New Deal Program the Great Depression Hit

New Deal Program

The Great Depression hit America in ways that affected everyone, from the richest of the country's society, to the poorest of the urban and rural inhabitants. The stock market crashing left many rich society folk with no wealth, the farmers found themselves without any consumers to buy their overabundance of too-expensive products, and the urban families found themselves precariously scrounging for means of survival, oftentimes going hungry for days on end. This situation certainly set forth the cause for governmental involvement, and by 1933, the FDR administration sought to remedy this catastrophe by constructing the New Deal.

The number of the unemployed before the stock market crashed in 1929 was as low as 4%; however, by 1933, this rate had skyrocketed to around 25%. One in four of the working class could not find work, and thus could not support the livelihoods of their families or themselves. Businesses were floundering, and "unemployed Americans scraped together meager dinners of flour and water and skipped many meals" (Moran, 2011). Corporations began to crumble, and many found themselves turning to the government for help, as opposed to the usual capitalistic tendencies of corporate handouts. However, there were downsides to this leaning-to, considering the laws passed by the government seemed to be more detrimental to groups than they were helpful.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal took form in three different stages. In 1933, the administration sought to "stop the economic panic that had engulfed the nation" (Brinkley, 1991); in early 1935, the same administration tried to bolster the first program with another set of reforms; by 1937, a "less productive period of activism" (Brinkley, 1991) commenced and "searched for ways to make the federal bureaucracy more efficient" (Brinkley, 1991). Intending to restore economic demand -- and therefore boost up the American economy -- the government placed laws that ordered farms to steady their prices by plowing the crops and ridding their overstock of pigs. Another set of laws -- as created and authorized by the newly formed National Recovery Administration -- attempted to instill a set of "codes of fair competition" (Shughart, 2011), which restricted outputs produced by companies and prevented private industries from extreme competition against each other. Congress, at this time, "had become a delegator" (Bertelli, 2010), and for some struggling during the Depression, this New Deal seemed like a heaven-sent: "If government does not stand up and apply the brakes, society is defenseless" (Greider, 2011).

However, this in no way meant that FDR's New Deal helped or even affected all of the citizens of the United States. In fact, the first set of reform laws, while it attempted to help the rural individuals and families, it set rural and urban citizens at odds; there was "an irony of agricultural abundance paired with urban hunger" (Moran, 2011). The laws were, however, set aside by the Agricultural Adjustment Act, which was a New Deal program that attempted to channel the surplus farm commodities to the needy -- though of course, the caveat would be that only those "too poor" would be benefiting from the program. Once more, here we have starving middle families omitted in this condition.

The New Deal slowed down and attempted to lower and stabilize the economic and unemployment troubles that riddled the United States. The attempt was noble at that, though the statistics at the time showed a much less attractive reform; the unemployment level decreased, but it was still at an average of 17%. There was at least one lasting legacy of the New Deal, however, and that was the importance of government's role within the recreation and stabilization of jobs.