An act that gave both reform and relief was the S.S.A. (Social Security Act) of 1935 was designed to help the people who were unemployed or who could not work. It provided old age pensions, widows pensions, disablement pensions and also unemployment benefit. The money that paid for all of these pensions and benefits came from taxing the employers and employees.
b) Explain why Roosevelt Introduced the New deal
The Wall Street Crash in 1929 caused the American economy to fall into a state of depression. A number of problems in 1933 then stemmed from this,
Firstly, there was no confidence in the money system, or in the banks due to the crash. In total 1500 banks had been closed and nine million men and women lost their savings because the banks had collapsed. This meant that all confidence in the economy disappeared.
Putting your money in an open bank would be almost like giving your money away because nobody knew when the next bank was going to close. The people in America needed immediate relief. A once strong and prosperous country had been reduced to a country living in poverty and grief. The Americans were not prepared for this. Roosevelt recognised this instantly and began to prepare Hoover’s mistakes. ‘Two cars in every garage and a chicken in the pot’.
Due to the Wall Street crash, millions had lost their jobs. Many factories had closed down because they could not afford to stay open, this lead to many families left homeless and unemployed. It was not only the big factories that were affected. Family businesses were forced to close down; this was devastating as the outcome was whole families on the street living in poverty. This became so common that the shanty houses built buy the poor were named Hoovervilles
This then left the problem of mass unemployment to be dealt with; by 1932 over twelve million people were out of work. Unlike Hoover’s idea of Laissez-faire, that people should help themselves, Roosevelt knew that it was up to him to get people into work. At this stage, farming was in a state of disorder. The prices for products such as wheat and corn were far too low. It did not even pay for the farmers to reallocate the harvest from the fields because of the low prices.
Roosevelt wanted His New Deal to go further, particularly in improving living conditions and working conditions for which he called ‘ the forgotten men’. Workers did not have many rights and the conditions they worked in were dire, part two of the New Deal was then needed. To help both workingmen and farmers.
Due to the disastrous consequences that the depression had, welfare schemes were needed as a backup which would prevent and ‘cushion´ the effects of future depressions. The S.S.A. also did this, although it proved unpopular amongst some. Also as ther e was a lack of social security within the community, it was not not uncommon for the public to rely on charity such as soup kitchens and hostels, because they had no other alternative, Until Roosevelt that is.
Roosevelt saw that a depression could easily happen again and was against Hoover’s idea that ‘the economy should be left to right itself’. It was this idea of leaving the economy did not need any help from the government that caused the need of the ‘new deal’.
From the early 1930s, America was in distress and needed urgent help. The person to help America out of the depression and on the way to becoming an economically strong and prosperous society was Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
c) ‘The new deal was not a complete success’. Explain how far you agree with this statement.
I can fully agree with the statement that ‘the new deal was not a complete success’. This is because nothing when it comes to politics is ever a complete success, so the new deal like everything in this world will have its pros and cons.
The whole point of the new deal was to allow America to fully recover after the Depression and make adjustments along the way. Did it deal with the depression or just postpone it?
To begin with Unemployment figures were down in the mid-1930s but they shot up again in 1938, which showed that Roosevelt’s solution was not permanent. However, unemployment went back down in 1940 because there was a great demand for war goods due to the problems arising in Europe. The unemployment fell from 25% to 14% in 1939; the New Deal had found jobs for 11% of the population this would mean that there were fewer jobs to find for the 13% still unemployed. Also Roosevelt would now be able to put more taxes on consumer goods e.g. Fridges and Cookers so that the government would get back some of the billions of dollars they had stuck into the New Deal. Regardless of this the first New Deal was made unconstitutional making the rate of unemployment rise between the years of 1937-39 from 14% to 18%, which brought less money into the American Government. It was not untill1941 that the unemployment rate fell rapidly as America had just joined World War two and they were recruiting soldiers, Pilots, sailors and workers in the factories to make machinery and artillery. In other words the war was their saviour.
The depression returned to America in 1938. However, the S.S.A. was prepared for this and it ‘cushioned´ the effects. People did not starve and they received unemployment benefit. There were no ‘Hoovervilles´ like there had been previously when there was no welfare scheme to help the people. But the only way the country would stay out of depression is if money is being constantly being spent.
