Roosevelt and the New Deal

‘The only thing we have to fear is fear itself’’?

This quote from his inaugural speech, sums up the mood of the American people as Roosevelt was elected to be President of the United States in the deepest part of the depression. He faced numerous challenges as a result of the mismanagement of the previous successive Republicans governments such as a large proportion of the American population were out of work and the banking crisis. Roosevelt had promised the American people a ‘new deal’ at his acceptance of the democratic nomination for president in 1932, however, his campaign only offered vague hints of what it would entail. He put the question of economic security on the agenda. President Roosevelt explicitly and consciously defined the New Deal as the embodiment of freedom, but of freedom of economic security rather than freedom of contract, or freedom of every man for himself.

Roosevelt enacted the first New Deal, also called the ‘Hundred Days’ to deal with the urgent situation that the country found itself in?. He confronted a banking system on the verge of collapse, as over five thousand banks were already closed, including all of those in New York and Illinois, as they had been shut down by their respective state governors earlier that day. Roosevelt declared a ‘bank holiday’ in March 1933, as by this time, banking had been suspended in over thirty-eight states, and he temporally halted all bank operations and held a special session in Congress. On the 9th of March, Congress rushed through a bill called the Emergency Banking Act, which provided funds to shore up threatened banks.

He continued trying to protect the economy by introducing the Glass-Stegall Act, which barred commercial banks, from becoming involved ...

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...ncluded the racial and ethnic groups being ignored by previous adminstatration, nevertheless the south helped the New Deal welfare state to be moulded to only helping white Americans as the majority of black workers found themselves to the most venerable and less generous wing of the new welfare state. The federal government allowed states to set their benefits for blacks at extremely low levels and to determine eligibility standards which included moral behaviour as outlined by local authorities, this lead to widespread discrimination in the payment of benefits. African-Americans were the hardest hit by the Depression as they had an unemployment rate double that of whites, thus the majority of blacks were on direct government relief especially in the northern cities such as Harlem where half of the families received public assistance throughout the 1930s.