New Deal Dbq

America in the early 1930's was a forbidding and bleak place; by 1932, one in every four Americans was unemployed and financially, the country was in ruins; the stock market had collapsed and what followed was arguably the worst financial recession America had ever suffered. Homeless and starvation were common and ‘Hooverville's’ were the nickname given to the shantytowns appearing across America because of President Herbert Hoover’s unwillingness to offer any kind of government intervention, instead believing in the importance of self-reliance. When Franklin Delano Roosevelt took the presidency in 1933, his goal was to return America to her former glory financially and to boost the morale of the population. FDR promised to ‘pledge [himself], to a new deal for the American people’ During the first one hundred days of his presidency, known also as the ‘First New Deal’, Roosevelt introduced several measures that were intended to provide immediate relief to the people, foster reform in the banking sector and to promote recovery. In this essay, I will discuss the principle measures and events which characterise this New Deal, and how successful it was, in improving the lives of the American people.

The number of banks in the United States fell 35 percent between 1929 and 1933 .Roosevelt recognised the severity and potential impact of the closures and almost immediately called a four-day bank holiday, which he used to push an emergency bill through both houses of congress in only eight hours. The Emergency Banking Relief bill (1933) was enacted on 9th March 1933; it brought all banks under the control of the federal government and enabled all banks that were stable and solvent, to reopen on the next working