In what ways did the National Recovery Administration (the new deal) alleviate the Great Depression?
Parts of the New Deal created soil conservation districts in the dust bowl. That eventually helped end the dust bowl. You can read about it in “The Worst Hard Time” by Timothy Egan. I don’t think it was the NRA, but the CCC might have been involved. It’s important to remember that the farm economy was much larger and the industrial economy much smaller during the depression. Another thing the New Deal did was buy up (and slaughter) starving livestock and pay farmers not to plant crops that were in surplus. During the 20’s there was a period when Russian wheat production dropped greatly. That created a boom for American wheat, and farmers speculated and planted more and more wheat. Russian wheat came back to world markets around the time of the drought in the dustbowl. As wheat prices dropped, farmers planted more and more to try to keep their incomes up. This created a wheat surplus and drove prices so low that farmers couldn’t pay their costs. Some farmers and speculators walked away
Stimulated demand by purchasing goods and services from the private sector. and Reduced the cost of doing business in America through infrastructural and transportaion investments. Don’t believe the idiots who think it prolonged the Depression. While the new deal was not enough to pull us out of the depression, it in no way deepen or extend it. Their reasoning is flawed. While technically correct, I’ve found it to be a mischaracterization of truth. FDRs policies were quintessentially Keynesian. However, I read that Keynes himself had written a series of scathing letters to FDR, one of which was an open letter published in the New York Times. Make no mistake; these letters amounted to an excoriation of FDR at the time. But it’s not because Keynes thought so badly of his policies, but rather because he thought FDRs programs did not spend enough! History, in fact, proved Keynes right. The economy did not truly recover until the exorbitant expenses of WWII increased demand enough to lift u
