The Three Major Programs Enacted During The New Deal To Address Crisis And Hardship

The Civilian Conservation Corps was a work relief program that was created as part of the New Deal to provide jobs for the unemployed single young men in 1933.

Part of the problem that was occurring in the 1930’s was the inability for poor families in hardship to feed every child. They would turn to the older boys in the family and tell them it was time to go and find a way to support themselves. As one can imagine this led to many young people in the country doing whatever it took to survive. They would go from city to city, jumping trains and working whatever small job they could.

The CCC program hired these young men and provided food, shelter and thirty dollars a month. In turn they would be put to work building trails in national parks, building new roads, constructing bridges and helping to build fire towers. This program ended up employing over 2. 5 million young men before it came to end around the Second World War. A lot of the trails and reservoirs that received focused attention by this program are still in use today.

Another program that was created to deal with the housing crisis taking place and provide relief after the Great Depression was the National Housing Act.

The program was designed to help those that had lost homes and whose credit had suffered or to those who were unable to purchase new homes. This was a reform program that had agencies developed that we still see in modern day America, known as the Federal Housing Administration (FHA). It was one of many programs that had a purpose to “not simply to end the immediate crisis of the Depression, but to make life less risky and more predictable, to temper for generations thereafter what FDR repeatedly called the "hazards and vicissitudes” of life. ” The Federal Housing Administration itself did not build homes, but rather it helped to insure long term mortgages and also created and defined home standards on a national level. The risk to insure a home dropped as more homes met these standards and consequently more mortgages were offered.

In turn, interest rates on home mortgages also dropped. “Before the New Deal, only about four Americans in ten lived in their own homes. Four decades after the New Deal, nearly two thirds of Americans lived in owner-occupied houses. ” Even today we can see the benefits of Americans being able to use this helpful program to obtain mortgages.

A program that is surprising to see still in action today is the Tennessee Valley Authority.

This program was the largest intervention in the South and was brought about because the income levels were so low in the South that President Roosevelt believed that they would drag down the whole of the U. S. economy.

Originally the plan was designed to help drought areas by creating a water and hydroelectric power plant, but once it was realized that the area was so poor that most people couldn’t even receive power, it “expanded to promote economic development, bring electricity to rural areas, restore fields worn out from overuse, and fight malaria. ” President Roosevelt wanted to give the poor southern people a chance to change and grow. Although the program ran into some environmental issues in its time, it is a program that worked for the long-term betterment of the region. While the early years of the TVA were challenging for southerners who did not want to relocate for the building of dams, or who didn’t understand the goal of economic improvement for the region, the agency did eventually see progress.

Drought thirsty soil was “replenished with fertilizer from TVA, and reforestation, protection of wildlife, and careful planning kept southern resources from being wasted. ” Dams provided protection from flooding and electricity was available for homes, farms and businesses at an affordable rate. All the building and designing of these electrical plants and dams provided thousands and thousands of people with jobs that hadn’t had the chance before of gaining financially. TVA workers even educated people on proper nutrition and helped contain the spread of malaria. The TVA is still working today to provide power to millions of people and has all different power plants; coal fired, nuclear, and hydroelectric. This is and was a New Deal plan that definitely provided a boost to the economics in the southern states.