Great Depression in the United States in the context of "Presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933–1941)"

The New Deal was a series of wide-reaching economic, social, and political reforms enacted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the United States between 1933 and 1938, in response to the Great Depression, which had started in 1929. Roosevelt introduced the phrase upon accepting the Democratic Party's presidential nomination in 1932 before winning the election in a landslide over incumbent Herbert Hoover, whose administration was viewed by many as doing too little to help those affected. Roosevelt believed that the depression was caused by inherent market instability and too little demand per the Keynesian model of economics and that massive government intervention was necessary to stabilize and rationalize the economy.

During Roosevelt's first hundred days in office in 1933 until 1935, FDR introduced what historians refer to as the "First New Deal", which focused on the "3 R's": relief for the unemployed and for the poor, recovery of the economy back to normal levels, and reforms of the financial system to prevent a repeat depression. Roosevelt signed the Emergency Banking Act, which authorized the Federal Reserve to insure deposits to restore confidence, and the 1933 Banking Act made this permanent with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). Other laws created the National Recovery Administration (NRA), which allowed industries to create "codes of fair competition"; the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which protected investors from abusive stock market practices; and the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), which raised rural incomes by controlling production. Public works were undertaken in order to find jobs for the unemployed (25 percent of the workforce when Roosevelt took office): the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) enlisted young men for manual labor on government land, and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) promoted electricity generation and other forms of economic development in the drainage basin of the Tennessee River.

The Works Progress Administration (WPA; from 1935 to 1939, then known as the Work Projects Administration from 1939 to 1943) was an American New Deal agency that employed millions of jobseekers (mostly men who were not formally educated) to carry out public works projects, including the construction of public buildings and roads. It was set up on May 6, 1935, by presidential order, as a key part of the Second New Deal.

The WPA's first appropriation in 1935 was $4.9 billion (about $15 per person in the U.S., around 6.7 percent of the 1935 GDP). Headed by Harry Hopkins, the WPA supplied paid jobs to the unemployed during the Great Depression in the United States, while building up the public infrastructure of the US, such as parks, schools, roads, and drains. Most of the jobs were in construction, building more than 620,000 miles (1,000,000 km) of streets and over 10,000 bridges, in addition to many airports and much housing. In 1942, the WPA played a key role in both building and staffing internment camps to incarcerate Japanese Americans.

Modern liberalism, often referred to simply as liberalism, is the dominant ideological variant of liberalism in the United States. It is most synonymous with the ideology of social liberalism, which is a variant of liberalism that moves beyond classical liberalism to account for poverty, seeking a balance between civil liberty and social equality via a social safety net. U.S. modern liberalism also takes inspiration from cultural liberalism and progressivism, and some (but not all) modern liberals explicitly identify with the contemporary U.S. progressive movement. Writing in 1993, American academic writer Ian Adams argued all major U.S. parties up to that point were "liberal and always have been. Essentially they espouse classical liberalism, that is a form of democratized Whig constitutionalism plus the free market. The point of difference comes with the influence of social liberalism."

Economically, modern liberalism accepts a role for government to protect against market failures, protect competition and prevent corporate monopolies, and supports labor rights. Its fiscal policy supports sufficient funding for a social safety net, while simultaneously promoting income-proportional tax reform policies to reduce deficits. It calls for active government involvement in other social and economic matters such as reducing economic inequality, expanding access to education and healthcare, and protection of the shared natural environment, in large part on the contention that advances in those areas create a thriving economy in the long run. Modern liberalism was formed in the 20th century in response to the Great Depression. Major examples of modern liberal policy programs include the New Deal, the Fair Deal, the New Frontier, the Great Society, the Affordable Care Act, and the Build Back Better Plan.

The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was a voluntary government work relief program that ran from 1933 to 1942 in the United States for unemployed, unmarried men ages 18–25 and eventually expanded to ages 17–28. The CCC was a major part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal that supplied manual labor jobs related to the conservation and development of natural resources in rural lands owned by federal, state, and local governments. The CCC was designed to supply jobs for young men and to relieve families who had difficulty finding jobs during the Great Depression in the United States. There was a smaller counterpart program for unemployed women called the She-She-She Camps, which were championed by Eleanor Roosevelt.

Robert Fechner was the first director of this agency, succeeded by James McEntee following Fechner's death. The largest enrollment at any one time was 300,000. Through the course of its nine years in operation, three million young men took part in the CCC, which provided them with shelter, clothing, and food, together with a monthly wage of $30 (equivalent to $729 in 2024), $25 of which (equivalent to $607 in 2024) had to be sent home to their families.

The Texas oil boom, sometimes called the gusher age, was a period of dramatic change and economic growth in the U.S. state of Texas during the early 20th century that began with the discovery of a large petroleum reserve near Beaumont, Texas. The find was unprecedented anywhere in its size and ushered in an age of rapid regional development and industrialization that has few parallels in U.S. history. Texas quickly became one of the leading oil-producing states in the U.S., along with Oklahoma and California; soon the nation overtook the Russian Empire as the top producer of petroleum. By 1940 Texas had come to dominate U.S. production. Some historians even define the beginning of the world's Oil Age as the beginning of this era in Texas.

The major petroleum strikes that began the rapid growth in petroleum exploration and speculation occurred in Southeast Texas, but soon reserves were found across Texas and wells were constructed in North Texas, East Texas, and the Permian Basin in West Texas. Although limited reserves of oil had been struck during the 19th century, the strike at Spindletop near Beaumont in 1901 gained national attention, spurring exploration and development that continued through the 1920s and beyond. Spindletop and the Joiner strike in East Texas, at the outset of the Great Depression, were the key strikes that launched this era of change in the state.

The American folk music revival began during the 1940s and peaked in popularity in the mid-1960s. Early folk music performers include Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Pete Seeger, Richard Dyer-Bennet, Oscar Brand, Jean Ritchie, John Jacob Niles, Susan Reed, Mississippi John Hurt, Josh White, and Cisco Houston. Lead Belly recorded "Cotton Fields" and "Goodnight, Irene" and folk singer Odetta released folk albums.

New folk musicians such as Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Joni Mitchell, Phil Ochs, Peter Paul & Mary and many others recorded folk songs and new compositions in the folk style in the 1960s and 1970s. The revival also brought forward strains of American folk music that had in earlier times contributed to the development of country and western, bluegrass, blues, and rock and roll music.