President Franklin Roosevelt

How President Franklin Roosevelt helped America out of economic crisis

President Franklin Roosevelt implemented government work projects where the jobless were put to work building roads and dams and government buildings. President Franklin Roosevelt formed a "brain trust" by calling to Washington:

• economists,
• scientists,
• writers, and
• professors

to advise him on possible solutions. President Franklin Roosevelt put together a dynamic Cabinet that included the first woman ever named to a Cabinet post - Frances Perkins, Secretary of Labor. Within three months President Franklin Roosevelt and his team had put together astounding New Deal experiments including:

• the Conservation Corps,
• the Farm relief Act,
• the Tennessee Valley Authority,
• the Home Owner's Loan association, and
• the Federal Relief Act.

President Franklin Roosevelt 's reform

It was President Franklin Roosevelt who introduced both Unemployment Insurance and Social Security. Many of his programs became known by their initials - the TVA, the CCC, or the NRA. And soon, President Franklin Roosevelt himself, was known by the affectionate nickname F.D.R.  The acts and programs of his first term:

• curbed the powers of Wall Street;
• gave jobs to millions;
• made it easy to get home mortgages;
• abolished child labor;
• controlled prices;
• brought sanitation, electricity, and flood control to areas that needed it; and
• brought new rights to workers in collective bargaining.

How First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt helped President Franklin Roosevelt

In all these efforts at reform, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt played a key role. It was First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt who showed up at bread lines, pouring soup; who dropped in on WPA projects; who lunched with railway porters; who read to kids in the Dust Bowl, and who tended the sick in the slums. A famous New Yorker cartoon of the time said it all: Deep in a mine, a soot-covered worker with a lantern on his head stops his coal shoveling and says to another miner: "For gosh sakes, here comes Mrs. Roosevelt."

1932 was the beginning of 40 years of public service that would forever endear Mrs. Roosevelt to the people of America and the world. During those years, she spoke often on human rights and the goal of world peace. Later, she would serve 16 years as the United States representative to the UN. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt had once said: "None of us has lived up to the teachings of Christ." But somehow this remarkable woman, who was convinced she had no beauty at all, got the idea that the elevation of the human condition was more than an afternoon-a-week affair; it was a reason for being. After First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, the role of the First Lady was never the same.