These programs were really pushed between 1933 and 1936, with the goals of relief (job programs) reform (stimulating business and providing structure for banking), and to ensure that the events that caused the crash would never happen again (speculation, lack of confidence in American currency, farm and urban policy, and unemployment).
FDR had to first focus on something that would provide the quickest recovery for the most people. His administration pushed through a number of banking reform laws that were designed to prevent another crash, to find emergency money for the poor and unemployed who had nowhere else to turn, and to establish work programs so that the able bodied could work, help their family, and recover self-esteem. FDR also worked to repeal the Gold Standard so that the new economy would be based on more practical measures, and to repeal Prohibition. Relief was provided, then, in the so-called "alphabet programs, " which guided government dollars towards finding jobs and work for the unemployed, to establish...
The 1934 Securities and Exchange Act also acted to reform the stock market, which in turn, spun other reforms in trade, business practices, and labor acts.
Recovery did happen in two stages. First, Roosevelt appealed directly to the people in his famous "Fireside Chat Program" the first time a sitting President regularly appealed to the populace. Second, although he ran up a large government debt, by establishing relief and reform programs that would diminish unemployment, increase farming and industrial output, and change the attitude of Americans about themselves and the world. Clearly, the situation had improved, and by the end of the 1930s, America was again on the way to recovery and, as would be a repeat of the events prior to World War I, crucial to the European situation from 1939 on.
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