From the start of Roosevelt's presidential term on March 4, 1933, his New Deal promised relief, recovery and reform. FDR accomplished more in his first 100 days than any of his predecessors and most of those who followed, but it's not as promising as it seems at first glance. The Great Depression hit America like a tsunami just months into Hoover's presidency and plunged the United States into an economic crisis. Following this sudden and devastating decline in the stock market, the entire nation faced unprecedented financial, agricultural, and industrial problems. By 1933, unemployment had reached a catastrophic rate of 25%, and the average family income had fallen 40% since 1929. By 1933, GNP had fallen to half of that in 1929. All of these problems posed enormous threats for American stability and had to be resolved. , and quickly. FDR, a strong personality with a promising vision for America's future, was the man to run. It is hardly surprising that he won a huge electoral victory with 57.4% of the vote and 42 states won in his favor, winning 472 of the 531 electoral votes. However, there is much debate about how effective the New Deal actually was in combating depression. Amity Shlaes, William E Leuchtenburg and Burton Folsom Jr. have different interpretations of Roosevelt and the New Deal. Leuchtenburg, says FDR was a good president who made great strides in curing the national depression. On the other side of the political spectrum, Shlaes and Folsom are much more critical of FDR's attempts. In most cases, the negative aspects of various New Deal policies tended to outweigh the positive aspects. Measuring success and failure on such a scale is complex. In order to assess the extent to which conditions have improved agricultural policy, the views of landowners, sharecroppers and sharecroppers will be taken into account. Likewise, the impact of industrial policy on groups will be analyzed. Roosevelt personally, how he came to power and how he used it will also be evaluated. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Amity Shlaes is an American author and magazine and newspaper columnist. Shlaes writes from an American libertarian perspective. She has written four books and each has been very successful. As a libertarian, she was very opposed to the extent of federal involvement during the Depression. Shlaes writes in an article that Roosevelt's actions to resolve the crisis "may actually have perpetuated it." She also uses Roosevelt's errors in his intervention to reinforce her belief in libertarianism when she writes that "even the best-intentioned government intervention can make things worse." Burton W. Folsom Jr is professor of history at Hillsdale College in Michigan and senior historian at the libertarian organization Foundation for Economic Education in New York. His involvement in this group shows the opinions he may hold, as libertarians tend to be more in favor of political freedom and autonomy. Folsom is very negative about Roosevelt and the New Deal, saying that it greatly worsened the Great Depression. It is easy to know his opinions, even before reading the book, just from the title of his book “New Deal or Raw Deal?” How FDR's Economic Legacy Damaged America. He is not afraid to clearly express his opinions using bold statements such as "tohow much it hurt agriculture” and choosing quotes to support his own work, such as “for every problem solved, two or three new problems were created.” », by HV Kaltenborn, national radio commentator. William E. Leuchtenburg has an extremely contrasting view compared to the two previously mentioned. He is "a leading scholar on the life and career of Franklin Delano Roosevelt", which shows that he is experienced and respected in the field. His most notable work is "Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932-1940", written in 1963. It could be argued that being born in 1922 gives him a certain advantage, having lived through the events on which he chooses to focus. to write. He talks a lot about Roosevelt's personality and the steps he took to make him such a "people's president." He especially likes FDR’s “Fireside Chats.” One of Leuchtenburg's most famous quotes shows how positive he is towards FDR as he calls him the "savior of capitalism." It is not difficult to understand why Roosevelt quickly became so widely beloved by the American people. With the state of the nation following the depression left by Hoover's presidency, people began to look for another alternative and Roosevelt seemed to be the knight in shining armor that people were looking for. He had brilliant ideas for leading America out of the rapidly worsening depression and a level of charisma that very few could resist. Even Shlaes, who is widely critical of FDR, admits that his personality was one of the best traits of his presidential campaign, as she writes: "In the darkness, Roosevelt's voice seemed to shine." »[5] In 1921, FDR contracted polio, a paralytic disease that left him completely unable to use his legs. When this happened, he believed his political career was over. His wife, Eleanor, convinced him otherwise. His disability and his friendly, supportive wife certainly helped people love him even more. The fact that he fought against his disability and continued his fight to become President of the United States showed "great perseverance", America was in a dire situation and the American people were, frankly, looking for anything that was not Herbert Hoover. . Would the election result have been different if the situation had been better? Probably not. But Roosevelt's margin of victory certainly would not have been that great. The despair observed among the Americans is reminiscent of that of the Germans at the same time. Both countries went through a huge depression and their desperation led to a massive vote for big change. In 