The Great Depression and the New Deal

In 1933, in his first inaugural address, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared, … the only thing we have to fear is fear itself… Yet, Roosevelt knew that the fear he spoke of was grounded in reality. With one-third of the nation’s workforce unemployed, grown men scrounged in garbage cans for discarded scraps to feed their families. Six thousand street-corner apple vendors sold their product in New York City alone. Fear, indeed, stocked the land of the 1930s during Great Depression a defining event of 20th-century America. With the introduction of Roosevelt’s New Deal, many families found relief through public works projects and other government-funded posts. The Great Depression and the New Deal describes how the nation coped and how it overcame a true national calamity.