New Deal facts for kids
The New Deal was a series of programs, public work projects, financial reforms, and regulations enacted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the United States of America between 1933 and 1939. Major federal programs and agencies included the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), the Civil Works Administration (CWA), the Farm Security Administration (FSA), the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 (NIRA) and the Social Security Administration (SSA). They provided support for farmers, the unemployed, youth, and the elderly. The New Deal included new constraints and safeguards on the banking industry and efforts to re-inflate the economy after prices had fallen sharply. New Deal programs included both laws passed by Congress as well as presidential executive orders during the first term of the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
The programs focused on what historians refer to as the "3 R's": relief for the unemployed and for the poor, recovery of the economy back to normal levels, and reform of the financial system to prevent a repeat depression. The New Deal produced a political realignment, making the Democratic Party the majority (as well as the party that held the White House for seven out of the nine presidential terms from 1933 to 1969) with its base in progressive ideas, the South, big city machines and the newly empowered labor unions, and various ethnic groups. The Republicans were split, with progressive Republicans in support but conservatives opposing the entire New Deal as hostile to business and economic growth. The realignment crystallized into the New Deal coalition that dominated presidential elections into the 1960s while the opposing conservative coalition largely controlled Congress in domestic affairs from 1937 to 1964.
Images for kids
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1935 cartoon by Vaughn Shoemaker in which he parodied the New Deal as a card game with alphabetical agencies
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Crowd at New York's American Union Bank during a bank run early in the Great Depression
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Roosevelt's ebullient public personality, conveyed through his declaration that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself" and his "fireside chats" on the radio did a great deal to help restore the nation's confidence
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Pumping water by hand from the sole water supply in this section of Wilder, Tennessee (Tennessee Valley Authority, 1942)
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National Recovery Administration Blue Eagle
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A poster publicizing Social Security benefits
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Female factory workers in 1942, Long Beach, California
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National debt as gross national product climbs from 20% to 40% under President Herbert Hoover; levels off under Roosevelt; and soars during World War II from Historical States US (1976)
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Anti-relief protest sign near Davenport, Iowa by Arthur Rothstein, 1940
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WPA employed 2 to 3 million unemployed at unskilled labor
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Francis Perkins looks on as Roosevelt signs the National Labor Relations Act
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The federal government commissioned a series of public murals from the artists it employed: William Gropper's Construction of a Dam (1939) is characteristic of much of the art of the 1930s, with workers seen in heroic poses, laboring in unison to complete a great public project
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"Created Equal": Act I, Scene 3 of Spirit of 1776, Boston (Federal Theatre Project, 1935)
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The WPA hired unemployed teachers to provide free adult education programs
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Surplus Commodities Program, 1936
See also
In Spanish: New Deal para niños
