The New Deal Dbq

When looking back through American History, it is hard gloss over the Great Depression and New Deal. The 12 year stretch that was the Great Depression was a massive money crisis that almost the entirety of the United States experienced. Nearly everyone lost all of their money due to large United States banks closing due to everyone withdrawing their money at once. Fortunately for the USA, Franklin D. Roosevelt had a plan. This plan was called the “New Deal”. The New Deal established the economic burden and welfare of American citizens on the Federal Government. This in turn created the first social security in America. He created new jobs as well, and in doing so, created new federal activism jobs so that people could no longer be unemployed

Some believe that the Great Depression could be resolved itself if they simply waited it out. However, once FDR was elected, the unemployment rate was at an all time high, but the year that he was elected, the unemployment numbers dropped drastically and stayed dropping until World War 2. (Document 1) Even when people try to make the argument that FDRs plan isn't working, it is invalid because of how long that he was in office for. If the American people didn't like what he was doing and they thought that it was not helping them, then they wouldn't have elected him 4 times. All 4 of the times that he was elected, he won by a landslide victory with the support of most. (Document 6) This fact once again supports the fact that the New Deal, at least to the American people at the time, was absolutely something that nearly everyone agreed on and

When FDR was elected into office, there were 13,000,000 people unemployed and most banks were closed and he still managed to pull through using the New Deal. That being said, the problem of racial discrimination was still prevalent. A letter sent by an anonymous person to the president said that, “it is to believe the relief officials here are using up most everything that you send for themselves and their friends. They give out the relief supplies here on Wednesday of this week and give us black folks, each one, nothing but a few cans of pickled meat and to white folks they give blankets, bolts of cloth and things like that.” (Document 16) This letter from the time reinforces the idea that the New Deal did not help everyone. While maybe true, the relief supplies being sent to the citizens of America were for them to distribute. Cases of only some people being given the correct supplies were few and far between. However, the New Deal had its small issues, as anything does, but the truth is that it pulled the United States out of the Great Depression and overall helped the country through its