[@deathkiller]

A few points:

The Great Depression in America was in part created by or aggravated by an excess in materials production that crashed the commodity market and smashed industries after manufacturers soon found that what they were producing had a market price far below their manufacturing price. In most cases - in particular agriculture - the immediate answer these firms figured would save them from having to liquidate all assets and to not foreclose on land when they failed to pay on their debts was to produce even more; crashing prices even more. An industrial panic ensued as companies failed to meet growth and their stocks dropped, starting a selling frenzy with no stock buyers and money started to burn.

Banks that had spent into the stock market to make higher returns never got their money back and that burned, and the rest was dried up in panic-driven withdrawals of savings.

To suggest that the "economy is growing again" in that you have expanded industry in the "Application Mountains" it's like saying you made the leg that got shot off with the shotgun better by blowing the rest of it up with a grenade. In essence, that was Hoover's plan to recover from the depression: encourage more production output to crash commodity prices lower and in potential effect crash more firms.

It's what happened to help make the Dustbowl, and why I picked up the Dustbowl; because as a player I was  honestly terrified a player like you would fail to realize the conditions of the crash and patch over the problem with the thing that made the problem worse in the first place.

As well on the economic note: with the world economy crashing as fucking hard as it is gold would have gone with it. It'd have value yes: but nothing worth its weight as it was and no buyers for something as unsubstantial as gold.

In short: you're tackling a massive deflationary problem with deflationary tactics and expecting to sell massively deflated gold with no buying market, all the while having a society flooded with product no one needs, wants, or can buy.

Socially, I'd like to comment American populism was hugely defined by socialist, communist, or even fascist policies. Have you hear of Huey Long? He was a massively powerful and popular Lousianan democratic senator that tippified the popularity of left-wing government.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hphgHi6FD8k[/youtube]

All hail The Kingfish!

So trying to stomp out the ideological strain that was so popular at the time will just make the region very unstable. And if the regional policy is that of Hooverism, it's that of the Republican Party. And the Republican Party was very, very small army. They wouldn't be fielding the army which you described; they'd have gotten rid of most of that.

EDIT - To also swing back to the economic point: how do you actually intend to get anything to market? Everything you produce for an international market has no viable ports to pass through, or those not already controlled by another nation. Those goods would probably be taxed, charged, and tariff'd. So when shippers get a hold of that product and get it to Europe, there prices would  be inflated to not only cover standard shipping fees, but the trading expenses added by tarrifs and trade taxes the likes of New York, The Pacific States, or the commie-south would impose on these goods to help pay bills. And then they have to go through local European tariffs and at the end of the day they're priced at a massive disadvantage to local products and BMW and Ferarri gets to smile smugly on their local monopoly of central Europe because Ford and GM is absolutely castrated and none of us have the political power to do anything.

You're at a massive disadvantage mate, like the rest of us.