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Essay about President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal

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On October 24, 1929, a day historically known as “Black Thursday”, the United States stock market crashed due to investors in the market starting to “sell off their shares, which resulted in a decline in stock prices.” (Dau-Schmidt, pg 60) This economic downturn in the market gave birth to financial ambivalence in the country, increasing unemployment, as well as other consequences on the landscape of international economics. When President Franklin D. Roosevelt took over as president in the year of 1933, “The country was in its depth of the Great Depression.” (Neal, 2010) Roosevelt’s New Deal consisted of implementing relief programs such as the Work Progress Administration and the Civil Works Administration, which aimed at revitalizing …show more content…

They write, “In response to the massive unemployment of the 1930’s, Roosevelt’s New Deal in 1933 introduced the first federal relief programs targeted at the poor and unemployed… he anticipated that the work relief jobs would boost consumer spending and thus increase demand for labor, which would then raise private employment and earnings.” (Neuman, Fishback, Kanton, pg 4) This quotes illustrates that programs such as these relief jobs, would not only be able to get the people back to work, but also get the economy up and running again. Moreover, another method in which Roosevelt used to revitalize the labor market was through the Civil Works Administration also known as the CWA. Similar to the Works Progress Administration, the CWA was introduced in 1933. This relief program also allowed for the construction of bridges, roads, but mostly focused on inner city projects. Nonetheless like the WPA, the CWA only “ employed up to 4 million people per week through March 1934.” This goes to show that there was only a number amount of people to get jobs, this was determined by the “Household budget deficit principle of the CWA.” Furthermore, to put this in simpler terms, the CWA was given certain amount of money in order to have unemployed people working, therefore

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