The New Deal Dbq

Section 1: Identification and Evaluation of Sources

This historical investigation will explore the question: To what extent did the New Deal impact U.S. political and economic systems during the Great Depression? The New Deal was from 1933 to 1938 and the Great Depression was from 1929 to 1939.

My first source was created by T.H. Watkins. T.H. Watkins was born in 1936 in Loma Linda, California. He lived in Washington D.C. with his wife Joan. His book The Great Depression: America in the 1930s is a companion volume to the public television series The Great Depression and the twentieth book he has written. The Great Depression: America in the 1930s serves purpose as a continuation of sorts to the documentary and provides more in depth details

of the Great Depression. However, according to Herbert L. Calhoun the book was limited in that it “provided only limited answers. It merely "skates lightly along the surface" of the causes, in an almost polemical way: making only backhanded references to bank failures, stock market speculation, and the laxity of regulations, more generally. What I expected, but did not get, was a robust narrative or economic analysis to go with the somewhat "left-leaning" polemics.” With everyone in mind, the book gives information useful to students, teachers, and historians for research purposes and better understanding of the Great Depression.
My second source was made by Terry Golwag. Terry Golwag is the curator of the John Kean Center for American History at Kean University in Union, New Jersey. In 2010 Golway discovered a historic early census count predating the creation of the United States at Liberty Hall National Historic Landmark at Kean. He served as a political reporter, city editor and columnist for the pink paper, for which he still writes the periodic piece. He lives in Maplewood, New Jersey. Together We Cannot Fail: FDR and the American Presidency in Years of Crisis voices how Theodore Roosevelt was the first impacted by the media age. Showing how he lead the nation through the Great Depression and World War 2. Historian This biography on Roosevelt shows how he invented and established media presidency with his fireside chats and his first presidential speeches broadcast nationally from the White House. This book is created to use audio as a mixed-media book that fully integrates the book in hopes that the readers will have a thrilling experience and it is his third book for Sourcebooks. This book gives information useful to students, teachers, and historians for research purposes and to be informed about Theodore Roosevelt during the 20th century. However, a review by Library Journal Review said, “The combination of the CD and Golway's writing is sometimes poignant, and hearing FDR's words is powerful. Since the release of World War II records and because of today's acceptance of FDR's physical handicaps and complex marriage, Golway is able to provide a new look at the mid-20th century. He also includes excellent notes, bibliography, illustrations, and indexing.”. This shows that even though Golwag executed everything perfectly, he is limited to only the voice of Roosevelt.

Section 2: Investigation
The New Deal is a group of government programs and policies established under President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s. It was designed to improve conditions for people suffering in the Great Depression by supplying more and new jobs when the stock market crashed and other varies problems.
The First New Deal was more pro-business than its successor period. The highest on Roosevelt’s legislative priorities was a new work system called the Works Progress Administration (WPA). It was “the best known of all New Deal inventions… because it affected more individual lives more directly than any other.”. It ensured that every able-bodied American male and some females would be able to earn the basic needs for themselves and their family. The WPA also gave work to artists, writers, theater directors and musicians. This relief program was responsible for the new and immutable intimacy between the people and government that is thoroughly in place today. After the success of this program during 1933-1934, Hopkins was convinced that a major work program “was the only form of federal relief that would put food on the tables of workers and their families without starving them of their pride” and later during that year he went to Roosevelt with a proposal to expand the Federal Emergency Relief Administration’s (FERA). According to the historian Edward Robb Ellis, the workers of WPA “built 651,087 miles of highways, roads and streets… 124,031 bridges; erected 125,110 public buildings; created 8,192 public parks; built or improved 853 airports.”.
The FERA’s Rural Rehabilitation Program spent $85 million to purchase and rehabilitate wrecked farmland and was only able to save a tiny fraction of land that needed rescue. On April 17, 1933, Roosevelt wrote to Senator George Norris of Nebraska and asked, “I would really like to get one more bill, which would allow us to spend $25 million this year to put 25,000 families on farms at an average cost of $1,000 per family.”. The result was called Subsistence Homesteads.
The second New Deal also helped create the Wagner Act, which gave unions the right to bargain collectively with employers and created an enforcement mechanism; over time, it helped raise wages and benefits for millions of workers and increased aggregate purchasing power. New Deal policies represented a '"safety value" that saved corporate capitalism in the United States: it gave policymakers a chance to reform and save the corporate capitalist system.
The Social Security Act of 1935 was imperfect.

