New Deal Dbq

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Pages: 5

The New Deal was intended to help nearly everyone at a time when nearly everyone needed help. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt started the new deal in 1933 to address a problem that was already old. The stock market crash of 1929 caused banks to fail, and there wasn’t enough money for people to buy things. Jobs were scarce. People couldn’t pay their mortgages, and lost their houses. Millions of people were homeless. A lot of them started “hobo jungles” or camps. Many people traveled around in railroad boxcars. President Herbert Hoover (1929-1933) used methods that were well intended but too weak to heal the economy. Treasury secretary Andrew Mellon thought that, if the Depression was allowed to run its course, the “rottenness” would work …show more content…
They were prevented from voting. Their houses had no water or electricity or bathrooms. In the “Dust Bowl” of the midwest farm country, millions of tons of topsoil were blown away by the wind. The average income of farm families was $240 a year. President Franklin Roosevelt (1933-1945) tried plans that were even more ambitious than those tried by President Hoover. Immediately after taking office he started what he called the “New Deal”, using the image of a poker game. Roosevelt announced “We have to try something. If it doesn’t work, we’ll try something else- but we have to try something” (Shi and Tindall 841). What he did was to start new government programs, most of which affected rural Americans, intended to restate the economy, and restore people to a healthy living …show more content…
By the mid 1930’s, the New Deal had stopped the Depression from getting worse, but it did not enable the economy. One farmer said “We were promised a New Deal, instead we have the same old stacked deck” (Shi and Tindall 849). AAA placed a tax on companies that processed products like wheat and cotton, and used the money to pay farmers to take some of the crops out of production. This practice helped the farmers pay off their mortgages, but it also put farm workers out of work. Then in January of 1936 the supreme court declared that the AAA tax on agricultural processing was unconstitutional. The new deal needed a new start. Social justice was made a “definite part” of the new