recession. Hopkins made it his mission to strengthen ties between the Roosevelt administration and the business community. While Roosevelt believed in complete reform through the New Deal, Hopkins took a more administrative position; he felt that recovery was imperative and that The New Deal would continue to hinder recovery. With support from Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace and Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr, popular support for recovery, rather than reform, swept the nation. By the end of 1938 reform had been struck down, as no new reform laws were passed. The economy in America was now beginning to show signs of recovery and the unemployment rate was lowering following the abysmal year of 1938. The biggest shift towards recovery, however, came with the decision of Germany to invade France in May 1940. After France had been defeated in June, the U.S. economy would skyrocket in the months following. France's defeat meant that Britain and other allies would look to the U.S. for large supplies of materials for the war. The need for these war materials created a huge spurt in production, thus leading to a promising level of employment in America. Moreover, Britain chose to pay for their materials in gold. This stimulated the gold inflow and raised the monetary base, which in turn, stimulated the American economy to its highest point since the summer of 1929 when the depression began. By the end of 1941, before American entry into the war, defense spending and military mobilization had started one of the greatest booms in American history thus ending the last traces of unemployment. Facts and figures Effects of depression in the U.S.: 13 million people became unemployed. In 1932, 34 million people belonged to families with no regular full-time wage earner. Industrial production fell by nearly 45% between 1929 and 1932. Homebuilding dropped by 80% between the years 1929 and 1932. In the 1920s, the banking system in the U.S. was about $50 billion, which was about 50% of GDP. From 1929 to 1932, about 5,000 banks went out of business. By 1933, 11,000 of US 25,000 banks had failed. Between 1929 and 1933, U.S. GDP fell around 30%; the stock market lost almost 90% of its value. In 1929, the unemployment rate averaged 3%. In Cleveland, the unemployment rate was 50%; in Toledo, Ohio, 80%. One Soviet trading corporation in New York averaged 350 applications a day from