An Open Letter To Rex Tugwell Analysis

The two documents, An Open Letter to Rex Tugwell by Tom Burke and Letter from Mr. and Mrs. W. L. Hannon to Eleanor Roosevelt, both discuss the experiences that were encountered by two families from two different programs from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. The document An Open Letter to Rex Tugwell talks about the problems faced by former sharecroppers in Alabama associated with the Resettlement Administration in 1934. The other talks about the success experienced by farmers in Kansas in 1939 by the Farm Security Administration, which is the successor to the Resettlement Administration. The reason why these farmers’ experiences with the New Deal were so divergent could be due to the location of the farmers, the type of program they were using and …show more content…
The Great Depression was especially hard on farmers because they also experienced a drought and severe storms that killed their crops around the same time that the depression hit. They each depended on programs from the New Deal. However, the farmers associated with the Farm Security Administration had a much better experience than the ones with the Resettlement Administration since they received bailouts from the government while the others did not and were in danger of losing their house and livelihood. The reason why the famers in the two letters had different experiences with the New Deal could be due to the location of the farmers. The farmers that had a bad experience with the New Deal were located in the South while the ones that benefitted were in the Mid-West. The South suffered far worse from the Great Depression than other areas of the U.S. The south was also in a pretty bad shape long before the Great Depression hit due to the civil war, the depression only intensified their already bad