These bankers called on the nation's central bank -- the Federal Reserve Board -- to control the expanding money supply. And the Federal Reserve acted to limit the amount of money in use.

At the same time, the federal government began reducing the amount of money that it was spending. And it launched the new Social Security tax on workers' incomes.

The effect of all these government actions was to limit the amount of money being spent by the government, companies, and private citizens. As a result, the economy began to fall once again into depression.

Most people supported the "New Deal" policies of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt

HARRY MONROE: In August nineteen thirty-seven, stock market prices began to fall sharply.

In seven months, the price of stock for the General Motors Corporation fell from sixty dollars to twenty-five. The United States Steel Company stock fell all the way from one hundred twenty-one dollars to thirty-eight. In fact, the stock markets lost in nine months about two-thirds of all the gains that they had made so slowly and painfully since Roosevelt took office.

Americans had supported Roosevelt's New Deal program because it offered a solution to the depression. Now that program seemed to be failing.

JACK WIETZEL: Historian Frederick Lewis Allen remembered those dark days of nineteen thirty-seven.

"Goods sold slowly," Allen wrote. ”Businessmen became frightened and reduced production. Two million men were thrown out of work in the space of a few months. They became less able to buy what was for sale. The terrible circle of the falling value of the dollar moved all the more rapidly.