of President Roosevelt did not come into being all at once but instead came in waves. The first New Deal extended from 1933 to 1935 and offered recovery from the Depression and relief for the poor and unemployed. Roosevelt was responding to a clear need, but to do this he tested a number of programs to find what would work. He believed in economic planning and government spending to help the poor, and the changes he made were conservative because he could have done much more and used the crisis as an excuse to promote socialism or to nationalize the banks.
The changes Roosevelt made would be far-reaching, and he would encounter increasing opposition as time passed because both institutions and groups tend to resist change, especially change that is seen as too rapid or too wide-ranging. What is called the Second New Deal came in 1935 as Roosevelt moved toward the goals of social reform and social justice while also abandoning attempts to cooperate with the business community, again responding to a perception of crisis rather than to group pressure.
The New Deal tried to alleviate the problems of the Great Depression in several different ways. Roosevelt believed that one of the reasons why the Depression was as bad as it was came from the fact that people had lost confidence in the government and the economy. Roosevelt wanted to restore confidence in the banks and other financial institutions. Roosevelt saw the problem as a kind of war and wanted the government to fight back to change the situation. He talked to the people on the radio so that he could tell them that he was doing something about the problem and so that he could assure them that they had to have more confidence in the banks. Different bills he sent to Congress tried to correct different problems for different industries. He had an agricultural bill that would help farmers who needed to buy supplies so they could continue to do their work. He also prov...