In ten years it transformed the country and restored our faith in the ability of government to serve the people. National output had fallen by one-third from to and thousands of banks had collapsed, taking households savings with them. The New Deal stabilized the banks and cleaned up the financial mess left over from the Stock Market crash, allowing credit to flow again. It stabilized farm prices, aided state and local governments, and injected a surge of federal spending into the economy that bolstered household incomes and business revenues.
By , one in four Americans was out of work by one in three in the private sector — roughly 15 million workers. The New Deal created a multitude of agencies that provided over 10 million jobs for the unemployed, whose wages saved millions of families from destitution.
The rights of workers to organize was recognized, leading to a huge surge in union membership and rising wages, and a federal minimum wage was introduced. A woman in ragged clothing holds a baby as two more children huddle close, hiding their faces behind her shoulders. The mother squints into the distance, one hand lifted to her mouth and anxiety etched deep in the lines on One monster dust storm reached the Atlantic Ocean.
For five hours, a fog of prairie dirt enshrouded Eight decades ago hordes of migrants poured into California in search of a place to live and work. Since the late s, conventional wisdom has held that President Franklin D. The series of social and government spending programs did get millions of Americans back to work on hundreds of public When confronted by the crisis of the Great Depression, the American president knew that doing nothing was not an option.
Live TV. This Day In History. History Vault. New Deal for the American People. Recommended for you. New Deal Programs. Artists of the New Deal. The SEC also provides information to help you invest through Investor. It has a section on How to Select a Broker. When a bank fails, the FDIC steps in. It sells the bank to another one and transfers the depositors to the purchasing bank.
The transition is seamless from the customer's point of view. Collin College. Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum. History News Network. Federal Reserve History. History Learning Site. National Park Service. W University Libraries, University of Washington. Farm Credit Administration. Freedom School. The University of Chicago Press Journals.
National Archives. Department of Economics, Iowa State University. Securities and Exchange Commission. Justice Information Sharing. National Labor Relations Board. The Fair Housing Center. Internet Archive Wayback Machine. Digital Public Library of America. Miller Center, University of Virginia. Roosevelt: Domestic Affairs. Department of Labor. Seeking Alpha. Sacred Heart University. Bureau of Economic Analysis. Treasury Direct. Roosevelt Forward. Consortium News. National Bureau of Economic Research.
Business Cycle Expansions and Contractions. Office of Management and Budget. Accessed May 9, Bureau of Labor Statistics. Office of the Historian. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. Department of Health and Human Services. Securities and Exchange Commission, Investor. Federal Deposit Insurance. It just provided the capital and the technical support, empowering Americans to get together and take control of their local economy. Their work made possible the modernization of the American farm and farmhouse, which in turn made it possible for rural America to buy electrical goods from private companies.
They also returned a modest profit to the RFC. Most small businesses, then and now, are imitative rather than innovative. That is fine. Small business can replicate best practices rapidly through the economy, which is exactly what happened in rural America. Installment lenders stepped in to provide new services, and even the electrical utility companies began to string lines out into the country.
As late as , 90 percent of rural homes had no electricity. By , 40 percent of rural America had electricity—a rise of 30 percent in only a few years. Ten years later, in , 90 percent had electricity. Housing filled a social need, and rural electrification enabled country folk to buy electrical goods. But to really get the economy on a sounder footing, New Dealers would have to encourage investment in new industries, an imperative that dovetailed with the need to prepare for war with the Nazis.
While it is now conventional wisdom that World War II ended the Depression, amateur historians rarely consider the contrary example of World War I, which brought not prosperity but ruin.
The disparity lies in the fact that, in World War I, firms invested their own capital to expand weaponry production, only to confront the collapse of demand a year and a half later with the armistice. Manufacturers were left with overflowing inventory and a demilitarized America.
In the run-up to World War II, private companies were not going to get suckered again. The government, for its part, did not want to spend billions of dollars on state-owned weapons factories, which smacked of the fascism they sought to fight. Besides, they needed those billions to buy the guns and pay the soldiers.
Somehow, however, the country had to prepare itself, and to develop advances in aerospace in particular—still a new sector but of increasingly obvious utility for the war effort. So the RFC did for planes and other instruments of war what it had done for houses and electrification: It created channels for capital investment through the Defense Plant Corporation DPC. Like Jones, the people behind the DPC were not ideologues but practical men and women from both management and labor.
William Knudsen, the president of General Motors, who had helped organize the first Ford production line, was there. The president of a major railroad, the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad, Ralph Budd was on the committee too, as well as a vice-president of Sears, Roebuck.
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