It is important to note that the New Deal was comprised of regulatory changes, financial and economic reforms, public projects, and aid programs to overcome the effects of the Great Depression. There were both successes and failures of the New Deal, where the former included the Emergency Banking Act, the Civilian Conservation Corps CCC, the Federal Housing Administration FHA, and the Congress of Industrial Organizations CIO. Failures included the National Recovery Administration or NRA, the Public Works Administration or PWA, the Agricultural Adjustment Act or AAA, and minimum wage laws for women and children.
The Emergency Banking Act helped the threatened banking institutions to survive the collapsing impact of the Great Depression. It is stated that “these measures rescued the financial system and greatly increased the government’s power over it,” and “in 1936, not a single bank failed in the United States” (Foner 824). The second success was the Civilian Conservation Corps, which helped more than 3 million Americans (Foner 825). The third success was the Federal Housing Administration, which made it significantly cheap to purchase single-family houses (Foner 829). CIO was able to create unions in order to empower the working class against employers (Foner 831).
The major failure of the New Deal was the NRA and the National Industrial Recovery Act, which “produced neither economic recovery nor peace between employers and workers” (Foner 825). The second failure was PWA, which created an entire class of permanently government-dependent workers, which was subsequently resolved (Foner 826). The third failure was AAA, which did not benefit the majority of farmers but rather landowners (Foner 826). The fourth failure was the New Deal’s attempt to establish a minimum wage for children and women (Foner 830).
Work Cited
Foner, Eric. Give Me Liberty! An American History. Norton, 2020.