Question

Considering what Roosevelt and the New Deal have and have not done for African Americans and the country in general, would you vote for Roosevelt or Landon?

Answer 1

New Deal of Roosevelt is given below.

Explanation:

NEW DEAL

• The 1936 election was a referendum on President Roosevelt’s first-term policies. Unemployment had gone down, millions were working in New Deal programs best known under their alphabetic abbreviations, and a sense was growing that the struggling economy had turned an important corner.

• Social Security had been signed into law, along with legislation to build housing, create an unemployment insurance system, ensure a minimum wage, and give workers the right to organize and bargain collectively.

• Regulation of the banking and financial industries

• It is estimated that 20 million Americans were receiving some form of assistance from the government by 1936. The first major New Deal program, the PWA (Public Works Administration) had put several hundred thousand people (mostly men) to work in construction. The WPA (Works Progress Administration), which launched in 1935, employed three million more in a variety of programs, and by the time the program ended six years later,  it had employed eight million.

• All these employment programs were influenced by several women: Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, the first woman to hold a cabinet post; First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who ensured that women were hired for many projects; and civil rights pioneer, New Deal administrator, and FDR advisor Mary McLeod Bethune, who monitored the hiring of African Americans.

The New Deal had not fixed everything, yet it was well on its way to convincing average citizens that it was addressing their interests.