New Deal

This passage is about how President Franklin Delano Roosevelt helped the American economy.

Lexile Level: 1260L

Categories: History People & Places

So many Americans were unemployed after the "Black Friday" stock market collapse and the Great Depression that, as the country entered the 1930s, something drastic had to be done. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt launched a wide variety of programs that are collectively called the New Deal. Nicknamed "alphabet programs" because they were referred to by their three-letter acronyms, New Deal projects, such as the Civilian Conservation Corps, Works Progress Administration, and Tennessee Valley Authority, put millions of Americans to work. Some programs built dams to generate electricity and irrigate and enrich previously infertile farmland. Other programs concentrated on environmental issues such as erosion prevention and the prevention of forest fires. The Works Progress Administration was the largest program in the New Deal. WPA workers built hundreds of thousands of miles of roads and tens of thousands of bridges and buildings. At its height, more than eight million people worked for the WPA alone.