This put the global economy into an even greater decline, now deprived of America's industries. Every industrialised country in the world lost anywhere from a quarter to half of their industrial production, as well as over half of their foreign trade. In the US, unemployment rose by over 600%. This was, perhaps, the crisis that would break America's back. In the deep south, the Ku Klux Klan began an armed uprising, seeking to dissolute the Constitutional Union between the USA and the CSA, seeing the former's hedonistic capitalism as the origin of such widespread misery and economic collapse. Though Hervert Hoover's policies had been ineffective, by the end of his presidency all notions of volunteerism were in the process of being abandoned in favour of state action, which 1933 electoral winner President Franklin D. Roosevelt pioneered through his New Deal policy of sponsoring public works, regulating the financial sector and offering aid to American farmers, which were becoming more destitute by the day thanks to both the Depression and the Dust Bowl, a series of droughts and climate anomalies which reduced agricultural output.
The Great Depression lasted until 1939, when the beginning of World War II and the realisation that America could realistically enter the war against Japan and the USSR pushed the American government into adopting a war economy, latter dubbed as the Arsenal of Democracy.