The New Deal and the Great Depression

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The american project of 17 76 and 18 76 lives on, more or less, intact, but up dated and modified. The most common narrative about the new deal goes something like this: roosevelt's multi pronged response to the great depression held off the angriest potential responses from the American people. And by the time the war is won in tn, forty five, the idea that America was gravely threatened feels like a distant memory. So chengeri, hey, john, it seems fair, i think, and actually important, to say that the new deal brought some real change, you know, changes that made things better for a lot of people. I

The Great Depression presented a crisis not only for the U.S. economy, but for American democracy. President Franklin Roosevelt wanted to save the nation’s system of government, and its economic system, while reforming both. What did the New Deal achieve, and not achieve?

Reported and produced by John Biewen, with series collaborator Chenjerai Kumanyika. Interviews with Eric Rauchway and Cybelle Fox. The series editor is Loretta Williams.

Music by Algiers, John Erik Kaada, Eric Neveux, and Lucas Biewen. Music consulting and production help from Joe Augustine of Narrative Music.

Photo: Men fighting during a strike at the Ford Motor Company in Dearborn, Michigan, 1937. Image courtesy of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum.

As mentioned in the episode, an article by public historian Larry DeWitt examining the widespread assertion that the exclusion of some occupations from the original Social Security old-age pension program was insisted on by southern segregationists: https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v70n4/v70n4p49.html