The New Deal was President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s legislative agenda
for rescuing the United States from the Great Depression. The Great
depression is widely believed to have been caused by the instability
of the stock market in the 1920’s, due to a rising number of
‘speculators’. On October 29, 1929, the crash of the U.S. stock market
triggered a worldwide financial crisis. In 1929-1933, unemployment in
the U.S. soared from 3 percent of the workforce to 25 percent, while
manufacturing output collapsed by one-third. The government at the
time, the Republicans, lead by president Herbert Hoover stuck by their
policies of laissez-faire and rugged individualism. It was obvious
that these policies were not helping the disaster, so in the 1932
elections a democrat president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected.
In Roosevelt’s inaugral speech, he said ‘This great nation will endure
as it has endured, will revive and will prosper…Our greatest primary
task is to put people to work. This is no unsolvable problem if we
face it wisely and courageously.’ Whether he kept to his word and
achieved his goal is what is to be discussed.
One of Roosevelt’s main aims was to restore American’s confidence in
their banking system and economy. With the Emergency Banking Act,
Roosevelt closed all the banks for four days, for investigation and
bank investment in the stock market and then only reopened the
trustworthy ones. After this, bank failures, which had previously been
ata bout 2250, were almost zero. This scheme was succesful as the
confidence was regained, because as soon as the banks were reopened,
$1 billion was redeposited in them. The secu...
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...taken away by the Wall Street
crash. Although the economy did not completley recover, it was much
improved. All these things would have happened eventually, wihtout the
New Deal, but they definiteley wouldn’t happened as quickly or
efficiently. Roosevelt reformed America and its politics in a way that
made the country a much better place than it had been in the hands of
Hoover. The New Deal was a success, not because it completley
eliminated all of America’s problems and ended the Depression, because
it didn’t; but because it changed the way Americans think forever,
reformed the system to make it better not just for the generation at
the mtime, but for many generations after that and generally improved
the country for the better. Success is not all about unemployment
figures and the New Deal is a prime example of that.