THE NEW DEAL: ACCOMPLISHMENTS AND FAILURES Allan M. Winkler Distinguished Professor of History Miami University Oxford, Ohio Testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs March 31, 2009 The New Deal was a response to the worst economic crisis in American history. As the United States suffered from the ravages of the Great Depression, the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt, which took office in March 1933, tried a host of different, often contradictory measures in an aggressive effort to provide relief for the unemployed, to prompt the recovery of the faltering economic system, and to propose the kind of structural reform that could protect people in future crises. But the New Deal was never a coherent, interconnected effort to deal with the various dimensions of the Depression in a systematic way. Rather it was a multi-faceted attmept to deal with different elements of the catastrophe in ways that sometimes seemed haphazard and occasionally were contradictory. On balance, though, the New Deal enjoyed some notable accomplishments, even if it failed to promote full-scale economic recovery. The Great Depression was an economic disaster. While the stock market crash of 1929 need not have precipitated a depression, structural weaknesses in the economy, unbridled speculation in financial markets, and lack of regulation on Wall Street led to an unprecedented economic calamity that soon affected the entire world economy. In the United States, unemployment was the chief symptom of the depression, and by the time FDR took office there were approximately 13 million people unemployed – fully one quarter of the working population – with another quarter underemployed. In some cities, unemployment reached 75 percent.
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