As soon as Roosevelt's presidential term began on March 4, 1933, his New Deal promised relief, recovery, and reform. FDR did more in his first 100 days than all of his predecessors and most of those who came after, but this is not as promising as it might seem at first glance. The Great Depression hit America like a tsunami within months of Hoover's presidency and left the United States in an economic crisis. Following this sudden and devastating stock market decline, the entire nation faced unprecedented financial, agricultural, and industrial problems. By 1933, unemployment had risen to a catastrophic 25 percent, and the average family income had fallen 40 percent since 1929. By 1933, GNP had halved what it had in 1929. All of these problems represented enormous threats to American stability and needed to be resolved. . and fast. FDR, a strong personality with a promising vision of America's future, was the man to step forward. It is not at all surprising that he achieved a huge electoral victory with 57.4% of the vote and that 42 states were in his favor, obtaining 472 of 531 electoral votes. However, there is much debate about how effective the New Deal really was in fighting the Depression. Amity Shlaes, William E. Leuchtenburg, and Burton Folsom Jr. have different interpretations of Roosevelt and the New Deal. Leuchtenburg, argues that FDR was a good president who made great strides toward curing the nation's depression. On the other side of the political spectrum, Shlaes and Folsom are much more critical of FDR's efforts. In most cases, the negative aspects of various New Deal policies tend to outweigh the positive aspects. Measuring successes and failures on a scale like this is complex. To assess the extent to which conditions have improved agricultural policy, the views of both landowners, sharecroppers and sharecroppers will be taken into account. Similarly, the impact of industrial policy on groups will be analysed. Roosevelt personally, how he came to power and how he used it will also be evaluated. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get Original Essay Amity Shlaes is an American author, magazine and newspaper columnist. Shlaes writes from an American libertarian point of view. He has written four books and has had much success from each. As a libertarian, she strongly opposes the level of federal involvement during the Depression. Shlaes writes in an article that Roosevelt's actions to resolve the crisis "may actually have perpetuated it." He also uses Roosevelt's mistakes in his speech to strengthen his belief in libertarianism when he writes that "even the best-intentioned government intervention can make things worse." Burton W. Folsom Jr is a professor of history at Hillsdale College in Michigan and a senior historian at the libertarian organization Foundation for Economic Education in New York. His involvement with this group shows that his views as libertarians tend to be more in favor of political freedom and autonomy. Folsom is very negative about Roosevelt and the New Deal, arguing that it largely made the Great Depression worse. It is easy to understand his views, even before reading the book, simply from the title of his book “New Deal or Raw Deal? How FDR's Economic Legacy Hurt America.” He is not afraid to make his opinions clear through the use of bold statements such as “how it has damaged agriculture” and in the choice of quotes to support his works such as “for every problem that isbeen solved, two or three new problems have been created,” by HV Kaltenborn, national radio commentator. William E. Leuchtenburg has an extremely contrasting view to the two previously mentioned. He is "a leading scholar on the life and career of Franklin Delano Roosevelt", which shows that he has experience and respect in the field. His most notable work is "Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932-1940", written in 1963. It could be argued that being born in 1922 gives him a certain advantage, having experienced the events he chooses to write about. He talks a lot about Roosevelt's personality and the moves he made to make him a "people's president", he is especially fond of FDR's "Fireside Chats". One of Leuchtenburg's most famous quotes shows how positive he is towards FDR as he calls him "the savior of capitalism". It is not difficult to understand why Roosevelt quickly became so beloved by the American people. With the state of the nation following the depression left by the Hoover presidency, people began to look for any other alternative and Roosevelt seemed to be the knight in shining armor that people were looking for. He had brilliant ideas for dragging America out of the rapidly worsening Depression and a level of charisma that very few could resist. Even Shlaes, who is widely critical of FDR, admits that his personality was one of the best features of his presidential campaign as he writes "in the darkness, Roosevelt's voice seemed to shine." it left him completely unable to use his legs. When this happened, he believed his political career was over. His wife Eleonora convinced him otherwise. His disability and friendly, supportive wife definitely helped people love him even more. The fact that he fought his disability and continued his