The 1929 stock-market crash and the ensuing Great Depression exposed major weaknesses in the U.S. and world economies. These ranged from chronically low farm prices and uneven income distribution to trade barriers, a surplus of consumer goods, and a constricted money supply. As the crisis deepened, President Hoover struggled to respond. In 1932, with Hoover’s reputation in tatters, FDR and his promised “New Deal” brought a surge of hope. Although FDR’s New Deal did not end the Great Depression it eased the people’s suffering and reformed many of the problems that contributed to the depression by providing relief, recovery, and reform while fundamentally changing the role of the federal government towards the people.
First, the conditions under Hoover need to be examined, as seen from the point of view of The New Masses, a Marxist publication, in which Meridel Lesueur criticizes the Hoover administration’s lackluster response in helping not only men, but mostly in helping women as a whole, noting that there were many women out of work who were discriminated against by the male population in the midst of the crisis (Document A).
Critics could dismiss this because of the source, a Marxist publication, but they cannot dismiss statistics, like those shown in Document J, which shows the overall unemployment rates of non-farm workers from 1920 until 1945, with the peak of the unemployment following the crash, and only beginning to fall after Hoover’s leave from office and the initiation of the New Deal (Document J).
The Essay on United States Hoover Depression Roosevelt
Napolean Bonaparte once stated, "A leader is a dealer in hope." Hoover and Roosevelt had very different viewpoints on how to handle the Great Depression. Hoover preferred "rugged individualism," and FDR preferred "helping hand" philosophies. Hoover believed in assisting business in hope that this support would create a trickle down impact which would lead to investment and more jobs. FDR, on the ...
The effectiveness of the New Deal must be weighed with the economic and political environment of the Roosevelt Administration. Under Roosevelt, the New Deal was formed, and unemployment dropped from nearly 40% unemployment to 25% unemployment from 1933 to 1937 (Document J).
If this doesn’t show how effective the New Deal was, then nothing does. The effectiveness of the New Deal goes beyond lowering unemployment by half. It also goes further, removing obstacles of the common man to organize for self-protection, creating Social Security to benefit all Americans, and helping to ease race tensions for the first time since Reconstruction.
The right to organize for self-protection, for the working man to form a Union to protect their rights, was restricted to the point of nonexistence in the anti-worker, pro-business administrations of the Republican-held 1920s. To remedy this, and to increase support among the working man and help to relieve workers, Congress passed the National Labor Relations Act, or the Wagner Act. This gave Unions the legal right to exist for the first time in American history, after decades of labor strife and government support of big business under Republican presidents. John L. Lewis, labor leader and supporter of Roosevelt, gave an address on NBC, defending the act and the rights of workers to organize in 1936, saying,”Huge corporations, such as United States Steel and General Motors…have no right to transgress the law which gives the workers the right of self-organization and collective bargaining.” (Document G)
While the Wagner Act addressed labor strife and allowed for the common man to have a real voice in the marketplace as well as the ballot box for the first time, other effects of the New Deal and its effectiveness are still seen today. A noted one is Social Security, established during Roosevelt’s second term. Social Security, which provides old age pensions for the elderly, remains an effective and useful program to this day; despite the problems it has because of population growth and the raiding of the trust fund to finance things it wasn’t meant to finance. The premise of the plan and program itself can be seen in Document E, which gives information on the program after it was first established (Document E).
The Essay on Basic Documents Affecting American Society
BASIC DOCUMENTS AFFECTING AMERICAN SOCIETY There are three basic documents which affect American society almost daily in day to day affairs. They are the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights. Each The sentiments in favor of independence from England was growing in the American Colonies during the last days of 1775. The opening battles of the revolution, at Lexengton ...
Originally, the program was created to bring the elderly out of poverty, of which it did easily, bringing millions of the elderly out of poverty and further showing the effectiveness of the New Deal.
The New Deal, in many cases, was rather socially progressive as well as economically progressive. African Americans, which had been hurt by the Depression and made scapegoats by many, were among the hardest hit by the Depression, finding themselves now out of work and the possibility of being at the wrong end of a noose if they were singled out by the Ku Klux Klan in the Southern states. The New Deal began to remedy this in ways not yet seen in American society, ones that would later give way to the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s. African American workers were now given jobs alongside white workers all over the nation by the new relief programs established by the New Deal. In an editorial in The Crisis, the NAACP’s official publication, an author notes that “…For the first time in their lives, government has taken on a meaning and substance for the Negro masses…” (Document I).
The New Deal didn’t only stop there in terms of effectiveness, though, as can be seen in Document H, which shows that among the things done under the New Deal to combat poverty and eliminate unemployment, the government itself had been revitalized, and the American people had a real trust in government, following years of corruption under Republican rule (Document H).
Critics of the New Deal need look no further to assess the effectiveness of the New Deal but to look to society at present, a society in which workers can freely organize and move for better working conditions, a society in which the elderly don’t have to fear poverty because of a lack of an ability to work, and a society in which civil and equal rights are protected by our government.
