Historian's View of Franklin D. Roosevelt & New Deal
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Historians take different approaches to the same material, bringing to their subject their own experience, interests, and special knowledge, as well as their own ability to pull ideas together and draw conclusions. The portrayal of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in William E. Leuchtenburg's book Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal is one historian's view of Roosevelt and a period in history. Roosevelt was president at a time of crisis, and he responded with the New Deal as a way of coping with the problems of the Great Depression. The New Deal has become a mythic beast in American political thought, praised by some as the process which solved the Great Depression, while others see it as a problematic program that outlived its usefulness and changed the way government relates to the people in a detrimental way. David Hackett Fischer points out that the role of the historian is to be useful, something he says many historians are not because they are not professional enough and are not historians enough: "If they are to be useful as historians, then they must do so by the refinement of their professional discipline and not by its dilution" (Hackett 315). The historian helps people understand the past, foresee the future, know who they are, refine their knowledge, and teach them how to think historically. Leuchtenburg seeks to accomplish these tasks, and he explains his position in the preface to his book, noting first that the Great Depression "was one of the turning point
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r less severely, but, taken together, the forces unleashed would collide over the decade of the 1930s to produce political as well as economic dislocation and tension.
The Great Depression started with the stock market crash in 1929. This came after a period of massive buying of stocks as people rushed to get in on the perceived economic boom of the late 1920s, a boom that proved illusory: "The stock market crash of 1929, which marked the beginning of the Great Depression of the United States, came directly from wild speculation which collapsed and brought the whole economy down with it" (Zinn 377).
Hoover was unable to cope with the effects of the Depression and was, in any case, blamed by many for the crash itself. Hoover's inability to cope is evident in Leuchtenburg's account of Hoover using armed force against American veterans, the Bonus Army that had marched on Washington: "Hoover's use of armed force against American veterans raised a storm of protest" (Leuchtenburg 15).
At the lowest point in the Depression in 1932, between 13 million and 15 million Americans were unemployed in a population of 130 million. At least that many more people were working on short time, and wages had dropped steeply. Agricultural dis
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Approximate Word count = 1603
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)
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