Office of the First Lady of the United States Staff, White House Social Secretary, Press Secretary, White House Chief Floral Designer, and White House Executive Chef. Though the persona, activities, and initiatives of the First Lady have always been significant to the history of the United States, the first First Lady to hire federally funded staff was Edith Roosevelt, who hired Belle Hagner as the first White House Social Secretary on October 2, 1901. Eleanor Roosevelt became the first First Lady to expand the office beyond social and administrative secretaries by hiring Malvina Thompson as her personal secretary and Jackie Kennedy was the first to employ a Press Secretary.
History of the United States (1918–1945) crash of Thursday, October 24, 1929. Sectors of the US economy had been showing some signs of distress for months before October 1929. Business inventories of all types were three times as large as they had been a year before (an indication that the public was not buying products as rapidly as in the past), and other signposts of economic health—-freight carloads, industrial production, and wholesale prices—-were slipping downward. The events in the United States triggered a worldwide depression, which led to deflation and a great increase in unemployment. In the United States between 1929 and 1933, unemployment soared from