Rugged Individualism And The Great Depression

In 1929, short term problems such as the stock market crash and the banks not not having any money to loan out, caused the Great Depression. There were also long term causes. Farms were overproducing, and because of the mass production, the prices lowered. Farmers did not make as much money and they could not take loans from the bank because the banks had no money to loan after losing it all. The Great Depression put many people out of work, without a home and without money to put food on the table. President Herbert Hoover was elected in 1928, winning by promising to end national hunger. A year after his election, the Great Depression began. Hoover’s approach was the “wait and see” approach. He thought that the economy had natural …show more content…
He also believed in voluntary cooperation and rugged individualism. Voluntary cooperation was the idea that people, businesses and the government should voluntarily help each other out. Rugged individualism is the belief that people succeed from their own efforts and if they fail it is their own fault. This caused a long drawn out depression because the government was taking no action towards ending it. Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) got elected in 1932, beating Hoover. He believed in relief, reform and recovery, the steps to end the Depression. To do this, he created the New Deal, a collection of things the government would do to help get out of the depression, for example, Social Security or the National Youth Administration. Although the New Deal did not go as far as it should have and cover minorities, but it was a success because it provided relief and helped to end the …show more content…
Programs such as the National Youth Association (NYA), the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the Social Security Act (SSA). The first source, Document 1 talks about how beneficial the NYA is. The NYA helped boost family incomes by helping teenagers make money, get a job and stay in school. It gave teenagers a chance to earn some money for the family and tasks were getting done because they were doing these jobs. The WPA provided money for hungry, underprivileged children. It provided 80,000,00 meals in a year in a half in schools to keep children nourished. For some children, it was their only meal of the day. As well as keeping children fed, the WPA also hired women in need of jobs to provide the meals. Document 8 describes the SSA, which gave seniors a monthly check. Many were helped to have a better life all around. The SSA gave seniors the chance to retire while still making money which opened up the jobs for the young and the middle aged. These programs helped greatly in the healing of the Great