Question

Explain how Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal attempted to solve the Great Depression. Who supported the New Deal? Who criticized it? In what ways did the New Deal succeed? In what ways did it fail? ESSAY QUESTION PLEASE ANSWER FULLY.

Answer 1

• The New Deal was a series of programs and projects instituted during the Great Depression by President Franklin D. Roosevelt that aimed to restore prosperity to Americans. When Roosevelt took office in 1933, he acted swiftly to stabilize the economy and provide jobs and relief to those who were suffering.
• Over the next eight years, the government instituted a series of experimental New Deal projects and programs, such as the CCC, the WPA, the TVA, the SEC and others, that aimed to restore some measure of dignity and prosperity to many Americans.
• Roosevelt’s New Deal fundamentally and permanently changed the federal government’s relationship to U.S. citizens.
• On March 4, 1933, during the bleakest days of the Great Depression, newly elected President Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered his first inaugural address before 100,000 people on Washington’s Capitol Plaza.
• He promised that he would act swiftly to face the “dark realities of the moment” and assured Americans that he would “wage a war against the emergency” just as though “we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.”
• His speech gave many people confidence that they’d elected a man who was not afraid to take bold steps to solve the nation’s problems.
• From 1933 until 1941, President Roosevelt’s New Deal programs and policies did more than just adjust interest rates, tinker with farm subsidies and create short-term make-work programs.
• They created a brand-new, if tenuous, political coalition that included white working people, African Americans and left-wing intellectuals.Many of the New Deal programs that bound them together – Social Security, unemployment insurance and federal agricultural subsidies, for instance – are still with us today.
• What was truly novel about the New Deal, however, was the speed with which it accomplished what previously had taken generations. Many of the reforms were hastily drawn and weakly administered with some actually contradicting others.
• During the entire New Deal era, public criticism and debate were never interrupted or suspended; in fact, the New Deal brought to the individual citizen a sharp of interest in government..
• The Great Depression of the 1930s worsened the already black economic situation of black Americans. African Americans were the first people to be fired from their jobs as they suffered from an unemployment rate two to three times that of whites.
• Blacks benefited greatly from New Deal programs though discrimination by local administrators was common. Low-cost public housing was made available to black families. The National Youth Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps enabled black youths to continue their education.
• The Work Projects Administration gave jobs to many blacks, and its Federal Writers Project supported the work of many authors, among them Zora Neale Hurston, Arna Bontemps, Waters Turpin, and Melvin B. Tolson.
• The Congress of industrial Organizations (CIO); established in the mid-1930s, organized large numbers of black workers into labor unions for the first time.
• The increasing pressures of the Great Depression caused President Roosevelt to back a new set of economic and social measures Prominent among these were measures to fight poverty, to counter unemployment with work and to provide a social safety net.
• The Works Progress Administration (WPA), the principal relief agency of the second New Deal, was an attempt to provide work rather than welfare.
• Under the WPA, buildings, roads, airports and schools were constructed. Actors, painters, musicians and writers were employed through the Federal Theater Project, the Federal Art Project and the Federal Writers Project.
• In addition, the National Youth Administration gave part-time employment to students, established training programs and provided aid to unemployed youth.
• The New Deal's cornerstone according to Roosevelt, was the Social Security Act of 1935.
• In addition to several provisions for general welfare, the new Act created a social insurance program designed to pay retired workers age 65 or older a continuing income after retirement. Social Security created a system of insurance for the aged, unemployed and disabled based on employer and employee contributions.
• The most famous opponent of the New Deal was Huey Long, a Senator from Louisiana. He criticised Roosevelt for not doing enough for the poor. His alternative to the New Deal was called “Share Our Wealth”.
• Predictably, Roosevelt’s New Deal came under attack from the right, from Republicans, conservative Democrats, bankers, and Wall Street financiers who claimed that it doled out too many federal handouts.
• Many of these critics also feared that the policy and programs involved were a dangerous step toward socialism and the destruction of the American capitalist system.
• Such misgivings were understandable given the political atmosphere in the 1930s, as communism was becoming a more imminent threat. In fact, Soviet agents in the United States went so far as to launch a “popular front” campaign to actively support the president. Moreover, an unprecedented number of people joined the American Communist Party during the decade.
• One of the most vocal of Roosevelt’s critics was Father Charles Coughlin. A Catholic priest from Michigan, Coughlin began broadcasting a weekly radio show in 1930 that outwardly criticized the New Deal.
• Within a few short years, Coughlin had amassed a following of 40 million listeners who agreed with his anti–New Deal opinions. He blamed the Great Depression on Wall Street, crooked financiers, and Jews and campaigned for the nationalization of the entire American banking system.
• According to Roosevelt’s defenders, the New Deal did not fail because of four major reasons. First, the New Deal did not fail because the 1920s were an economic disaster. Leuchtenberg argues that the havoc that had been done before Roosevelt took office was so great that even the unprecedented measures of the New Deal did not suffice to repair the damage.
• Roosevelt provided useful tools to partially relief, recover and reform the U.S. economy. Thus, the New Deal could not fail because of the damage that was done to the economy before Roosevelt took office.
• Second, the New Deal did not fail because it led to positive results. For example, while unemployment in 1933 was at 25%, it decreased to 15% by 1937.
  
