Franklin D Roosevelt's Influence On America

Beginning in 1929 with the Great Crash, Americans suffered greatly from financial instability during the Great Depression. In 1933, after Herbert Hoover’s failed laissez faire approach to the economy, President Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in the depths of economic despair. As opposed to Hoover, Roosevelt believed that the government had to step up and take an active role in the American economy because he saw the damage that a free and unregulated stock market could cause. In response to the middle class’s desperation, Roosevelt created many relief, recovery and reform programs to help Americans get back on their feet and prepare for the future, and which became the backbone of Roosevelt’s presidency. Roosevelt’s signature program was
While the CCC was beneficial to many Americans because it gave previously unemployed men a stable income, it fell short in social issues of racism and discrimination due to Roosevelt’s reluctance to defy his Dixiecrat supporters. While FDR believed the government should help bring Americans out of the poverty of the Great Depression, the racist attitudes present in his voter base limited his power to help racial minorities as equally as he did white men in the CCC.
Throughout his first two terms, Franklin D. Roosevelt strove to secure a decent standard of living for all Americans because he felt the government had a moral obligation to prevent tyrannical economic incentives from crushing Americans. On the contrary to a hands-off government, Roosevelt’s vision for government was a strong and powerful scaffold for American life. As he stated in his Second Inaugural Address in 1937, the government was responsible for “fashioning an instrument of unimagined power for establishment of a morally better world.” Through acts that distributed wealth and boosted the economy from the bottom up such as the Federal Emergency Relief Administration and the Social Security Act, Roosevelt used his strong executive role in