President Roosevelt was seen by voters as a sharp contrast to Hoover because he talked about taking action and fighting the Great Depression, as though the United States was at war, by relying on government funding and deficit spending to revive an ailing economy. His first weapon in the fight against the economic crisis was the New Deal, similar to Hoover’s economic ideas, which was designed to “relieve suffering and conserve the nation’s political and economic institutions through unprecedented activity on the part of the national government” (Henretta 693). In his first Hundred Days in office, Roosevelt took Hoover’s plans a step further when he enacted a variety of reforms that relied mostly on federal funding and government control in an effort to boost the confidence of Americans in the economy. The Emergency Banking Act required that banks be inspected to see if they had a sufficient amount of cash. When the banks reopened after a mandatory bank holiday, confidence in them was so high that deposits outnumbered withdrawals. Roosevelt put a variety of acronym acts into place that lifted public spirits and confidence in the government and economy of the United States. The Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) was designed to refinance mortgages for people that faced foreclosure of their property. The Glass-Steagall Act was responsible for separating investment and commercial banking to cause a decrease in speculation. The creation of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) allowed people to secure up to $2,500 in deposits. Roosevelt’s economic acronyms and warlike mentality successfully boosted the confidence of Americans but his most significant changes during the course of the First New Deal involved economic improvement and a plan that involved recovery, relief and reform.

Hoover took a lot of criticism from 1929 to 1932 as unemployment rose and people began to have doubts about the effectiveness of the Republican government in place. The Great Depression was the focus of the problems of the government and it began with the crash of the market in October 1929 and from that time until March 1930, unemployment in the United States rose from 1.5 million people to 3.2 million (Watkins 51). Although the majority of people did not suffer great losses in stocks, they accumulated losses in the form of unemployment, wage cuts, food shortages and higher prices. The confidence of the general public in the health of the country’s economy was shaky because of rising unemployment, closing businesses, and bank failures that took millions of uninsured dollars. In 1930, 1352 banks failed with a total of $853 million in deposits and 26355 businesses failed (Watkins 55). In 1931, economic conditions worsened with 2294 bank failures accounting for a total of $1.7 billion in deposits, 28285 business failures and over eight million people were without work (Watkins 55). By 1932, the downward spiral that Hoover hoped to avoid became a reality when 451,800 companies totaled $5.64 billion in debts and deficit spending and in the first few months of that year, unemployment in the United States reached twelve million (Watkins 55). Conditions for agriculture were bad since 1923 but the depression in agriculture was further intensified when total property values in the country fell from $78.3 billion in 1920 to $51.8 billion in 1931 causing many farmers to lose money invested in their land (Watkins 55). The Great Depression had a stronger impact on society than previous economic failures and crashes because more people lived in the cities, where new jobs and opportunities could be found. People in the cities did not own homes or grow food so when they lost their jobs, they lost the money to pay for food, shelter and survival. Families that did not have the money to pay rent were reduced to “living in makeshift shacks on unoccupied land in or near cities” and homeless people flocked to these “Hoover

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