Professor Christopher Staaf
HIST 2112-17
30 November 2015
D2L Assignment 1 (Second Half) I agree with the New Dealers in their battle to successfully implement their programs that would have never been given a chance if it weren’t for the Great Depression. The New Deal had been put under a lot of scrutiny but New Dealers were right to try bold new moves to fix the economy because it had numerous successful programs, some of which are still in use today that have positively helped the economy. One of FDR’s first moves were a four-day bank holiday in order to stop people from withdrawing all their money from banks. On March 9, Congress passed Roosevelt’s program called the Emergency Banking Act, which reorganized the banks and closed the ones that were bankrupt. A couple of days later in FDR’s first “fireside chat”, he pressed that Americans put their savings back in the banks, and about a month later 75% of them had reopened. Another successful program is the the Tennessee Valley Authority Act in 1933 which enabled the federal government to create dams that controlled flooding and generated inexpensive …show more content…
The SS program guaranteed pensions to millions of Americans, set up a system of unemployment insurance and stated that the federal government would help care for dependent children and the disabled. The largest and probably most ambitious New Deal Agency created was the Works Progress Administration (WPA) created by Harry Hopkins which employed millions of unemployed Americans and took people with skills and talents and gave them contracts to get paid for using those skills so they don’t go to waste. These contracts mainly included public works projects, such as the construction of public buildings and roads and on a smaller scale it included musicians, artists, writers, actors, and