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Black Tuesday Dbq

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Imagine being in charge of a nation that has so little money families are splitting up in search of work and many are losing their jobs and becoming homeless. This was the situation President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was facing at the beginning of the 1930s. He and his administration had to come up with a plan to end the depression and rebuild the economy before the fragile country crumbled even more. While some of their responses to the American Great Depression were more effective than others, they all impacted the nation in a positive way and changed the role of the federal government for the better.

The source of the Great Depression came from the stock market crash of October 29, 1929, better known as Black Tuesday. Before the crash, …show more content…

Families had to split up in search for work and many children got jobs to make extra money for their families. In 1933, when Roosevelt took office, “24.9% of the total workforce or 12,830,000 people were unemployed” according to the FDR Library. This statistic shows just how much the average American was struggling to keep themselves and their families afloat. The FDR Library also states that “drastic drops in farm commodity prices resulted in farmers losing their lands and homes due to foreclosure” and that “gangs of unemployed youth, whose families could no longer support them, rode the rails as hobos in search of work.” The previous excerpts depict America’s loss of stability because the people providing food were out of jobs and parents had to send their children away since they could not afford to care for them any further. Thankfully, President Roosevelt and his administration stepped in soon afterward to correct the …show more content…

Some of the tactics used were implementing the New Deal, establishing alphabet agencies and taking a banking holiday. Roosevelt’s New Deal was put in place to help with economic recovery and have the federal government take on a larger role. Most of the reform that the New Deal promised to bring about occurred within Roosevelt’s first hundred days in office. He first established alphabet agencies which were an eventual forty-three acts that helped alleviate the pressure of the economic setback as stated by britannica.com. The president also declared a “Banking Holiday” which closed all banks across the nation and allowed President Roosevelt to restructure, reorganize, and reopen the banks when they were satisfactory. “During this period, Roosevelt presented the new Congress with the Emergency Banking Act. This law empowered the president to reopen banks that were solvent and assist those that were not” (ushistory.org). These programs were very helpful in the efforts to relieve the burden of the Great

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