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Welcome to FloridaStudents.org, your source for Student Tutorials and Resources. This website is freely available to Florida public schools and login is integrated with all districts. Inside this website you will find resources to support your learning in language arts, mathematics, science, civics, and U.S. History.

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President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Inaugural Address

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President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Inaugural Address

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Crash Course Questionnaire: The Depression.

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Crash Course Questionnaire: The Depression.

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How does the stock market work - Oliver Elfenbaum

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Review Video of the Great Depression and New Deal

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Review Video of the Great Depression and New Deal

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GCSE History | Depression and the New Deal - USA 1929-1941

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So what did Hoover do? Not enough. It's important to remember that the American government is not just the President. Hoover couldn't always get Congress to do what he wanted but his political ineptitude was not particularly surprising, because the first elected office that he ever held in his life was President of the United States.

Like, let's take the foreign debt issue. Hoover proposed a moratorium on intergovernmental debt payments and he actually got Congress to go along with it, but it wasn't enough, mainly because the central bankers in Europe and America refused to let go of the gold standard, which would have allowed the governments to devalue their currency and pump needed money into their economies.

And when Britain, rather heroically, I might add, did abandon the gold standard in 1931 and stopped payments in gold, the U.S. did not follow suit, which meant that world financial markets froze up even further. Like, this is a little bit complicated but if you and I have always used Cheetos as currency to exchange goods and services, and one day I announce that we can't really do that anymore because it doesn't give us the flexibility that we need to pull ourselves out of this deflationary spiral, if I don't also agree to abandon Cheetos then it's going to be a total disaster, which it was.

And then, even worse, the Fed raised its discount rate, making credit even harder to come by. By the end of 1931, 2294 American banks had failed - double the number that had gone under in 1930. Now, it's easy to criticize poor Herbert Hoover for not doing enough to stop the Great Depression, and he probably didn't do enough, but part of that is down to our knowledge of what happened afterward - the New Deal.

That Franklin Delano Roosevelt at least tried to do something about the Depression makes us forget that when Hoover was president, orthodox political and economic theory counselled in favor of doing nothing. And at least Hoover didn't follow the advice of his Treasury Secretary who, according to Hoover anyway, argued that the solution was to "liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate," which sounds like the worst milkshake ever.

Instead, Hoover believed that the best course of action was to "use the powers of government to cushion the situation", and in a White House meeting, he persuaded a large number of industrialists to agree to maintain wage rates. He also got the Federal Farm Board to support agricultural production and got congressional approval for 140 million dollars in new public works.

Overall, he nearly doubled the federal public works expenditure between 1929 and 1931, it just wasn't nearly enough. Because what Hoover didn't allow was for the federal government to take over the situation completely. He relied primarily on private businesses and state and local governments to stimulate the economy, and that was insufficient. It's not surprising when you consider that in 1929, federal expenditures accounted for 3% of our gross domestic product. Today, it's more like 20%.

So it was just really hard to imagine the federal government doing anything on such a large scale to address a national problem because it had never really done that much before. Hoover also hiked taxes as part of a plan to stabilize the banks by balancing the federal budget, providing confidence for foreign creditors and stopping them from buying American gold. This would support bonds and also keep the federal government out of competition with private borrowers. The Revenue Act of 1932 passed Congress but it didn't do much to stop the Depression. In fact, arguably, it made it worse.

And so, ultimately, this dire situation forced Hoover into a truly radical move. In January 1932, he and Congress created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which was basically a federal bailout program that borrowed money to provide emergency loans to banks, building and loan societies, railroads and agricultural corporations.

The problem was that by 1932, bailing out the banks wasn't enough, and the Great Depression started to take shape. By early 1932, well over 10 million people were out of work - 20% of the labor force. And in big cities the numbers were even worse, especially for people of color. Like in Chicago, 4% of the population was African-American, but they made up more than 16% of the unemployed.

Although Hoover famously claimed that no one starved, which was a little bit "let them eat cake-y", people did search trash cans for food and many Americans were forced to ask for relief. Hoover's response was to try to encourage private charity through the unfortunately acronymed President's Organization on Unemployment Relief, or POUR.

New York City's government relief programs rose from 9 million dollars in 1930 to 58 million in 1932 and private charitable giving did increase from 4.5 million to 21 million and that sounds great until you realize that the total of 79 million dollars that New York City spent on relief in 1932 was less than one month's lost wages for the 800 000 people who were unemployed.

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Nerdfighteria Wiki - The Great Depression: Crash Course US History #33

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So what did Hoover do? Not enough. It's important to remember that the American government is not just the President. Hoover couldn't always get Congress to do what he wanted but his political ineptitude was not particularly surprising, because the first elected office that he ever held in his life was President of the United States.

