Name

Years Lived

Description

Lloyd George

1863-1945

Headed the Liberal party in Britain, which fell into decline and was replaced by the Conservatives who favored high tariffs and welfare payments.

Ramsay MacDonald

1866-1937

In 1929, he led an alliance of Labourites and Conservatives as the prime minister of Britain.

Stanley Baldwin

1867-1947

Followed MacDonald as the second prime minister to lead the alliance of Labourites and Conservatives.

Neville Chamberlain

1869-1940

Third and last man to run the British government until the alert of World War II. Chamberlain participated in the Munich Conference, which ceded the Sudetenland to Germany. His black umbrella became a symbol for the policy of appeasement, or the willingness to give into the demands of the aggressive dictatorships.

Raymond Poincaré

1860-1934

Prime minister of France during the 1920s. In 1922 when Germany paid only part of their reparation bill, he sent French troops to occupy the Ruhr Valley in Western Germany which did not bring more money into the French economy from Germany. His tax and spending reforms led to a temporary resurgence of prosperity until the depression.

Warren G. Harding

1865-1923

President of the United States who promised a "return to normalcy."

Herbert Hoover

1874-1964

President of the US, who by 1932 brought the Roosevelt Democrats into the White House because of his stubborn insistence that the depression was a normal fluctuation of the economy.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt

1882-1945

President of the United States who presented the New Deal. He helped to preserve capitalism and democracy in the United States by using the deficit-spending theories of Keyes, and by establishing profound involvement of the federal government in the economy.

John Maynard Keynes

1883-1946

His ideas were used by Franklin D. Roosevelt to save the economy of the United States.

Leon Blum

1872-1950

Socialist who in 1936 became prime minister of France under the Popular Front banner. He instituted a "French New Deal," which offered labor and agricultural reforms similar to those in the United States. However, his measures were ineffective in ending the depression. He resigned in 1937.

Edouard Daladier

1884-1970

Conservative prime minister of France who followed Leon Blum. He overturned the Blum reforms and practiced a policy of appeasement of Hitler’s aggressions.

Benito Mussolini

1883-1945

Editor of a socialist newspaper who organized the Fascist party in Italy, which is a combination of socialism and nationalism. His squadristi, paramilitary blackshirts, attacked Communists, socialist, and other enemies of his program. He won the support of the conservative classes and quickly abandoned his socialist programs. The Fascists March on Rome of 1922 caused the government to collapse and won Mussolini the right to organize a new government. Through the 1930s, an organization of corporation headed by Mussolini effectively replaced parliamentary government; the totalitarian state was created in Italy.

Adolf Hitler

1889-1945

Austrian who helped organize the National Socialist German Worker’s Party (Nazis) after WWI. A brilliant orator, he blamed democracy, Communist, and Jews for Germany’s ills. After the Munich Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 he served a year of jail, where he wrote his book, "Mien Kampf" (My Struggle). In 1933, he was invited by Hindenburg to form a government as chancellor.

Erich Ludendorf

1865-1937

A distinguished general who had led German troops to victory on the Eastern Front during the First World War. He led, with Hitler, the attempted coup in Munich.

Paul von Hindenburg

1847-1934

As the president of the Weimar Republic, he invited Hitler in January 1933 to become the chancellor of Germany.

Francisco Franco

1892-1975

General of his Spanish Falangists (Fascists) that began in 1936 an insurrection against the democratically chosen republican government of Spain. Mussolini and Hitler supported him with men, arms, and money. The Fascists won the Spanish Civil War, and Franco remained as the longest reigning Fascist dictator, until his regime ended when he died in 1975.

Chiang Kai-shek

1887-1975

Leader of the Nationalist party in China. The Japanese drove them deep into mainland China, where they waged a guerrilla war that proved costly to the Japanese.