1932, even before he was elected, FDR “asked for only one clear mandate: bold action,” which, as Conkin points out, “seemed like terribly dangerous and callous demagoguery.” FDR also worked to establish a level of communication between the president and the people. He responded to those who wrote to him, but his most famous method of communicating with people was what are called "fireside chats." This was a series of 28 radio broadcasts broadcast by FDR himself in which he explained his policies to the American people. Powell, another largely negative figure toward Roosevelt's administration, finds positives in FDR's fireside chats. He writes of his very first fireside chat saying, "The 'conversation' lasted thirteen minutes and established FDR as a masterful communicator. " This shows that, as mediocre as the new agreement was, it is impossible to deny that Roosevelt was indeed a masterful communicator. Farmingwas a major aspect of the American way of life. Unfortunately, in 1933, agricultural prices were at their lowest. The overproduction of cotton meant that money was lost on every acre planted. Sharecroppers had to pay a quarter of their harvest in rent, and sharecroppers paid half of all the cotton they harvested, many of which were black. The Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU) was a union created and formed of blacks and whites. By the end of its first year, the union had more than 1,000 members. The STFU arranged to meet with the AAA to ensure that any money given to the planters was distributed fairly. Soon after, the STFU went on strike to campaign for higher wages and, indeed, after 10 days of strike action, landowners were forced to increase their wages. This success allowed the STFU to gain many more members. The situation of southern farmers seemed to be improving, but their victory was short-lived. Unfortunately, farm unions were not included in the Wagner Act, meaning unions like the STFU had no federal protection, which meant they were still intimidated by planters. In this case, the Roosevelt administration brutally prevented the advancement of agriculture. The AAA was a law designed to use many different methods to raise agricultural prices. Powell says that because the AAA provided subsidies based on acreage and production, the policy largely favored larger farmers. Unfortunately, “by basing payments on production rather than need, it inevitably helped already large and successful farmers very generously.” »[10] Kennedy points out a problem with the subsidies and benefits paid, particularly the way they were distributed. He writes: “In theory, landlords were supposed to share their services with their tenants. In practice, very few of them have done so. Powell also points out that the New Deal "displaced poor sharecroppers and farmers, many of whom were black," which reflects poorly on FDR's desire to pursue racial equality. Bernstein, writing from a very different perspective, makes a similar argument. He asserts that New Deal agricultural policies “sacrificed the interests of the marginalized and the unrecognized for the benefit of those who wield the greatest political and economic power.” However, Leuchtenburg disagrees with the view presented by Powell and Bernstein. He argues that steps taken to improve farming and agriculture are a crucial part of the New Deal. Leuchtenburg states that "they gave the highest priority to raising agricultural prices in order to restore the balance between industry and agriculture and to provide businesses with a large domestic market." The AAA has always been the subject of extensive debate over many of its actions and who they actually helped. It's difficult to try to justify, for example, Roosevelt's idea that overproduction was the problem when so many people were starving. It's even harder to challenge AAA's order to kill six million pigs and not turn them into food and paying farmers in subsidies not to plant on certain plots of land. This effectively lowered production and subsequently caused crop prices to rise again. However, the plan to stop producing so much food when so many Americans were hit so hard by the Depression that they were starving is completely inexcusable. This decision also appears to present aFDR's view that financial stability trumps the importance of the quality of life of the American people. The Farm Credit Act of 1933 is frankly absurd. The aim was to cure farmers of their debt by providing them with loans. Which makes sense in the short term, because farmers can repay their debts. However, once the loans are repaid, farmers simply find themselves back in debt because of the loans they used. This is why Conkin emphasizes that “the recovery remained only a dream”. More than $100 million was made available for loans and mortgage refinancing – “nearly four times more than the total mortgage loans made to farmers by the entire land bank system the previous year.” The Farm Credit Act, as Schlesinger argues, provided "all the evidence to at least bring the emergency debt problem under control," but while addressing the emergency is important, it is arguably more important to address long-term concerns related to the situation. This is also related to the Agricultural Mortgage Refinancing Act. It helped farmers repay their loans by rescheduling them and avoiding repossession of farms. Unfortunately, for many farms it was already too late. The people were in conditions too bad to continue and were still recaptured. In both the Farm Credit Act and the Farm Mortgage Refinancing Act, short-term problems were solved by simply putting them in the long term, so they really didn't solve anything at all . The soil erosion and conservation laws were intended to undo the effects left by the dust bin and they actually succeeded. Unfortunately, the money earned from the land continued to go to landowners