The New Deal Dbq

Section 1: Identification and Evaluation of Sources This historical investigation will explore the question: To what extent did the New Deal impact U.S. political and economic systems during the Great Depression? The New Deal was from 1933 to 1938 and the Great Depression was from 1929 to 1939.

My first source was created by T.H. Watkins. T.H. Watkins was born in 1936 in Loma Linda, California. He lived in Washington D.C. with his wife Joan. His book The Great Depression: America in the 1930s is a companion volume to the public television series The Great Depression and the twentieth book he has written. The Great Depression: America in the 1930s serves purpose as a continuation of sorts to the documentary and provides more in depth details

Roosevelt insisted that the program be self-supporting through a payroll tax which would later be cited as one of the causes of the recession of 1937 to 1938 as the people began to feel the effects of the first payroll deductions. Those that were effected by increasing deductions thought it was an unfair burden that will be bankrupt by the time they will be eligible for payments. However, flawed it was, the act was, as historian Kenneth S. Davis has written, “one of the major turning points of American history. No longer could ‘rugged individualism’ convincingly insist that the government… had no responsibility whatever for the welfare of the human beings who did the work from which profit was

Those hopes were based on the New Deals successes during FDR’s first term. The nation’s fortune improved under New Deal, but unemployment remained high and soup kitchen continued to be a fixture in American life. The nation’s private corporations showed a profit of “$5 billion in 1936, compared with collective losses of $2 billion four years earlier. The nation’s gross national product grew by about 14 percent in 1936, a far cry from the 15 percent decrease in GNP in