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Frances Perkins: The Heroine Of The Great Depression

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Frances Perkins, the Heroine of the Great Depression The stock market crash of 1929 devastated America, a country built on traditional values and beliefs. During this traumatic era the future seemed disheartening. Though women were expected to play the traditional role of homemaker, one brave women displayed exceptional political courage as she stepped out of that role. Frances Perkins became the first female to serve as cabinet secretary, and the driving force behind Roosevelt’s New Deal which ended the Great Depression. Perkins soared above her humble beginnings, laying the foundation for the development of the middle class, and emerging as the voice of workers’ rights and safety. Frances Perkins was born several blocks from Boston Commons, …show more content…

To recruit for this program, Perkins established the National Reemployment Service. By April 1936, there were 2158 of these work camps employing approximately 157 people. The second program she and FDR implemented was the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (Downey, 2009). Through this program the government gave states money for public works such as repairing public buildings, parks, playgrounds, funding drought relief programs, shoring up bankrupt school districts, and implementing job and housing programs. The Federal Employment Relief Administration, Civil Works Administration and the Public Works Administration also quickly launched under the New Deal. By July 1934, The U.S. Employment Service had registered 12.5 million people and employed 26 million and on April 19, 1934 the social security act was passed. Perkins was also instrumental in creating the Federal Home Owners Loan Corporation and the National Housing Act of 1934 protecting middle class homeowners from foreclosure (Downey, 2009). In the coming years, thousands of middle income people could buy a home thanks to this

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Relief short term actions designed to tide people over until the economy recovered. Franklin D. Roosevelt created the three r’s to lift the nation out of the Great Depression which relief had many factors to it like for example the (CCC) Civilian Conservation Corps worked from 1933 to 1942 to give public work to unmarried men or the unemployed. The (PWA) Public Works Administration was also formed was a large-scale public works construction agency in the United States headed by Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes. The last relief program made was the (WPA) Works Progress Administration was the largest and most ambitious American New Deal agency, employing millions of unemployed people (mostly unskilled men) to carry out public works

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The year of 1929 brought upon a whirlwind of emotions through the United States. This was the beginning of the Great Depression, as well as the birth of a young child named Kathleen Steubben, originally Kathleen Blackman. For the duration of her growing years, she attended a public school in Long Island, New York. Here, most girls wore a skirt, bobby socks, and either a sweater or a blouse. In contrast, the boys wore a pair of slacks, a shirt, and a tie.

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In Canada, relief camps were opened to help fight against unemployment, which did not happen in the United States. Almost immediately after American President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, was inaugurated in March of 1933, he began planning his actions to help combat the Great Depression. His first main course of action was to implement the New Deal, a series of domestic programs and legislative reforms seeking to deliver relief, recovery, and reform. Some of the programs put into effect for the New Deal are still in use today. Such as the Federal Deposit Insurance Commission (FDIC), the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA).

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In August 1935, the social security act passed.

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Frances became the first women to serve in the Cabinet and with this appointment ship came many changes for the good (Berg, "Labor Hall of Fame: Frances Perkins and the flowering of economic and social policies. ," n.d.). She became the Secretary of Labor and directed Federal aid to the States for unemployment relief, public works projects, maximum hours of work, minimum wages, child labor laws, unemployment insurance, social security, and a revitalized public employment service (BLUMBERG). She also brought about insurance for the people and later on she also helped produce the Social Security program in response to the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire (Berg, "Labor Hall of Fame: Frances Perkins and the flowering of economic and social policies. ," n.d.).

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Herbert Hoover, the previous president, had stubbornly refused to help the unemployed and homeless, since he assumed that individual self-reliance and charitable organizations would be sufficient. The Roosevelt administration, however, knew that the numbers of people in need far exceeded the capacity for charity to cover it. To compensate, Roosevelt’s team provided over 4 million federal jobs through new worker programs such as “The Federal Emergency Relief Administration” and “the Civil Works Administration (CWA)” and organized a variety of similarly useful projects. However, by 1934, after the program’s budget became too costly, Roosevelt ordered the CWA’s dissolvement and 4 million workers, whose jobs were cut, were left unemployed once again. Shi 1148-1150.