fight to become President of the United States demonstrated "great perseverance", America was in a drastic situation and the American people were looking, frankly, for something other than Herbert Hoover. Would the election result have been different if the situation had been better? Probably not. But Roosevelt's margin of victory would certainly not have been that large. The desperation seen in Americans is not dissimilar to that experienced by Germans during a similar period. Both nations had been going through a huge depression and the desperation of both led to a mass vote for great change. In 1932, before he was even elected, FDR “asked for a single clear mandate: courageous action” that, as Conkin points out, “seemed like terribly dangerous and callous demagoguery.” FDR also worked to create a level of communication between the president and the people. He responded to those who wrote to him but his most famous method of communication with people were the so-called “Fireside Chats”. It was a series of 28 radio programs organized by FDR himself in which he explained his policies to the American people. Powell, another figure largely negative about the Roosevelt administration, finds positives in FDR's fireside conversations. He writes about his first fireside chat saying; “The “chat” went on for thirteen minutes and established FDR as a skilled communicator.” This shows that, however mediocre the new agreement was, it is impossible to deny that Roosevelt was indeed a skilled communicator. Agriculture was a fundamental aspect of the American way of life. Unfortunately, in 1933, agricultural prices were at their lowest. Overproduction of cotton meant that money was lost on every single acre planted. Sharecroppers had to pay a quarter of their harvest as rent and sharecroppers paid half ofall the cotton they picked, a large number of which were black. The Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU) was a union chartered and staffed by both blacks and whites. By the end of its first year, the union boasted more than 1,000 members. The STFU organized a meeting with the AAA to convince them to ensure that all the money given to the planters was distributed equitably. Before long, the STFU went on strike to campaign for higher wages and, sure enough, after 10 days of strike, the landowners were forced to increase their wages. This success led the STFU to acquire many more members. The situation for Southern farmers seemed to be improving, but their victory was short-lived. Unfortunately, farm unions were not included in the Wagner Act, meaning unions like the STFU had no federal protection, which meant they were still intimidated by planters. In this case, the Roosevelt administration brutally prevented the progress of agriculture. The AAA was an act designed to use many different methods to push farm prices back up. Powell argues that because the AAA provided subsidies based on acreage and production, the policy largely favored larger farmers. Unfortunately, “by basing payments on production rather than need, he inevitably helped already large and prosperous farmers very generously.”[10] Kennedy highlights a problem with the benefits provided and benefit payments, particularly the way they were distributed. He writes: “In theory, landlords should have shared benefit payments with their tenants. In practice, very few of them have done so.” Powell also points out that the New Deal “displaced poor sharecroppers and renters, large numbers of whom were black,” which reflected negatively on FDR's willingness to pursue racial equality. Bernstein, writing from a very different perspective, represents a similar line of argument. He claims that New Deal agricultural policies “sacrificed the interests of the marginal and unrecognized to the well-being of those who held greater political and economic power.” However, Leuchtenburg disagrees with the view presented by both Powell and Bernstein. He argues that initiatives taken to improve farming and farming were a crucial part of the New Deal. Leuchtenburg emphasizes that “They gave the highest priority to increasing agricultural prices in order to restore the balance between industry and agriculture and to provide businesses with a large domestic market.” The AAA has always been the subject of much debate about many of its actions and who it actually helped. It's hard to try to justify, for example, Roosevelt's idea that overproduction was the problem when so many people were starving. It is made even more difficult to argue by the AAA's order to kill six million pigs and not turn them into food and by paying farmers subsidies for not planting on certain plots of land. This reduced production and subsequently pushed crop prices back up. However, the plan to stop producing so much food when so many Americans have been so severely affected by depression that they are starving to death is completely inexcusable. This decision also appears to present FDR's view that financial stability trumps the importance of quality of life for the American people. The Farm Credit Act of 1933 is frankly absurd. The aim was to relieve farmers of their indebtedness by providing loans. This makes sense in the short term because farmers can pay off their