Abstract

In January 1937, as his first term drew to a close, United States President Franklin RooseveltRoosevelt, Franklin D. looked back on the distance the country had traveled since his inauguration four years earlier. Then, the United States had been mired in the depths of the Great Depression—rocked by catastrophic levels of unemployment, foreclosures, evictions, bank runs, and everyday hardship. But it “was not only that the visible mechanism of economic life had broken down”, Roosevelt told Congress and the nation.