rather than to small farmers who continued to be unfairly underpaid for the work they did. The Tennessee Valley occupied an area the size of England and Wales combined (about 40,000 square miles). It was in contact with 7 states and 2.5 million people lived on its territory, half of them unemployed. The Tennessee Valley and the Tennessee River posed biannual problems for hundreds of thousands of area farmers. Every spring, the Tennessee River flooded, washing away millions of tons of topsoil and destroying farms in its path. Every summer there was very little water in the river and the surrounding land was parched. These problems, combined with animal grazing and poor agriculture, are leading to sharp increases in soil erosion levels. Additionally, only 2 percent of farms in the Tennessee Valley had access to electricity, posing a major barrier to mechanization and modernization in the region. The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) built a series of dams along the valley to control the flooding that caused such damage to surrounding farmers, their land, and their livelihoods, and to use the dams to provide affordable electricity to the region. Kennedy believed that TVA had serious potential when he wrote: “Roosevelt's vision of what TVA could do was breathtaking. » On the other hand, Shlaes criticizes TVA for “crowding out private utilities that hoped to light the South.” The TVA was intended to be the first of many such acts, all aimed at regenerating areas facing extreme social and economic distress. All other projects failed in Congress and never saw the light of day. As mediocre asWhether the rest of the agricultural actions undertaken, the VAT has been largely positive, in particular by providing affordable electricity to the region and by creating jobs in this immense region. However, although it was successful in providing electricity to the region, it caused conflicts with private companies attempting to do the same. The success of TVA leads us to reflect on the counterfactual question of “what more could have been done if the other projects had succeeded in passing Congress?” » Finally, the law on rural electrification accompanied the VAT. Its goal was to provide electricity throughout the country. It provided low-interest loans to rural cooperatives that helped finance electrification in the most rural areas where big business had no interest. The act was very successful, but that success took time to happen. In 1939, 25 percent of farm families had electricity, a small but welcome increase from 20 percent in 1933. By 1949, that figure was over 90 percent. After the depression, the industry was in a truly dire state. The economy went from full employment in 1929, when the unemployment rate was only 3.2 percent, to massive unemployment in 1933, when the unemployment rate reached 25 percent, and throughout the years 30, this figure has never fallen below 14 percent. Even during the period before World War II, which many consider the end of the Depression, the unemployment rate was still 9.9%. Unfortunately, the measures taken to improve the unemployment and industrial situation have not been implemented well enough to be called a success. The Roosevelt administration allocated a whopping $3.3 billion to the Public Works Administration (PWA) to create jobs for skilled workers in the construction of major projects in the first year alone. During its eleven years of existence, between 1933 and 1944, the PWA spent more than $6 billion, which did little to reduce the deficit. Some of the PWA's most notable projects are the Triborough Bridge, the Los Angeles Airport, and the Lincoln Tunnel. By bringing national and local pride with these major projects as well as plenty of jobs for skilled workers, it's easy to stop there and consider the PWA a success, but it's not that simple. The PWA has only hired skilled workers, which works well for private companies that are pumping more money into it, but it doesn't quite have the resources. Such a happy effect on unskilled workers at the looking for work. For a total of $6 billion, the PWA could have done much more than build nice bridges and a few airports. The PWA's somewhat confusingly named younger brother, the Works Progress Administration (WPA), held much more promise. The WPA was one of the largest agencies ever to emerge from the New Deal, with a whopping $4.9 billion allocated to carry out numerous public works projects, including the construction of many public buildings and roads. The idea was to ensure that people retained their autonomy and self-preservation capacity to prevent them from becoming dependent on social assistance, which was not granted lightly. However, most of the jobs consisted of "job creation projects that produced very little results." Critics have even often referred to the WPA as "We Piddle Around" to highlight the lack of meaning in their works. In 7 years the WPA was responsible for 2,500 hospitals, 6,000 schools and 570,000 miles of roads, which sounds incredible, and some of them were. However, some projects were so “so poorly constructed that they had to be rebuilt almost immediately.” Within six months, more than 2,000,000 people were employed by WPA programs. The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was a public works relief program that operated from 1933 to 1942 under the New Deal. Leuchtenburg writes that "the president offered the 'army' positions in the CCC, but the leadership refused," a motion that was quickly rejected, as the mass of the army "enlisted by the hundreds » and finally “a quarter of an hour” million veterans registered in the forestry corps. At first, Southern politicians were Roosevelt's most loyal supporters. It is therefore not surprising that the CCC was led by a Southern racist who did little to encourage blacks to join. Those who joined