debts. However, once the loans are paid off, the farmers comesimply left in debt again for the loans they used, which is why Conkin makes the point: “recovery remained just a dream.” More than $100 million was made available for mortgage loans and refinancing – “nearly four times more than the total mortgage loans made to farmers by the entire land bank system the year before.” The Farm Credit Act, as Schlesinger argues, has given “every evidence of at least getting the emergency debt problem under control,” but while solving the emergency is important, it is probably more important to fix the long-term concerns of the situation. This also links to the law on the refinancing of agricultural loans. It helped farmers with their loans by rescheduling them and preventing farms from being repossessed. Unfortunately for many farms it was already too late. The people were in too serious condition to continue and were still recovered. In both the Agricultural Credit Act and the Agricultural Mortgage Refinancing Act, short-term problems were solved by simply making them long-term, so they didn't actually solve anything. The Soil Erosion and Conservation Acts aimed to negate the effects left by garbage and indeed succeeded. Unfortunately, the money from the land continued to go to the landowners instead of the small tenant farmers who continued to be unfairly underpaid for the work they were doing. The Tennessee Valley occupied an area the size of England and Wales combined (about 40,000 square miles). It was in contact with 7 states and within its borders lived 2.5 million people, half of whom were unemployed. The Tennessee Valley and the Tennessee River presented biannual problems for hundreds of thousands of farmers in the area. Every spring, the Tennessee River overflows, washing away millions of tons of topsoil and destroying farms in its path. Every summer there was very little water in the river and the surrounding land was parched. These problems, combined with animal grazing and poor agriculture, lead to sharp increases in soil erosion levels. Additionally, only 2 percent of Tennessee Valley farms had access to electricity, which posed an unbeatable obstacle to the mechanization and modernization of the area. The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) has built a series of dams along the valley to control the flooding that has caused such devastation to surrounding farmers, their lands and their livelihoods, and to use the dams to provide affordable electricity to the area. Kennedy believed that the TVA had serious potential as he writes, "Roosevelt's vision of what the TVA could do was breathtaking." On the other hand, Shlaes criticizes the TVA for having “crowded out private utilities that hoped to light up the South.” The TVA should have been the first of many acts of this type, all aimed at regenerating areas of territory affected by extreme social and economic difficulties. All other projects failed at the congress and were never built. As little as the remaining agricultural actions taken may be, the TVA has been largely positive, mostly by providing affordable electricity to the area and creating jobs in the greater area. However, although it succeeded in providing electricity to the area, it caused conflicts with private businesses trying to do the same. The success of the TVA leaves us pondering the counterfactual question of “what more could have been done if the other projects had made it past congress?” Finally, the Rural Electrification Act was joined by the TVA. The objective was to provide electricity tothe whole country. It provided low-interest loans to rural cooperatives that helped finance the electrification of more rural areas where big business had no interest. The act was very successful, but that success took a long time to come to fruition. In 1939, 25% of peasant households had electricity, a small but welcome increase from 20% in 1933. By 1949 it was over 90%. After the Depression, the industry was in a truly dire state. The economy went from full employment in 1929, when the unemployment rate was only 3.2%, to massive unemployment in 1933, when the unemployment rate reached 25%, and during the 1930s, this figure never dropped below 14%. Even in the period leading up to World War II, which many consider the end of the Depression, unemployment was still at 9.9%. Unfortunately, the measures taken to improve the unemployment and industrial situation have not been done well enough to be called a success. The Roosevelt administration allocated a monumental $3.3 billion to the Public Works Administration (PWA) to create jobs for skilled workers in the construction of major projects in the first year alone. In its eleven years of existence, from 1933 to 1944, the PWA spent over $6 billion, which didn't exactly help the deficit. Some of the PWA's most notable projects are the Triborough Bridge, Los Angeles Airport, and the Lincoln Tunnel. Providing national and local pride with these large projects along with many jobs for skilled workers, it's easy to stop here and judge the PWA as a success, but it's not quite that simple. The PWA hired only skilled workers, which works well for private companies that receive more money, but not such a happy effect on those unskilled