Roosevelt insisted that the program be self-supporting through a payroll tax which would later be cited as one of the causes of the recession of 1937 to 1938 as the people began to feel the effects of the first payroll deductions. Those that were effected by increasing deductions thought it was an unfair burden that will be bankrupt by the time they will be eligible for payments. However, flawed it was, the act was, as historian Kenneth S. Davis has written, “one of the major turning points of American history. No longer could ‘rugged individualism’ convincingly insist that the government… had no responsibility whatever for the welfare of the human beings who did the work from which profit was

reaped.”
Business leaders and Democrats including Roosevelt’s friend and predecessor as New York governor, Al smith, formed an organization called the American Liberty League to organize opposition to the New Deal. The Liberty League charged that Roosevelt’s program of government intervention and regulation was more radical than the programs being put in places like Benito Mussolini’s Italy, Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union, and Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich. Former President Herbert Hoover complained that Roosevelt was moving the country towards “‘gigantic socialism’ through ‘the most stupendous invasion’ of liberty ‘since the days of Colonial America.’”
Roosevelt’s fellow Democrats were eager to make the case against him. Alfred E. Smith was bitter over his loss to Roosevelt at Democratic National Convention in 1932 so he traveled to Washington in late January 1936 to attack the New Deal and its author at a meeting of the Liberty League in the Mayflower Hotel. Smith compared the New Deal with socialism and equated its proponents with “Karl Marx, or Lenin, or any of the rest of that bunch.” He was envious and allowed Republicans and the business community to believe that the New Deal was nothing but socialism dressed up as reform. His attacks, along with opposition from Davis and other Democrats in the Liberty League, gave Roosevelt’s allies anxiety as they considered their prospects in 1936.
Many New Deal supporters believed that a second Roosevelt term could build on reforms to alleviate the economic crisis, to create a new economic order with an expanded and permanent place for government in the private economy.

Those hopes were based on the New Deals successes during FDR’s first term. The nation’s fortune improved under New Deal, but unemployment remained high and soup kitchen continued to be a fixture in American life. The nation’s private corporations showed a profit of “$5 billion in 1936, compared with collective losses of $2 billion four years earlier. The nation’s gross national product grew by about 14 percent in 1936, a far cry from the 15 percent decrease in GNP in

1932.”
The New Deal also dramatically changed the two main political parties in the United States. Roosevelt's commitment to the improvement of the plight of the working class and the poor shifted political loyalties. Thanks to the New Deal legislation, the urban working class, including labor unions, became one of the most loyal supporters of the Democratic Party. What was known as the New Deal Coalition, turned the Democratic Party into a majority party, and shaped American politics until the 1960s, with some remnants of it existing into the 1980s.
At such a dire moment in the nation’s history, it was appropriate, he said, to think about the “social and economic problems which are the root cause of the social revolution which is today a supreme factor in the world.” If democracies were to prevail in the face of that revolution, they had to ensure that their citizens enjoyed equality of opportunity, employment, security, the ending of special privilege for the few, civil liberties, and the rising standard of living. Which the New Deal restatement of a social contract protected economic rights as well as political rights.
To conclude, Roosevelt’s New Deal received many criticisms from political parties and figures, but the results economically was a success to the nation. The New Deal policies implemented by Roosevelt went a long way in helping to reduce income inequality in America. But, in regards to the task of reviving an economy in crisis tatters, the New Deal was a failure. If anything, the legacy of the New Deal is that it has helped to create greater equality and welfare in America. In 1939, the unemployment rate was still 19 percent, and not until 1943 did it reach its pre-Depression levels. The massive spending brought by the American entry to the Second World War ultimately cured the nation's economic woes.

Section 3: Reflection
Based on the research I did, I think that historians can find that the New Deal was useful in some ways but in the end, it didn’t solve the economic problems in the ways that the Second World War did. I think that it would be hard for historians to find out the extent of the New Deal if they only looked at data. It’s easy to find numbers calculated by other researchers, but it’s hard to find definite opinions on the topic from that time and now. I think the time period I’m researching is still valuable today, because there are programs still implemented like the Social Security Act. I also don’t think the time period affects the limitations of historians, because it’s not too far or not too close to our time period. The methods used by historians were data of GNP and other political and economic issues to show how the economy changed throughout the time period. They also used sayings from other historians and people of political and non-political backgrounds from the time period.
Judgements and biased opinions about a historical event can and should be avoided. A significant historical event is something that has changed how things are run in a society. It is possible to describe a historical event in an unbiased way by providing information on both sides. Bias is being selective of one particular side or event and only telling that side. Selection gives both sides and selects what’s import for the paper. Challenges facing a historian can greatly differ from mathematicians and scientist, because mathematicians and scientist can solve their problems by conducting experiments and proving their work by doing so.