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Objective 5.2 -- The Depression Grips America

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Objective 5.3 -- Hoover's "Volunteerism"

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Objective 5.7 -- The Legacy of The New Deal

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A Picture is Worth a Hundred Words Activity

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A Picture is Worth a Hundred Words Activity

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A Picture Is Worth a Hundred Words Activity

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Roosevelt worried about people becoming dependent on relief handouts and preferred programs that created temporary jobs. One section of the NIRA created the Public Works Administration, which appropriated 33 billion dollars to build stuff like the Triborough Bridge (so much for a balanced budget). The Civil Works Administration launched in November 1933 and eventually employed 4 million people building bridges, schools and airports.

Government intervention reached its highest point, however, in the Tennessee Valley Authority. This program built a series of dams in the Tennessee River Valley to control floods, prevent deforestation and provide cheap electric power to people in rural counties in seven southern states. But despite all that sweet, sweet electricity, the TVA was really controversial because it put the government in direct competition with private companies.

Other than the NIRA, few acts were as contentious as the Agricultural Adjustment Act. The AAA basically gave the government the power to try to raise farm prices by setting production quotas and paying farmers to plant less food. This seemed ridiculous to the hungry Americans who watched as 6 million pigs were slaughtered and not made into bacon.

Wait, Stan, 6 million pigs? But bacon is good for me! Only property-owning farmers actually saw the benefits of the AAA so most African-American farmers who were tenants or sharecroppers continued to suffer. And the suffering was especially acute in Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas and Colorado where drought created the Dust Bowl.

All this direct government intervention in the economy was too much for the Supreme Court. In 1936, the court struck down the AAA in the U.S. v. Butler. Earlier, in the Schechter Poultry case, aka. the "sick chicken" case (finally a Supreme Court case with an interesting name); the court invalidated the NIRA because its regulations quote; "delegated legislative powers to the president and attempted to regulate local businesses that did not engage in interstate commerce." Thanks Thought Bubble.

So with the Supreme Court invalidating acts left and right, it looked like the New Deal was about to unravel. FDR responded by proposing a law that would allow him to appoint new Supreme Court justices if sitting justices reached the age of 70 and failed to retire. Now this was totally constitutional, you can go ahead and look at the Constitution if Nicolas Cage hasn't already swiped it, but it seemed like such a blatant power grab that Roosevelt's plan to "pack the court" brought on a huge backlash.

Stop everything; I've just been informed that Nicolas Cage stole the Declaration of Independence not the Constitution. I want to apologies to Nick Cage himself and also everyone involved in the National Treasure franchise, which is truly a national treasure.

Anyway, in the end the Supreme Court began upholding the New Deal laws, starting a new era of Supreme Court jurisprudence in which the government regulation of the economy was allowed under a very broad reading of the Commerce Clause. Because, really, isn't all commerce interstate commerce? I mean, if I go to Jimmy John's, don't I exit the state of hungry and enter the state of satisfied?

Thus began the second New Deal, shifting focus away from recovery and toward economic security. Two laws stand out for their far-reaching effects here. The National Labor Relations Act also called the Wagner Act, and the Social Security Act. The Wagner Act guaranteed workers the right to unionize and it created the National Labor Relations Board to hear disputes over unfair labor practices. In 1934 alone, there were more than 2,000 strikes, including one that involved 400,000 textile workers.

Oh, it's time for the Mystery Document? Man, I wish there were a union preventing me from getting electrocuted. The rules here are simple: I guess the author of the Mystery Document and I'm usually wrong and get shocked.

"Refusing to allow people to be paid less than a living wage preserves to us our own market, there is absolutely use in producing anything if you gradually reduce the number of people able to buy even the cheapest products. The only way to preserve our markets is an adequate wage."

Ugh.... I mean, you usually don't make it this easy but I'm gonna guess that it's Franklin Delano Roosevelt? *Buzzer* DANG IT!! Eleanor Roosevelt, Eleanor of course it was Eleanor. GAH!

The most important union during the 1930s was the Congress of Industrial Organizations, which set out to unionize entire industries like steal manufactures and automobile workers. In 1936 the United Autoworkers launched a new tactic called the sit down strike. Workers at the Fisher Body Plant in Flint Michigan simply stopped working, sat down, and occupied the plant.

Eventually GM agreed to negotiate and the UAW won. Union membership rose to 9 million people as quote "CIO unions helped to stabilize a chaotic employment situation and offered members a sense of dignity and freedom." That quote, by the way, is from our old buddy Eric Foner. I love you Foner.

And unions played an important role in shaping the ideology of the second New Deal because they insisted that the economic downturn had been caused by under consumption and that the best way to combat the depression was to raise workers' wages, so that they could buy lots of stuff.

The thinking went that if people experienced less economic insecurity they would spend more of their money; so there were wide spread calls for public housing and universal health insurance. And that brings us to the crowning achievement of the 2nd new deal, and/or the crowning achievement of its communist plot, the social security act of 1935.

