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New Deal Program the Great Depression Hit Essay
New Deal Program
The Great Depression hit America in ways that affected everyone, from the richest of the country's society, to the poorest of the urban and rural inhabitants. The stock market crashing left many rich society folk with no wealth, the farmers found themselves without any consumers to buy their overabundance of too-expensive products, and the urban families found themselves precariously scrounging for means of survival, oftentimes going hungry for days on end. This situation certainly set forth the cause for governmental involvement, and by 1933, the FDR administration sought to remedy this catastrophe by constructing the New Deal.
The number of the unemployed before the stock market crashed in 1929 was as low as 4%; however, by 1933, this rate had skyrocketed to around 25%. One in four of the working class could not find work, and thus could not support the livelihoods of their families or themselves. Businesses were floundering, and "unemployed Americans scraped together meager dinners of flour and water and skipped many meals" (Moran, 2011). Corporations began to crumble, and many found themselves turning to the government for help, as opposed to the usual capitalistic tendencies of corporate handouts. However, there were downsides to this leaning-to, considering the laws passed by the government seemed to be more detrimental to groups than they were helpful.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal took form in three different stages. In 1933, the administration sought to "stop the economic panic that had engulfed the nation" (Brinkley, 1991); in early 1935, the same administration tried to bolster the first program with another set of reforms; by 1937, a "less productive period of activism" (Brinkley, 1991) commenced and "searched for ways to make the federal bureaucracy more efficient" (Brinkley, 1991). Intending to restore economic demand -- and therefore boost up the American economy -- the government placed laws that ordered farms to steady their prices by plowing the crops and ridding their overstock of pigs. Another set of laws -- as created and authorized by the newly…
Sample Source(s) Used
Resources
Bertelli, A. (2010). Congressional Ideology and Administrative Oversight in the New Deal Era. Historical Methods, 43(3), 125-137.
Brinkley, Alan (1991). The Reader's Companion to American History. Eric Foner and John A. Garraty, Editors. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
Greider, W. (2011). The End of New Deal Liberalism. (Cover story). Nation, 292(4), 18-23.
Moran, R. (2011). Consuming Relief: Food Stamps and the New Welfare of the New Deal. Journal Of American History, 97(4), 1001-1022.
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