faced terribly strict segregation. During its years of operation, 250,000 blacks enrolled in the CCC. There is a strong argument that registration figures could have been much higher if segregation had been lessened, or even eliminated, to prevent blacks from being intimidated by the discriminatory nature of the organization. The National Recovery Administration (NRA) was a policy often seen as one of the more positive recovery programs, but it was actually at the heart of everything that was wrong with the recovery efforts. Codes and rules were created to set minimum wages and maximum working hours for workers to eliminate competition that was destructive of industry and labor. However, NRA codes allowed black people to be paid less for doing the same job as a white person. When the NRA disbanded two years later, it was quickly replaced by the National Labor Relations Act. The NLRA was created to establish relationships and communications between unions and private sector employers. The law also gave a lot of power to unions. The American Liberty League described this act as a threat to liberty. The TVA was another major New Deal policy. It was designed to transform the Tennessee Valley with a series of dams throughout it. It aimed to control flooding in the area and provide affordable electricity to the surrounding area. By providing electricity to farms in the region, TVA has enabled them to modernize with newer technologies to facilitate their agricultural operations. However, the construction jobs created by TVA could have gone to local residents rather than to private companies. Powell is skeptical of the real positive aspects of the TVA, asking "Why has the Tennessee Valley Authority become a drag on the Tennessee Valley?" » Kennedy claims that "Roosevelt's magic"[26] was what solved the banking problem. Roosevelt used his fireside chats to announce his emergency banking law, passed on March 9, 1933. It would be used to create a national holiday to prevent further bank runs. Fearing further bank closures, people rushed to withdraw their funds. Banks would not open until they were stable enough to do so. Folsom says FDR's temporary bank closures "effectively allayed the monetary fears of many Americans." In three days, more than 5,000 banks had been authorized to reopen. Later that year, the Banking Act of 1933 was passed and gave the Federal Reserve more control over banks' investment capabilities. Additionally, the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 separated investment and banking activitiescommercial. Folsom believes that this actually damaged the American banking system as "bank branches were banned" and these were often the "most stable banks". The overzealous involvement of commercial banks in stock market investments was considered the main reason for the financial crash. Powell believes that the Glass-Steagall Act "had no impact on small banks that failed by the thousands." Critics argued that the Emergency Banking Act and the Glass-Steagall Act were "written by bankers for bankers." They argue that this is clear because these acts appeared to benefit them, granting them "lavish financial subsidies from the government" and "liquidating their weaker brethren", which seems undeniable. Reynolds also comments on the limitations of banking reform: "Congress failed to seize the opportunity to create a bank branching system of the type that protected neighboring Canada and Britain from a banking crisis in the American. » Bernstein, of the New Left, criticizes Roosevelt's response from a different angle. In saying this, he highlighted his administration's "conservatism" and its "conscious avoidance of more radical means." “These complaints, however, ignored a number of restrictions on FDR's freedom of action,” Parrish says. Parrish is extremely complimentary of FDR. He even calls the entire section of his book in which he discusses these financial policies "Saving Capitalism", but it is very difficult to admit that when the law benefited the largest banks, more than those who were in made the most in difficulty. : This is just a sample. Get a personalized article from our expert writers now. Get a Custom Essay Overall, was the New Deal a success? Folsom writes: "Roosevelt's infectious smile, hearty laugh, and sweet tenor voice all helped reassure Americans that their country would somehow return to prosperous days." » And it was the case, but unfortunately much later than he had promised. Despite efforts to fix America, the sad truth is that it took a world war, in which more than 400,000 Americans lost their lives, to put people to work. Leuchtenburg writes, “FDR is at least the first president in modern America to ask the right questions,” even if he may not always have gotten the answers or results he sought. Throughout Roosevelt's presidency, unemployment remained at alarming levels, financial stability reached new lows, the federal deficit increased enormously, and hundreds of thousands of people starved while livestock and livestock Crops were burned and thrown into the trash. Discrimination and segregation are deeply embedded themes in industrial policies like the CCC and NRA and agricultural policies like the AAA, making it impossible to claim that any form of progress toward racial equality was accomplished during FDR's presidency, especially since it was some of the most important policies to come out of the New Deal. The idea that the New Deal succeeded in lifting the United States out of depression cannot be defended when all the evidence seems to indicate that FDR's blunders far outweighed his progress toward stability. More often than not, for FDR and his administration, it seemed like a one-step-forward, two-steps-back situation. Shlaes writes: "The real question about the Great Depression is not how or whether World War II ended it, but rather..