Relief programs during depression

They were not meant to replace private production and work relief pay was designed to be below market wage rates to encourage workers to seek private employment.

There are another set of programs that have not received as much historical attention. These grants were also used largely to employ workers, but the focus was less on hiring the unemployed and more on building large-scale projects like dams, roads, schools, sanitation facilities, and other forms of civil infrastructure.

Public works projects paid substantially better wages than the relief projects, were freer to hire a broader class of skilled workers, and were required to hire only a proportion of people from the relief rolls. Measuring the Success of the Programs How successful were the public works and relief programs at achieving their goals? On their face they were wildly successful.

Millions of unemployed people were put to work. Large numbers of roads, buildings, post offices, and public works built in the s can be found in every county in America. There is another counterfactual standard against which these projects should be measured. The mother, usually so busy in a home, stares despondently out of the painting.

She is not doing housework, perhaps because she has little to work with in her sparse surroundings. The father looks at the visitor and holds one hand to his chin. As the traditional family provider, his hands are strangely idle. The visitor, still in her coat and hat, leans towards the father as though listening to him, as she writes on a sheet of paper. The heaviness of her posture and expression suggest that she is burdened by sadness or despair.

The artist himself was on a relief program and he could appreciate the stresses of many of his fellow Americans who needed government assistance in order to survive the Great Depression.

Applying for aid was considered a last resort and a humiliating experience. As part of the process, a case worker would come and inspect a home to ensure that the people living there were truly poor enough to qualify for help.

She completes her paperwork at an empty table, indicating that the family has no food or drink to share with her. Case workers, whose jobs were also part of the aid program, faced the desperate situations of fellow citizens time and again. This painting, completed nearly nine years after initial stock market crash, shows the demoralizing, helpless position that was so common amongst Americans at this time. How would an infrastructure project such as building a dam impact Americans in their everyday lives?

Directly in the center of this three-panel, monumental mural is a section of an enormous pipe being hoisted above a canyon. A man on top of it directs his co-workers, who include a surveyor and an engineer scrutinizing blueprints for the project.

In the left panel, bravely positioned on the steep, jagged edges of the canyon, men operate air drills. At the right, six men balance themselves on a large steel buttress. The artist, William Gropper, emphasized teamwork and physical courage by depicting three separate groups of workers, who labor under the oppressive heat of a southwestern sun. The landscape is rocky and dry; in the background a mountain looms. The image flows across the three-part work, a sun-lit tribute to the American worker as a hero.

Gropper deliberately romanticized the scene, showing the men smiling as they put innovative technologies to use to harness the enormous potential power of the water. In the new, industrialized America, he seems to say, technology can conquer anything. Gropper organized the composition in three parts to accommodate a second-floor lobby wall divided by two marble pilasters.

Each scene represents different phases of construction to show the drama, danger, and massive scale of the dam projects overseen by the government. The depicted Grand Coulee Dam was an inspiring feat of twentieth century engineering. It bettered the lives of millions of people by providing them with electrical power and irrigation for their crops. The dam itself is hardly visible in this mural because Gropper wanted to emphasize the American workers who made it possible; he paid tribute to the courage and strength of the laborers and the country recovered from economic disaster thanks to President Franklin D.

The first rumblings of disaster were heard in September — stock prices fell, then quickly recovered. The following Tuesday, 16,, shares changed hands. For two weeks, stock prices continued to fall, and by mid-November, roughly one-third of the value of stocks listed in September was lost. It was becoming clear that recovery would be neither swift nor easy, and that company promises of wages and pensions had been ephemeral.

In reaction to the stock market crash , President Herbert Hoover met with business leaders during the winter of and During the s, banks failed at a rate of more than per year. In the first ten months of , America saw bank closures; during the last two months of the year, sixty more, many of them woefully undercapitalized to begin with, closed their doors. Tens of thousands of unemployed lined up at soup kitchens, rode the rails in every direction of the compass hoping to find work, or hitchhiked wherever the roads might take them.

By early , more than ten million Americans were unemployed. Industries such as steel and automobiles which had flourished during the World War I years and fueled the economic boom of the s now came to a virtual halt — the unemployment rate for these industries was as high as fifty percent. Those who held their jobs took shorter hours or reduced wages. Unfortunately President Hoover failed the grasp the direness of the economic crisis and as a result, he was blamed by many Americans for failing to leverage the power of the American government to address the problem.

As such, he was soundly defeated for re-election in by Franklin D. President Franklin D. Following this, the Federal Emergency Relief Act FERA was put into effect on May 12, , allotting million dollars to give relief to the states, who could then help their citizens who were in need. Infrastructure and conservation work were also a part of FERA. Two hundred thousand young men put to work on conservation and construction projects, projects improving bridges, roads, and sewers, and refurbishing schools and hospitals.

A great part of its success was the understanding that the money distributed was not relief but wages. The heroic and powerful nature of this depiction of the construction of the Grand Coulee Dam were meant to inspire fellow American and provide them hope in a time of uncertainty. The sheer size of the Grand Coulee makes it both a monument and a metaphor.

It is one of the largest concrete structures in the world, with 12 million cubic yards of concrete — enough to pave a transcontinental highway. It is feet tall from top to foundation, though not quite as tall as another famed public-works colossus, the foot-tall Hoover Dam.

It will light homes and stores in towns and cities. Some 5, banks failed between and , and what that meant was that everyone's savings in those banks went poof. He shut down the national system of banking and when it reopened the federal government began insuring savings in banks and even became a shareholder in many banks to ensure they had enough capital on hand to resume regular operations. Another stat that gets at the scale of the crisis: Around 1, cities and counties went bankrupt during these years.

Charitable approaches to poverty and hunger just were devastated. One of the really poignant stories from the era was in Detroit, where they decided that they could no longer run the zoo, so all the edible animals were killed to provide for the hungry.

The scale boggles the mind today. All this expressed a real appetite for bold policy change and a tolerance for stumbles. We got a bailout and Obamacare, which is significant certainly but not the kind of paradigm shifting policies that the New Deal brought. The depression started in , and Hoover had a lot of runway ahead of him.

There is a real opportunity to have a change of administration. Certainly Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren were campaigning on such ideas and they were resonating. One major challenge facing any sustained agenda today is how short our news and political cycles are and how quickly people sour on agendas.

The question would be how to sustain something like this. In this regard, one of the real strengths of the New Deal was it harnessed the self-interest of members of Congress. Develop and improve products. List of Partners vendors. Share Flipboard Email. By Martin Kelly Martin Kelly. Martin Kelly, M. Learn about our Editorial Process. Featured Video. Cite this Article Format. Kelly, Martin.

Top 10 New Deal Programs of the s. What Is Fiscal Policy? Definition and Examples. The First 30 Days of the George W. Bush Presidency. A Short History of the Great Depression. History of Government Involvement in the American Economy. Reconstruction Finance Corporation: Definition and Legacy. The Story of the Great Depression in Photos.

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