New Deal Program

The New Deal is the title President Franklin D. Roosevelt gave to a sequence of programs and promises he initiated between 1933 and 1938 with the goal of giving relief, reform and recovery to the people and economy of the United States during the Great Depression. Dozens of government agencies were created as a result of the New Deal. Opponents of the New Deal, complaining of the cost and increase in federal power, ended its expansion by 1937 and abolished many of its programs by 1943. The Supreme Court of the United States ruled several programs unconstitutional. There are several New Deal programs still in operation, some of which still exist under their original names, including the FDIC, the FHA, and the TVA. The largest programs still in existence today are Social Security and the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Reasons for the New Deal programs.

On October 24, 1929, the initial crash of the U.S. stock market, known as Wall Street Crash of 1929, set off a worldwide downward spiral in every part of the globe. Then, on Tuesday October 29, the stock market fell even more than it had on October 24. This day is known as Black Tuesday. Roosevelt entered office with no single ideology or plan for dealing with the depression. He was willing to try anything, and, indeed, in the First New Deal virtually every organized gained much of what they demanded. This First New Deal thus was self-contradictory, pragmatic, and experimental. The economy eventually recovered from the deep pit of 1932, and started heading upward again until 1937, when the Recession of 1937 sent the economy back to 1934 levels of unemployment. Whether the New Deal was responsible for the recovery, or whether it even slowed the recovery, is a subject of debate.