Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1944, FDR Presidential Library
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When President Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office in 1933, America was in the grips of the Great Depression. More than a quarter of the workforce was unemployed. Over the next eight years, FDR instituted a series of economic recovery reforms in order to stabilize the economy. Roosevelt began by stopping withdrawals from banks and decreasing agricultural surpluses. Next, he ended Prohibition, reformed banking, encouraged unions, built hydroelectric power plants, and employed workers in government funded infrastructure projects. FDR’s New Deal policies were largely successful in helping to end the Great Depression. Perhaps more importantly, Roosevelt’s interventionist policies founded modern big-government liberalism.
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