The Great Depression and the New Deal

Catalog description

The world that broke down in 1929 broke down for reasons that astute observers had predicted in advance. The subsequent and nearly total failure to repair the damage owed to clear errors of judgment and action, and the prolonged misery that millions of people suffered could therefore have been lessened. Roosevelt and the Democratic Congress of the New Deal era achieved a marked historical success by correcting those errors. They also committed errors of their own. But in the 1936 election, the American voters overwhelmingly asked their leaders to forge forward with their experiments, mistakes aside, rather than return to the old and, to their minds, wholly discredited ways. This course will explore the buildup to the Great Crash of 1929, the Great Depression that followed and the New Deal created to counteract it.