The New Deal Reforms by Candice S.

"Migrant workers traveled to fields of California in search of work during the Great Depression"
Photo courtesy of: http://www.life.com/image/72392462/in-gallery/48141


Along with his administration as 32nd president of the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt endorsed The New Deal, whose objective was to provide government assistance to the American people during the Great Depression. Roosevelt’s administration believed that the only way for the American people to get out of The Depression was through government assistance, which is where the name, “The New Deal” came into practice. One reform that Roosevelt and his administration held in high regard and therefore passed expeditiously was the Emergency Banking Act. This act not only enabled a citizen to borrow emergency cash sans collateral, but also pushed the flow of capital back into the general flow of the U.S. economy and thereby putting cash back in the hands of the American people.

Several reforms, called the New Deal, were passed by the FDR administration to assist Americans out of the Great Depression and these reforms had a large influence on the American economy. For instance, the Resettlement Administration provided school lunches to students who without the funding may have gone through the day without nourishment. There have been many speculations made regarding whether The New Deal was beneficial to the American people or if Roosevelt’s dream proved to be a failed attempt at utopia when up against the Great Depression. According to William Leuchtenburg, “The New Deal stimulated utopianism in American political and social thought on a wide range of issues” (1971). Although it took many years for The United States to recover from The Depression, the reforms set forth by Roosevelt and his administration paved the way to America’s recovery and proved to be the gateway to many ideas and laws we have in place today.


References

Borstelmann, T., Jones, J., May, E., Ruiz, V., & Wood, P.(2008).
Created Equal: A Social and Political History of the United States (Vol. II).
New York: Pearson Longman.

Leuchtenburg, W. (1971) Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal 1932-1940.
New York: Harper & Row.