Reading Response to Alexander Hamilton

President Franklin D. Roosevelt introduced The New Deal after the Great Depression left the United States economy in a dreary state. The programs brought by the New Deal were implemented over a span of five years, from 1933 to 1938. The new deal consisted f many things, including bank, labor, and relief forms. Within The New Deal, Roosevelt introduced the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). TVA was introduced to provide navigation, flood control, power production, fertilizer manufacturing, and general economic development in the Tennessee Valley. Overall, the New Deal did not live up to the hopes that it gave American citizens.

One of the things that TVA contributed to helping is it becoming a job providing agency (Clayton 1). Also, “TVA has dealt with the Negro more justly than possibly any other one of the New Deal Acts” (Clayton 1). The South has the reputation of employ blacks, but according to Clayton, TVA has completely thrown black out of the working population. He claims they are “employing Negros according to their proportion of the total population and in all cases are paying them the same wages that whites receive for doing the same work” (Clayton 1). Marginal workers, like unskilled blacks, desperately needed an expanding economy to create more jobs. Yet, New Deal policies made it harder for employers to hire people. FDR tripled federal taxes between 1933 and 1940.

Overall, the New Deal was not entirely a success to the American citizens. The New Deal did not eliminate unemployment, did not eliminate poverty, and did not fulfill many of the other promises it listed. In multiple letters written to advisors of the government, citizens describe their working conditions to be worse off than before the New Deal was established. J.G. writes, “We work, ten hours a day for six days. In the grime and dirt of a nation” (Reading the American Past 170).  In one sense, Americans felt that those who had come to rely on the New Deal were being conned as all the evidence pointed to the fact that at some time in the near future, they were likely to be made unemployed once again.