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The Great Depression and The New Deal

T.H. Watkins, in his book The Great Depression: America in the 1930s, argues that the programs of President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, created as a result of the Depression, played a major role in advancing democracy and humane government. This study will argue that Watkins is correct in this assessment and in further declaring that the continuation of the intentions of the New Deal philosophy will mean that "we will have gone a long way toward honoring our own obligation to the future" (349). Watkins' argument favoring the New Deal and its heritage is particularly relevant today with the Republican-controlled Congress calling for massive cuts in social programs which are directly or indirectly the spawn of 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-American foundry worker in Detroit . . . who now found his job vanished. Fear shattered all the . . . certitudes of the . . . farm wife who watched black clouds of dust

. . . and knew that her dreams would soon be sucked up into that boiling mass (13).

These people might have had access to charity food lines, but the New Deal could not help them recover their dreams, their jobs, their farms, their small businesses. As Watkins writes, "The relief progr...

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The Great Depression and The New Deal. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 19:27, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1681197.html