workers looking for work. For a total of $6 billion, the PWA could have done a lot more than just build some nice bridges and a couple of airports. The PWA's somewhat confusingly named younger brother, the Works Progress Administration (WPA), was much more promising. The WPA was one of the largest agencies ever to emerge from the New Deal with a huge appropriation of $4.9 billion to carry out numerous public works projects, including the construction of numerous public buildings and roads. The idea was to ensure that people maintained their self-confidence and self-preservation to prevent them from becoming dependent on the dole, which was not given lightly. Most jobs, however, consisted of “work projects that accomplished very little.” Critics often even called the WPA “We Piddle Around” to highlight the senselessness of their works. In 7 years, the WPA was responsible for 2,500 hospitals, 6,000 schools, and 570,000 miles of roads, which seems amazing, and some of it was. However, some projects were so “poorly constructed that they had to be rebuilt almost immediately.” Within six months, over 2,000,000 people were employed by WPA programs. The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was a public works relief program that operated from 1933 to 1942 as part of the New Deal. Leuchtenburg writes that “the president offered “army” jobs in the CCC, only to see the leaders reject” a motion that was quickly defeated, as the bulk of the army “enlisted by the hundreds” and eventually “a quarter of a million veterans enlisted in the forestry corps." Early on, Southern politicians were Roosevelt's staunchest supporters. It is no surprise then that the CCC was run by a Southern racist who did little to encourage blacks to join. Those who joined faced horrifying segregationsevere. In its years of operation, 250,000 blacks enrolled in the CCC. There is a strong argument that membership figures could have been much higher if segregation had been reduced if not removed to prevent blacks from being intimidated by the discriminatory nature of the organization. The National Recovery Administration (NRA) was a policy often seen as one of the most positive recovery programs, but in reality that is at the heart of everything that was wrong with the recovery efforts. Codes and rules were created to establish minimum wages and maximum working hours for workers in order to eliminate destructive competition from industry and labor. However, the NRA codes allowed blacks to be paid less for doing the same job as a white. When the NRA disbanded two years later, it was quickly replaced by the National Labor Relations Act. The NLRA was formed to establish relationships and communications between unions and employers in the private sector. The law also gave a lot of power to unions. The American Liberty League described the act as a threat to liberty. The TVA was another huge New Deal policy. It was designed to transform the Tennessee Valley with a series of dams along its entire length. The goal was to control flooding in the area and provide affordable electricity to the surrounding area. By providing electricity to area farms, TVA has allowed farms to modernize with newer technologies to streamline their farming operation. However, the construction jobs created by TVA could have been given to the local population instead of outsourcing them to private firms. Powell is skeptical about the true positives of the TVA, asking, “Why has the Tennessee Valley Authority become an obstacle to the Tennessee Valley?” Kennedy claims that “Roosevelt's magic”[26] was what solved the banking problem. Roosevelt used his fireside chats to announce his Emergency Banking Act, passed on March 9, 1933. It would be used to create a banking holiday to prevent further bank runs. Fearing further bank closures, people rushed to withdraw their funds. Banks would not open until they were stable enough to do so. Folsom argues that FDR's temporary bank closures "calmed many Americans' monetary fears." Within three days, more than 5,000 banks were allowed to reopen. That same year, the Banking Act of 1933 was passed, giving the Federal Reserve Board greater control over banks' investment capabilities. Additionally, the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 separated investment and commercial banking. Folsom believes that this actually damaged the American banking system since “bank branches were off-limits” and these were often the “most stable banks.” The excessive involvement of commercial banks in stock market investments was seen as the main reason for the financial collapse. Powell believes the Glass-Steagall Act “had no impact on the small banks that failed by the thousands.” Critics have argued that the Emergency Banking Act and the Glass-Steagall Act were “written by bankers for bankers.” They argue that this is clear because the acts appeared to benefit them, giving them “generous government financial subsidies” and “liquidation of their weaker brothers,” which seems undeniable. Reynolds also comments on the limitations of banking reform by stating: “Congress failed to seize the opportunity to create a bank branch system of the kind that protected neighbors Canada and Great Britain from a banking crisis of..