The Great Depression and The New Deal

The New Deal certainly did not help all the people who needed help in the Depression years. It would have been impossible to do so, considering the millions of people who needed that help, and the frantic nature of the establishment and implementation of the programs of the New Deal. Even many of those who were helped were helped only minimally, and many who were intended to be helped were beyond access to that help. As Watkins writes,

Fear . . . haunted the dreams of the African-American sharecropper . . . who held a fistful of barren dust.

. . . It stalked the middle-class white merchant . . . who had seen decades of work destroyed when his once-friendly banker coldly forced him into bankruptcy. It whispered terror into the ear of the Mexican-Am

. . .
r needs, while poor, jobless people stricken by despair fell out of the reach of the New Deal. Large and powerful corporations benefitted as well. The auto industry, for example, as early as the spring of 1935, was "forging ahead in production, retail sales, and expansion of productive capacity" (277). Clearly, millions of Americans able to purchase such automobiles benefitted as well. There are a number of broad issues facing today's policy makers which also faced the New Dealers of the 1930s. Both groups had and have to address social and economic programs which deal with homelessness, with hunger, with joblessness, with big industry regulation and small business survival, with labor, with racism, with small and large farms, with the elderly, with Social Security, with migrant workers, with the problems of the middle class, with taxing and spending, with Presidential power in relation to Congress, with the nation's public infrastructure, with welfare, with urban problems, with discrimination against women, with the problems of youth. Certainly some problems today are at least more visible---abortion, high technology-related issues, problems related to the shift from a manufacturing to a service and information-based economy,
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Approximate Word count = 1282
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)