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FDR Essay
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FDR: A Savior of America? During the early 1930s and into the 1940s, America was in great turmoil. The country was suffering from the Great Depression, and to add to it, the nation was on the brink of war. The economy had crashed and was completely left in shambles, and the people were living in conditions that the can be considered incomprehensible to the human mind. Poverty had struck the far reaches of American society, but the largest groups affected were the farmers and those that didn’t have their hands in the big business. This desperate time in American history called for a strong leader to guide the country out of its impoverished state, but was unable to produce in Herbert Hoover. It was not until Franklin Delano Roosevelt came to power that the country began to turn itself around. FDR was the strong leader that America needed because he was able to completely change the long held American principles in order to help America come out of its Great Depression. His first 100 days in office consisted of only making changes to the existing American life to change it, and turn things around. He worked with the farmers and the low prices that they were facing when trying to sell their products, and the overwhelming unemployed population. FDR continued to set up new programs that would open up jobs for those is dire need of them. FDR had become one of the largest American figures for the way that he attempted to make the common man the largest priority of the government. However, despite all of the things that FDR did for the country to pull it out of the Great Depression, he did receive criticism. Because FDR had become such a large icon, many people began to draw political cartoons having to do with FDR and his actions. Many of them depict how FDR was kind hearted and how he tried to save the “American” man and the country as a whole. However, there are some that show him to be a dictator due to all the power he had accumulated while being in office, and there are some that criticize his efforts because he went beyond the realm of the U.S. Constitution do accomplish what he did. The thoughts on FDR and his programs were mixed, and depended on what the issue pertained to, as shown by the cartoons on him. The cartoons about the first 100 days that FDR was in office show how affective he was during that time period. They show how they people were sympathetic to the President and his programs concerning economic issues because they depict FDR doing away with all that was a problem in American society. In this particular cartoon, FDR is the lumberjack that has cut down all of the large corporations, and the large bureaus, and the banking crisis trees to ease the economic tensions that the country was facing. The cartoonist is showing how FDR dealt with the immediate economic problems when FDR assumed the office of the President. This cartoon serves the purpose of showing that FDR took immediate action to ease the economic tensions of the people, and how the people sympathize with him for doing so. This cartoon is sympathetic towards FDR and his New Deal because it gives us a perspective of FDR that shows him to be a great leader, and can possibly find a solution to our country’s problmes by eliminating the existing problems of bank failures, large corporations, and merging bureaus, and a man that led our country to the “port of prosperity” . The cartoonist is able to illustrate for the reader that these types of changes and reforms were supported by the people, and thus allowed FDR to continue to further reform America. Some of the programs that Roosevelt created that were widely supported were those that dealt with the recovery and reinstallation of confidence in the American financial system. Roosevelt’s first task in office was to restore confidence in the people, and fix the financial problems, so he started by declaring a national bank holiday and pushed trough the Emergency Banking Act.
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