Although strongly intervening in the economic and political affairs of the country,

Roosevelts executive power was unable to fully recover the economic prosperity of past
years; his efforts only lessened the chaos and disaster initiated by the Great
Depression. In order to pull the country out of the Great Depression, President
Roosevelt signed the United States up into World War II.
Roosevelt fought the Great Depression with his New Deal. His plan consisted in
the creation of more than fifteen boards and associations dedicated to aid different
areas of the economy. In Document E, an example of these new boards is shown.
Among other organizations that Roosevelt created, one can find the American
Agricultural Association, which bought farmers surpluses to help them pay their
mortgages; and the National Recovery Administration, which helped banks to recover
and to secure their accounts. These, and several other associations provoked different
responses among the public.
Some people believed that Roosevelt was accelerating towards socialism and
communism (Document B) because despite his enormous support for the forgotten
man, he did little to encourage companies and businesses. Nevertheless, Roosevelt
policies never aimed to be communist, they simply created a new type of federal
government role in the U.S. As Document C remarks: it is evolution, not revolution. In
contrast with the presidents of the 1920s, Roosevelt changed the government to make it
more active when it came to help and support people during severe crisis, but, did his
New Deal work?
Although Roosevelts policies did low unemployment between 1932 and 1940,
his efforts were not enough to end the Great Depression. In his article The Hand of
Improvidence, Williams Lloyd addresses how Roosevelts programs had added six
billion dollars to the national debt, a quite impressive amount considering that his plans
changed the Depression but little. Desperate to create some change, Roosevelt even
planned to modify the Supreme Court when the justices denied again and again some
of his New Deals associations. What truly saved the country and Roosevelt from the
Depression was World War II.
The major problem during the Great Depression was unemployment. Roosevelt
tried to eradicate it through his National Labor Board, but as said before, the results
were not enough. When the war started, many new jobs appeared in several industries
in order to make the vital weapons that the country would need or lend. It is then, as
shown in Document J between the years of 1940 and 1945, that unemployment was
lowered to a pre-Great-Depression level.
Roosevelts New Deal, even when unable to end the Great Repression, certainly
provided some relief to those who had been forgotten on the streets. His actions took
the role of the federal government one step further, making it an active force that had to
relieve the large population of the United States without being pushed to such an
extreme (Document F) in which the balance of powers is lost.