The New Deal (1933 - 1938)

The New Deal is the title President Franklin D. Roosevelt gave to a sequence of programs and promises he initiated between 1933 and 1938 with the goal of giving relief, reform and recovery to the people and economy of the United States during the Great Depression.

Dozens of alphabet agencies (so named because of their acronyms, as with the SEC), were created as a result of the New Deal. Historians distinguish between the "First New Deal" of 1933, which had aimed at short-term recovery programs for all groups in society, and the "Second New Deal" (1935–36), which aimed at a more radical redistribution of power away from business and toward workers, farmers and consumers.

Historian William Leuchtenburg concludes the Second New Deal was designed not to destroy capitalism but to "discipline business" and "bolster unionisation, pension the elderly...give relief to the needy, and extend a hand to the forgotten man."[1]

The following Crash Course video provides an overview of this period: