Reform, Relief, or Recovery?

"Many historians have boiled the goals of the New Deal down to three concepts: Reform, Relief and Recovery. Watch the documentary clips and decide which of the three the New Deal emphasized."

When viewing the New Deal in historical contexts, it's often acknowledged that there were three essential elements in the holistic approach taken by Franklin D. Roosevelt and his team: Reform, Relief, and Recovery. But which one of those elements was most important to the overall effort?

Viewed in context, it seems that, of these, relief was the most essential. Even when the government could not afford to foot the bill for the efforts required to recover the economy by creating long-term jobs, it was able to provide relief, through straight payments or through the creation of temporary jobs that could be used to keep people on their feet.

The most obvious example of these efforts was the Federal Emergency Relief Act, which provided cash grants to relief agencies and which eventually evolved into the more robust Civil Works Administration. More subtle forms, though, came in the temporary jobs afforded to workers through efforts like the Unemployment Relief Act, which essentially created temporary jobs, including six-month stints for artists and muralists across the nation, to keep money flowing in, even if people who would once have made nice wages would now be forced to subsist on plumbers' wages.

The Emergency Banking Relief Act was also significant, a short-term attempt to inspect and reorganize treasury banks in order to try to set things on an improved course.

It would be misleading to look at these as reformative or oriented towards straight recovery; rather, they were meant to keep things on rails and prevent people from starving, creating the temporary relief that defined the New Deal.