• Third, the New Deal did not fail because Roosevelt was popular. He was reelected three times after all. He mobilized America with his fireside chats and dominated Congress.
• Fourth, the New Deal did not fail because Roosevelt was an admirable executive and a good leader. Leuchtenberg defends FDR by noting that he essentially was a moralist who wanted to achieve certain humane reforms and instruct the nation in the principles of government.
• Other benefits of the New Deal include the Banking Holiday, the Glass-Steagall Act, which established confidence for savers and prevented bank failures to some extent, and the SEC, which increased safety requirements for stock trading companies, which, in turn, helped investors. Further, Roosevelt’s minimum wage and social security laws were also long-lasting parts of the New Deal.
• The New Deal failed because Roosevelt misunderstood what caused the Great Depression.
  
• Roosevelt assumed that the free market not the government caused the Great Depression. Roosevelt believed the Great Depression was partly caused by poor investments and stock manipulations by rich people. Further, he blamed the Great Depression on bankers, speculators and journalists.
• The New Deal failed because the AAA, by interfering with supply and demand, damaged farming which had repercussions on the overall economy. The government ensured price floors on wheat and cotton. Thus, wheat and cotton farmers expanded their businesses and other farmers flocked to those “guaranteed” crops.
• As a result, there was an overproduction of wheat and cotton, which later had to be sold by the government at a loss. As a result of the shift to wheat and cotton production, the U.S. failed to produce other agricultural products and thus at some point during the 1930s became a major food-importing country.
• The New Deal failed on account of relief programs such as FERA and WPA by shifting incentives and politicizing relief. Those programs shifted money from the frugal states to the inefficient states.
• While FERA was aid from the government which did not require the recipient to give anything in return, WPA created government jobs by which people would work for relief.
• Before Roosevelt’s relief programs, states and cities had incentives to be frugal with charities and a tendency to take care of their own while requesting aid only in emergencies.
• Afterwards, states were looking to the government to solve their problems and had no incentive to work hard to raise local funds. The less work a state did in raising money, the more it received from the government.
• Further, Roosevelt by having discretion on how to allocate funds often used the relief program as a tool of political manipulation.
• The New Deal failed because Roosevelt created uncertainty by experimentation, protectionism, regulation and raising taxes. For example, by raising taxes he did not encourage businesses to expand
• It shifted the economy from the private to the public sector. Roosevelt’s domestic policies failed because he created regulatory aid, and relief agencies based on the premise that recovery could be achieved only through a large military-style effort.
• It temporarily brought the economy out of recession, but did not solve the underlying problem. Further, the benefits of programs such as the NRA, AAA, and WPA did not outweigh the direct and indirect costs of the New Deal.