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However because of The Great Depression it caused great suffering which caused numerous proposals of help. In 1934 the Social Security Act of 1934 was created during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s term by the committee on economic security, and passed by congress. The act was an attempt to limit the dangers of American life, including aging, unemployment, and even the stress of fatherless parents or widows. By signing this act President Roosevelt became the first president to acknowledge the federal assistance of the elderly. This act provided benefits to those who have retired, or that are unemployed.

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They took men off the street and gave them a job and somewhere to sleep through the opening of relief camps. The federal government bailed the provinces out with relief money , making this two third of the country relying on relief money. During the 1939 , the president of the United states Franklin Roosevelt adopted a plan in which it would help put many people back to work He named it ‘arsenal of

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With a strong mandate, FDR moved quickly during the first hundred days of his administration to address the problems created by the Great Depression. Under his leadership, Congress passed a series of landmark bills that created a more active role for the federal government in the economy and in people�s lives. During the first hundred days of his administration, Congress passed the Emergency Banking Relief Act, which stabilized the nation�s ailing banks and reassured depositors, created the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), the National Recovery Administration (NRA), the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). Believing that work programs were better than relief, FDR secured passage

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The Public Works Administration offered these projects to privately owned contractors to do by hiring unemployed people. In ‘The New Deal, Then and Now,’ Alan Brinkley points out that the New Deal creates the Works Progress Administration, which was “the most extensive federal work-relief program ever created”. Brinkley adds that the WPA kept about two million people employed in it’s eight-year time period. In addition, The New Deal created financial support programs such as Social Security. Social Security was a support system created to provide welfare to the elderly, disabled, orphaned, and widowed.

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She was a very influential woman when it came to encouraging these ladies to stand up and take responsibility. Around 350,00 women worked during World War II. This was life changing not only for the women but also for their children at

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The New Deal programs aided those struggling during the depression to increase consumer spending, which ended the depression. In 1933, the Public Works Administration, a program of the New Deal that provided employment to work on infrastructure and parks, went into action. Between 1933 and 1939, the PWA spent six billion dollars on 34,000 projects around the country, including bridges, roads, public buildings, hospitals, and airports. During the mid-1930s, factories had shut their doors to people looking for work.

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Aside from having to fix the banking system, Roosevelt also had to help the unemployed since so many Americans had been left without jobs. “To provide immediate economic relief to the unemployed, Roosevelt created programs such as the Public Works Administration (1933) and the Works Progress Administration (1935), which put jobless Americans to work constructing public works such as roads, schools, post offices, and hospitals”. “Roosevelt supplemented such relief programs with initiatives to help the economy recover, including the national Recovery Administration (1933), which set prices on a variety of consumer goods as well as workers wages make and the Federal Housing Administration (1934), which regulated interest rates and mortgage terms

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1531 Words | 7 Pages

The migrant mother was a photograph that defined the great depression. The photograph helped reveal the cost of the disaster on human lives but this was falsely misrepresented. The migrant mother sends a message to the people as if none of the lower class had houses or food to eat. Florence Owens Thompson ,the woman who was photographed by Dorothea Lange, was in a situation that was very rare. Not everyone is in the same situation as this woman but the photograph showed that it shocked the U.S. government into providing relief for the millions of other families devastated by the Depression(Robert Hariman and John Louis

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The Federal Emergency Relief Act provided state assistance for the unemployed and their families. Rather than having large numbers of workers on the dole, Roosevelt believed in payment for the work performed to help maintain morale of recipients. This program, while being more costly, did provide work for 20 million people. Roosevelt knew that most of the government 's relief efforts got canned due to the fact that they got held up by politics.

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