Recovery, Relief & Reform

The need for action in response to the Great Depression was urgent, and in 1932 president Franklin Delano Roosevelt set to work at an unprecedented pace. The new Congress was Democrat dominated in both houses, and was eager to enact almost anything the president wanted in the following “Hundred Days” (between March 9 and June 16), with virtually no opposition to the president’s program. Roosevelt’s program often seemed a hodgepodge of conflicting tendencies. Some of this was for political reasons, but much of it reflected Roosevelt’s own mind and its unsystematic, unideological, and episodic way of proceeding. In any event, certain concrete and immediate problems needed addressing. First and foremost, there was the banking system, the ultimate financial infrastructure in a capitalist economy, which was teetering on the brink of collapse.