New Deal: What Worked, What Didn't

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.