The new deal brought in a lot of policies to stop the problems in America. America started to work together with everyone. All the people helped each other and worked to make America a better place. America started to spend a lot of money on the people to give them jobs. America has spent a lot of money educating people and giving them training so they were capable of getting better jobs. America was able to help the people by making a “Brain trust” so they decide what to do. The Brain Trust gave a lot of confidence to the American Society. And the Brain trust set up a thing called the alphabet agencies. The alphabet agencies helped the people by creating work for them. There were alphabet agencies such the AAA, CCC, PWA, FCA and CWA. They created banking policies which took less then 100 days to do. In the 100 days Roosevelt called the US congress into a special session and discussed a series of measures. And they made a job creation scheme so the people were able to build freeways, dams, bridges, roads and public buildings.
The New Deals aims were to help and restore agriculture, industry and to help to get the unemployed people back to work. From about 1933 until 1936 all of the policies were successful. But after a year the government started to spend less money on the project and production fell again. 4 million people were taken away from the bread line and were put into a job. All the people started to work although the wages were very low. The wages were only 1 dollar a day. And within 3 years, 8 million Americans were on a public project. The alphabet agency called the WPA managed to build 116,000 public buildings, 78,000 bridges and 650,000 miles of road. For the short term effects it seemed very good and helped a lot of Americans since they didn’t have any work in the first place. In the beginning the Americans were able to live from only one dollar a day. But getting such a low wage for more than a few years was very problematic and didn’t work. By the beginning of 1933 there were roughly 14 million people who were unemployed. And by the end of 1942 there were roughly 2.5 million people unemployed. The Alphabet agencies managed to restore the banking systems and confidence of the people so they can use the banks. The alphabet agencies did that by shutting down all of the banks. And after a while they only reopened the banks which were thought to be good and honest. By 1933 there were more than 4000 bank failures. By 1934 the banking system was restored and there were less then a 100 bank failures and by 1940 there weren’t any bank failures anymore. In 1932 150,000 businesses failed. By 1936 there were roughly 40,000 businesses which failed. In 1933 Americas GNP was on roughly 55 billion dollars. By 1940 Americas GNP was more than 100 billion of dollars.
By the end of 1930s there were still a lot of problems which remained. There were still around 9 million unemployed people in America. Some groups of people still did not receive any help since 1936. The old people did not receive their pensions until 1940 and agricultural workers remained desperate. The three main people who were opposing Roosevelt were Huey Long, Doctor Townsend and Father Coughlin. The new deal jobs have cost a lot of money for America so the taxes were raised. Huey Long promised everyone that the taxes for all the wealthy people would be raised and the money would be spend on roads, hospitals and schools. Huey Long won the election and carried out the promises. Lots of people thought that this was very undemocratic and socialist because he was putting on high taxes on the wealthy people and spending it on the poor people. Doctor Francis Townsend had his own specific ideas. His idea was to give everyone who was 60 and above a pension of 200 dollars a month providing that they would spend the money on the same month and that they would give up their job. Doctor Francis Townsend believed that it would create a lot of jobs for the young people and it would put money back into the economical system.
The New Deal was partially very successful. The New Deal policies helped a lot to recover the economics in America. From 1932 until 1936 managed to stabilize the banks mange to put people into work and help other specific group of people. The number of unemployed people and the amount of homelessness dropped a lot. But the work for the people was very badly paid. So the people weren’t able to live of the low wages for a long time. The new deal didn’t pull America out of depression but it helped America to recover for a very long rime.
