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Letters To Celie Carradina Before The Great Depression

1297 Words6 Pages

In 1935, Mrs. Olga Ferk wrote a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt to ask “how long is this rotten condition going to last…I am at the end of the Rope. The Rich get Richer, and the poor can to go – H – that’s what it looks like to me…Let’s have some results” (Cited in Cohen, p. 252). This letter, only one among hundreds of thousands written to the president, showed that citizens increasingly looked to the federal government for help. Furthermore, the workers, excited about the New Deal and believed Roosevelt was the closest thing to a savior they could ever get and believed he was really close to them and would hear their complaints, which led to more of these letters to FDR. One of these letters was from a woman named Celie Carradina …show more content…

Welfare benefits, such as permanent employment, extensive security (health insurance), internal labor markets, and fringe benefits aimed to attend to and satisfy workers. For example, the employee stock ownership program allowed workers to buy liberty bonds and stocks from employers, vacation plan allows employees to get paid vacation, and group insurance. These programs provided by the employers, no doubt helped workers, but they also tied workers to their employers. The employers further extended the welfare capitalist programs into creating social amenities for neighborhoods of workers and their families. However, welfare capitalism did not work in the ways employers hoped it would; for example, industrial workers in Chicago still faced unemployment due to repeated downturns in the business cycle and conditions of workers remained substandard (Cohen, p. 184). Furthermore, due to the great depression, industrial workers realized that welfare capitalism was unpredictable as a result of their frequent layoffs and employers mismanagement. Since, the great depression led workers to see that employers only valued welfare capitalism when it was convenient and cheap. By 1933, more than half of the U.S. Steel’s mill hands had been laid off. Nonwhite workers, including black workers and Mexican workers were particularly vulnerable (Cohen, p. 240). This further doomed the …show more content…

Even black workers who displayed a strong loyalty to the republicans in the 1920s, voted more democratic than ever before in the election of 1936 (Cohen, p. 258 – 259). After getting elected, Roosevelt proposed many acts and laws later passed by the congress in his New deal to help economic recovery during the Great Depression. Laws such as Federal Emergency Relief Act (FERA, 1933) which helped with funds for workers, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC, 1933) which guaranteed deposits up to a certain, Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA, 1933) which was designed to boost agricultural prices by increasing surpluses, National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA, 1933) which is to help stimulate economic recovery by regulating industries for fair wages and prices, Social Security Act (1933) which helped create pension payments to retired workers, and much more. Many people praised Roosevelt for this New Deal; for example, a hundredth anniversary book celebrating Polish contributions to Chicago, praised Roosevelt saying “with the aid of our splendid President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose humanitarian interests resulted in HOLC – Home Owners’ Loan Corporation -, and other security laws pertaining to homes, investments, and savings, many

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