Great Depression New Deal

Franklin D. Roosevelt was inaugurated as President of the United States in 1933. It was the Wall Street Crash of 1929 that put Roosevelt on the road to the White House. He was governor of New York at the time of the stock market crash and he established the New York State Emergency Relief Commission to help the unemployed. His success as governor of New York made him the Democratic presidential candidate and he easily won the Presidential election in 1932 as the then president, Herbert Hoover, was very unpopular at that time.

By this time the Great Depression was well under way and to make matters worse in that year hundreds of thousands of people were displaced when drought forced them off Midwest farms. His first act as president was to restore faith in the crumbling banking system. Right after his inauguration, Roosevelt closed all banks and put forward legislation guaranteeing money in saving accounts. Roosevelt was determined to get the country out of the economic depression and he put forward a series of New Deal government programs to provide work and stimulate consumer demand. A series of bills was passed by Congress to deal with the huge unemployment crisis. This special session of Congress took three months and became known as the Hundred Days and laid the foundation for the president’s New Deal program.

The New Deal stimulus programs included Relief (providing work), Reform (businesses) and Recovery (economic). The first New Deal focused on agricultural aid, employment relief and banking reforms. Roosevelt also ended the gold standard which was restricting the flow of money through the economy. The second New Deal introduced the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a job program for the unemployed, and further help for struggling farmers. President Roosevelt’s New Deal programs were very popular with the American public and he was voted in for a second term in 1936.

During the Second World War, many of the New Deal programs were closed by opposition parties in Congress. Further deregulation in the late 1970s ended more of the original New Deal regulations. However, some regulations are still in place today like Fannie Mae, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Social Security System.