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I'm mulling around doing a more modern political TL than the Byzantine one I've been concentrating on for the last few months. I'm in something of a rut with the later (I have a reference book to leaf through before I feel safe enough to continue), so I want to try and distract myself with something later.

A book I read recently on the relationship of the Smoot-Hawley tariff to the beginning of bank failures in the grain-basket and other heavily export oriented regions leaves me confident that I could forestall the Great Depression as-it-happened. If my reading of the period is accurate, than 1929 would see a comparatively mild recession that would clear up rather quickly. This is the result of a credit cycle that the Fed had been propagating since the beginning of the 20's and which had led to similar recessions in 1924 and 1926.

So far my best bet is to find a way to get Cordell Hull nominated for the Democratic ticket for President in 1928. My original idea (have Coolidge run for re-election) couldn't have worked, because Coolidge was a protectionist Republican and the whole TL turns on avoiding the trade war of 1929-1930. Al Smith couldn't have won, and Cordell Hull seems to have been the most popular after him.

How can I accomplish this? I don't know much about the DNC in 1928 and I don't know how to get Hull to be chosen.

More importantly, what happens after ward? The international monetary system is still more or less broken, so that will have to be addressed somehow. The politics of Reparations and Repayment are what dominate international circles right at the moment, and within a year IOTL we'd get the Young Plan. Will something similar still happen under a Democrat?

Likewise, what about the long run? A prosperous 1930's will have some very interesting tack-ons for the future. Will something looking like WWII still happen if there's no economic depression to get the Nazis elected in Germany? What will happen to American culture when the level of prosperity seen in the late 1950's is reached by the 1940's?

What about labor issues? The Great Depression was the (10 ton) straw that broke the camel's back with respect to the legality of labor unions. The Wagner Act IOTL legalized union organizing and provided them with a whole set of special privileges. Is something similar even possible without it? Is it possible to see labor unions legalized without being granted any special privileges?

How about problems of race? In the 1920's, in line with the revival of the KKK, there was the very earliest stirrings of the Civil Rights Movement. Calvin Coolidge is said to have been as anti-racist as a public official could get away with being at the time. Might these things go somewhere faster without the shock of depression and war? Or would they take longer?

Basically, WI the Great Depression was no deeper or longer than the slow-downs in the middle of the 1920's?
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