While many of the policies passed for the New Deal dealt with a combination of reform, relief, and recover, the New Deal mostly came down to relieving the immediate economic pressures that most people, such as farmers or textile mill workers, were facing.
Specifically, programs like the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and Roosevelt's plan to reduce overproduction in the beef and cotton industries show how the New Deal was more focused on relief towards the economic struggles of the common people affected by the Great Depression. The Works Progress Administration employed millions of unemployed men to work on public works projects, such as buildings, roads, and conservation work.
Additionally, overproduction ran rampant in many farming-related industries. This overproduction would result in prices dropping so low that farmers would not be able to sustain themselves and would be forced to waste a lot of the things they had made. In response to this, the New Deal would try to alleviate these issues through agencies like the National Recovery Administration imposing production quotas that limited the amount of product being made. Roosevelt also created a program to pay farmers to kill their cows and sell that meat to the government. This meat would then be canned and given back to the farmers to alleviate their starvation.
However, to some degree, these types of policies could also be considered small-scale economic reforms. Mandating production quotas and trying to limit overproduction sounds a lot like an attempt to resolve flaws within the inherent structures of the economy and recover from the many underlying causes of the Great Depression. Yet, even then, as mentioned in the documentary, Robert Nathan's economic professor brings up how these boom and bust cycles within a capitalist economy are ultimately inevitable. Even after the US recovers from the Great Depression, recessions are still endemic to the very roots of our economy. Because of this inevitability, the New Deal, and like-minded economic efforts in the future, all focus primarily on relief.
Interesting post and position. I would ask, though, it seems that in your final paragraph you seem to say that the Great Depression was inevitable in a sense as it was part of capitalism's normal cycle? But would you say factors other than overproduction like the huge inflow of capital and small amount of concentrated wealth made the Depression weak? Yes, recessions and times of growth are part of any capitalistic economy, but it does seem that the Great Depression was unique in a sense.
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