Black Tuesday: The New Deal

The Great Depression was a period of prolonged economic recession that began on October 1929 and was preceded by the economic boom of the 1920s. The Depression gravely devastated the country and was by far the worst economic crisis of the 20th century, lasting for a decade, till the end of the 1930s.

The Depression, though widely debated upon, can be considered the result of an untimely clash of unfavourable economic factors that began with the Wall Street crash of October 24th, 1929. The damage was extended on Tuesday, October 29, 1929, thus the name ‘Black Tuesday’. This market crash brought in a decade of rampant unemployment, poverty, low profits, deflation, falling incomes, and stagnated economic and personal advancement. Businesses

Roosevelt was elected president in a landslide victory. Following his win, Roosevelt immediately embarked on a plan to deliver the country from the Depression. As president, he championed the series of federal legislative initiatives known as the New Deal.

The term ‘New Deal’ was coined from Franklin Roosevelt’s 1932 Democratic Party’s presidential nomination speech where he pledged a ‘new deal’ for the American people. The phrase ‘New Deal’ came to encompass his many programs designed to lift the United States out of the Great Depression.

The New Deal created a broad range of federal government programs to offer economic relief to the suffering, regulate private industry, and improve the economy. The New Deal is often summed up by the “Three Rs”: relief (for the unemployed), recovery (of the economy through federal spending and job creation), and reform (of capitalism, by means of regulatory legislation and the creation of new social welfare programs). Roosevelt’s New Deal fundamentally reshaped American political culture around the principle that the government is responsible for the welfare of its

The New Deal was only partially successful, however. The United States is generally viewed as having only fully recovered from the Depression due to massive military spending during the Second World War. Nevertheless, key elements in the New Deal remain instrumental to this day, including federal regulation of wages, hours, child labor, collective bargaining rights and the social security system.

The Great Depression profoundly affected the United States and shattered the confidence of Americans in the government and the system. But it also made her more vigilant in remodeling its policies. In general, the recovery of the U.S. economy took about 20 years, finally managing to restore itself in the 1950s. This is credited to the Second World War. Thus, the Great Depression not only led to the war, but was also cured by this war, as paradoxical as it was from a historical and economic point of