Great Depression Dbq Essay

The Great Depression began with the famous stock market crash known as “Black Tuesday” and later went on to rapidly develop into one of the most dramatic economic declines in the history of Westernized society. Two of the main causes of the Great Depression were the abuse of the stock market and the general distrust of banks instilled within the American public, which led to the decline of the American economy. President Herbert Hoover, elected in 1928, was a firm believer of rugged individualism and that the economy has natural cycles, which prompted him to employ a “wait and see” approach with the American people when the Depression hit. Soon after, President FDR won the 1932 election by a landslide and enacted a collection of programs

In Document 1, the National Youth Association was acclaimed by teen participant Helen Farmer. However, she also described her experience carrying large amounts of paperwork home that would often take all night to complete, which depicts the destructive nature of the program that many young workers were forced to endure. Besides chronicling her exploits in the NYA, Helen also articulated the strong obligation she felt to earn money due to familial pressures. This exemplifies the bias of the opinion that she probably felt was necessary to have due to the job she was given by the program rather than the way she truly felt based on the work she was forced to do. Ellen S Woodward, whose speech was excerpted in Document 6, argues that the Works Progress Administration helped impoverished schoolchildren and desolate female workers. Nevertheless, her exaggeratory rhetoric clearly oversells the program and the fact that she acted as its assistant administrator only further insinuates that she was attempting to endorse it in a mandatory attempt to keep her job rather than portray her true feelings. Sadly, manipulative endorsements are not the only shortcomings that the New Deal possessed. The New Deal also acted as a catalyst to a number of financial issues. Document 3 depicts statistical data that documents the increase in national

The cartoon depicts an unimaginable sum of medicine bottles, or “New Deal Programs” which strongly confirms the amount of money that FDR had solicited from the government budget in order to accumulate funding for the programs. In addition to increasing national debt, the New Deal also failed to fulfill its initial purpose. The Depression officially met its end once the US began manufacturing products used during World War II, which meant that besides spending government funds, it had failed to meet its primary goal. Although financial turmoil was a huge problem, there were still others as