Roosevelt method was to hurriedly get people into jobs, this may be getting the figures down but the agencies were criticised for not supplying ‘real jobs’. However the agencies like the C.W.A and the W.P.A gave jobs to approximately 13 million workers decreasing unemployment and they also repaired airfields, schools, hospitals and roads. The C.C.C gave work to 2.5 million unemployed single men who restored forests, beaches and parks the C.C.C gave the young men training which did help them get jobs later on in life.
However everything was not perfect with Roosevelt’s Alphabet agencies, the N.R.A designed to give workers a faire deal by increasing wages and prices. In 1935 two brothers broke one of their acts for selling diseased chickens the N.R.A took them to court where they were found guilty, the brothers appealed to the Supreme court where the supreme court declared that it was the business of the New York State and not Washington. After this 16 cases of the alphabet agencies were under trial and then later the N.R.A was declared unconstitutional losing the American people money and jobs.
Once the Supreme Court had made the N.R.A illegal Roosevelt had more work to do in order to win his campaign for re-allocation in 1936. Having the Supreme Court as a main opponent is bound to make it harder for the ‘New Deal’ to obtain the credit that it may deserve, and will therefore risk the chance of it being a success. The Supreme court considered FDR to be interfering in the states rights, the judges were threatened his actions as they could have affected they posistion in the court or at least their power. In 1936 the AAA was made unconstitutional this was another hard hit on the New Deal and it was up to Roosevelt to ensure that his acts were not classed as worthless or in other words a failure.
Once the NRA was declared illegal, Roosevelt introduced the Wagner act, which allowed workers to be part of a trade union. This jus gave the New Deal more opponents, as the employers disliked the idea of their workers joining trade unions. The out come was violence. The employers hired thugs to beat up members of trade unions, but nothing could be done.
Farmers were also having problems. The measures taken to protect and help farmers worked extremely well for the richer farmers, but they seemed to leave out the smaller farmers in the southern areas of America. Their prices were better but the problems such as ‘dust bowls´ and poor crop yields were still existent.
There was always failure from the beginning for instance many parts of the American society were not touched by the new deal. The African – American people continued to suffer discrimination; nothing was done to prevent this or help them. Instead they were restricted to living in certain areas for example they were prohibited from living in area around the TVA dams. When it came to unemployment they found it hard to find jobs and by 1935 about 30 % lived on relief. Roosevelt knew that the Southern white congressmen that he relied on would not support civil rights or anti-lynching laws. However they did benefit from the CCC programme and new housing built after slum- clearance projects. Also women were not employed to any great degree in the manual labour programmes. It was not until 1930 that their employment rose, because they provided cheap labour. However they benefited to some extent from the social security act. Some like Frances Perkins (secretary of labour) rose to prominent positions in the administrations.
Something that was meant to change and improve the country so much actually did not. Instead it just invented many new agencies and spread out the work of the American government. Roosevelt was very inconsistent with his policies and kept on changing his mind. He spent billions of Dollars of government’s money and Failed to solve the problem. For instance Germany and the U.K both had unemployment problems also, but thye took measure to deal with the problem but not as expensively as the USA. By raising so much extra money in taxation, Roosevelt may have actually harmed the the long term prospects for the recovery of the US economy.
It was this money spending and taxation that created the problems for Roosevelt when it came to opposistion. Many rich Americans were unhappy about paying for the new deal through increased tax. The traditional republicans opposed the way that the very business valuses of America were being undermined by helping the poor.
So I can make the judgement that the new deal was not wholly successful, as it didn not fulfil its main aim ‘ to end the depression’. It was agreed that the new deal was successful in improving the morale and standard of living in the amreican people. Although it did not prevent it did preserve the USA from sinking lower into poverty. In the short term it gave people small jobs and trust in the American economy but in the long term the deal would only work with continual support which remained necessary untill the Second World War.
Only decided societies such as the very poor factory workers the elderly and widows benefited from the deal and if something is going to be a complete success everything should be dealt with equally. Where as the poorest in America were not dealt with such as the migrant workers and unskilled workers. As I have said already a main aim of the New Deal was to restore confidence in that was lost in the 1020’s, but by 1937 Americans were still only spending and investing about 75 percent of what they had in 1929.
