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The Good and Bad of Roosevelt's New Deal Essay

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The Good and Bad of Roosevelt's New Deal The era of the Great Depression was by far the worst shape the United States had ever been in, both economically and physically. Franklin Roosevelt was elected in 1932 and began to bring relief with his New Deal. In his first 100 days as President, sixteen pieces of legislation were passed by Congress, the most to be passed in a short amount of time. Roosevelt was re-elected twice, and quickly gained the trust of the American people. Many of the New Deal policies helped the United States economy greatly, but some did not. One particularly contradictory act was the Agricultural Adjustment Act, which was later declared unconstitutional by Congress. Many things also stayed very consistent in …show more content…

In retrospect, farmers found themselves worse off because the National Recovery Administration had been very successful in forcing up prices that consumers, including farmers had to pay for manufactured goods. Unfortunately, massive government intervention in agriculture never went away. Another one of the New Deal's contradictory reforms was the National Industrial Recovery Act. The principle was to establish minimum wages and prices and general labor regulations. On one hand, it sought to keep wage rates high and give the consumer greater purchasing power. On the other hand, it established hundreds of legally sanctioned industry-wide cartels that were allowed to establish standard wages, hours of operation and minimum prices on their own terms. The minimum prices meant that businesses would be prevented from underselling each other. The artificially high wages also meant that unemployment would continue to rise. High prices for goods were not the right path to take since the United States economy was in the biggest depression it had ever seen. In 1935, the Supreme Court declared the NRA unconstitutional, on the grounds that the United States government had no right to regulate intrastate commerce, since it was a power usually granted to state governments. To replace parts of the NRA, Congress passed the National Labor Relations Board and

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