Saturday, December 3, 2016

The New Deal - 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."

    Roosevelt's New Deal mainly emphasized recovery because of the focus on it in the measures put forth by Roosevelt to help jump-start it. Roosevelt kicked things off with a four day banking holiday to prevent withdrawal from shaky banks. After this, Roosevelt's Emergency Banking Act was passed, reorganizing all of the banks and closing the said "shaky" ones. This led to a recovery in the banking system as by the end of that month, three quarters of them re-opened. Roosevelt also took the first step to end Prohibition (which led to the 21st Amendment being passed at the end of the year), which was an increasingly divisive issue among Americans in the previous decade. This shifted American focus from an unnecessary issue to help focus on recovery from the Great Depression. Another measure passed by Roosevelt to aid recovery was the Tennessee Valley Authority Act, which enabled the federal government to build dams along the Tennessee River to control flooding. Later that month, Congress also passed a bill that paid farmers to leave their fields in order to stop overproduction and boost prices, while also compensating the farmers fairly, which was a large contrast from the lack of agricultural focus before and during the earlier years of the Great Depression. In addition, Congress passed the National Industry Recovery Act, which, as the name suggests, aided recovery by giving the industrial workers a right to unionize for higher wages and better working conditions. All in all, because of the contents and intents behind the acts passed by Congress, FDR's New Deal largely emphasized recovery.

Sources:
http://www.history.com/topics/new-deal

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