Social security included unemployment insurance, aid to the disabled, aid to poor families with children, and of course retirement benefits. It was, and is, funded through payroll taxes rather than general revenue, and while state and local governments retained a lot of discretion over how benefits would be distributed, Social security still represented a transformation in the relationship between the federal government and American citizens.

Like before the new deal most Americans didn't expect the government to help them in times of economic distress. After the new deal the question was no longer IF the government should but HOW it should. For a while the US government under FDR embraced Keynesian economics, the idea that the government should spend money even if it means going into deficits in order to prop up demand, and this meant that the state was much more present in people's lives.I mean for some people that meant relief or social security checks; for others it meant a job with the most successful government employment program, the Works Progress Administration.

The WPA didn't just build post offices, it paid painters to make them beautiful with murals, it paid actors and writers to put together plays, and ultimately employed more than 3 million Americans until it ended in 1943. It also by the way, paid for lots of photographers to take amazing photographs, which we can show you for free because they are owned by the government; so I'm just going to keep talking about how great they are. Oh look at that one, that's a winner.

Okay, equally transformative, if less visually stimulating, was the change that the new deal brought to American politics. The popularity of FDR and his programs brought together urban progressives, who would have been republicans two decades earlier, with unionized workers, often immigrants, left wing intellectuals, urban Catholics, and Jews.

FDR also gained the support of middle class home owners and he brought African Americans into the Democratic Party. Who was left to be a republican Stan? I guess there weren't many, which is why FDR kept getting reelected, until, you know, he died. But fascinatingly one of the biggest and politically most important blocks in the new deal collation was white southerners, many of whom were extremely racist.

Democrats had dominated in the south since the end of reconstruction, you know, since the other party was the party of Lincoln. And although Southern Democrats who'd been in congress for so long became important legislative leaders. In fact, without them FDR never could have passed the New Deal laws. But southerners expected whites to dominate the government and the economy, and they insisted on the local administration of many New Deal programs. And that insured that the AAA and NLRA would exclude sharecroppers and tenant farmers and domestic servants, all of whom were disproportionately African American.

So did the New Deal end the depression? No, I mean by 1940 over 15% of the American workforce remained unemployed. But then again, when FDR took office in 1933 the unemployment rate was at 25%. Maybe the best evidence that government spending was working is that when FDR reduced subsidies to farms and the WPA in 1937, unemployment immediately jumped back up to almost 20%. And many economic historians believe that it's inaccurate to say that government spending failed to end the depression because in the end, at least according to a lot of economists, what brought the depression to an end was a massive government spending program called World War II.

So given that is the New Deal really that important? Yes, because first it changed the shape of the American Democratic Party, African Americans and union workers became reliable democratic votes. And secondly it changed our way of thinking, like liberalism in the 19th century meant limited government and free market economics, Roosevelt used the term to refer to a large active state that saw liberty as quote "greater security for the average man." And that idea that liberty is more closely linked to security, than it is to, like, freedom from government intervention, is still really important in the way we think about liberty today. No matter where they fall on the contemporary political spectrum, politicians are constantly talking about keeping Americans safe.

Also our tendency to associate the New Deal with FDR himself points to what Arthur Schlesinger the imperial presidency. That is, we tend to associate all government policy with the presidency. Like, after Jackson and Lincoln's presidencies Congress reasserted itself as the most important branch of the government. But that didn't happen after FDR, but above all that, the New Deal changed the expectations that Americans had of their government. Now when things go sour, we expect the government to do something. We'll give our last words today to Eric Foner, who never Foner-s it in. The New Deal quote "made the government an institution directly experienced in Americans' daily lives and directly concerned with their welfare." Thanks for watching, I'll see you next week.

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Nerdfighteria Wiki - The New Deal: Crash Course US History #34

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Roosevelt worried about people becoming dependent on relief handouts and preferred programs that created temporary jobs. One section of the NIRA created the Public Works Administration, which appropriated 33 billion dollars to build stuff like the Triborough Bridge (so much for a balanced budget).

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Crash Course Questionnaire: The New Deal

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Crash Course Questionnaire: The New Deal

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CONFIDENCE - 1933 Cartoon, with Oswald the Rabbit and President Franklin Roosevelt

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Mr. DeLo's The Great Depression and New Deal

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Mr. DeLo's The Great Depression and New Deal

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Life During the Great Depression Activity

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Life During the Great Depression Activity

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Surviving The Great Depression Simulation

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Surviving The Great Depression Simulation

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McGraw-Hill Reading Guides: The Great Depression Begins

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McGraw-Hill Reading Guides: The Great Depression Begins

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McGraw-Hill Reading Guides: The New Deal

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McGraw-Hill Reading Guides: The New Deal