Question

a. The first part of the New Deal was also about reform. Did the reforms succeed?

b. Did the New Deal end the Great Depression?

c. What New Deal programs do we still have today? How do they affect our lives? Are they successes?

d. The first part of the New Deal was about relief. Did these relief efforts succeed?

Answer 1

Prior to the New Deal almost all public social welfare spending, or what
contemporaries called “relief,” was provided by local governments. The
administration of local public relief had long been associated with patronage,
political manipulation, and corruption. Between 1933 and 1940, federal,
state, and local governments combined to spend $2 billion per year to
provide relief to at least 2 million cases (families) per month. In 1933, when
unemployment reached 25 percent, the federal government introduced a
relief program redistributing 4 percent of gross national product (GNP) to
a quarter of all the nation’s families. The possibility of providing cash payments
to a quarter of the nation’s families offered an opportunity for corruption
unique in the nation’s history. Surprisingly, however, while the administration
of public relief was widely regarded as corrupt before 1933,
the modern federal/state public welfare system that developed out of the
New Deal reforms is often castigated as bureaucratic, but rarely corrupt.
What changed? How did the country enter the Depression with a public
welfare system riddled with political manipulation and emerge with one
that was not?
Our answer is straightforward. The president, Franklin Roosevelt, and
other members of the executive branch gained little or nothing from the
kinds of local corruption involved in public relief.