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Roosevelt's New Deal Agenda Essay

Johnson’s Great Society vs. FDR’s New Deal As Woods (2016) points out, Lyndon Johnson was a great supporter and admirer of Roosevelt’s New Deal program when it first rolled out during the Depression Era. When Johnson became president following Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, he set about building on the New Deal-era ideas with his Great Society approach to spreading liberalism and the concept that Americans were entitled to things like a good job, good health care, good education, and good homes. The New Deal sought ways to put people to work during an era of economic depression, a way to ease people’s burdens and give them a sense of security, and the Great Society agenda sought to make people feel good about their place in America—but neither really made the ideal a reality.

The Social Security Act of 1935 was signed into law during FDR’s New Deal as an attempt to help workers feel more secure about their retirement. The Depression had shaken their belief in the dollar and the overall economy. Social Security was meant to shore up that belief once more. It promised workers that they could retire with security because while they...

This was just one example of the many different alphabet soup programs that the New Deal developed to try to jump start the economy and put people’s fears to rest. By ignoring the obvious, however—i.e., the games that the central bank was playing and had been playing since its creation in 1913 under the Federal Reserve Act—Roosevelt and the New Deal were only brushing the surface of a very real and deep economic problem in American—namely that the U.S. government had given over the right to coin money to a bunch of bankers on Wall Street and they now controlled the nation.
Johnson’s Great Society was a little different in that it sought not to soothe the economic concerns of a struggling populace but rather to soothe the moral outrage that was still seething in America. Assassinations, civil unrest, a war in Vietnam, and protests at home were just a few of the social problems that were flaring up in the U.S. To distract from these very real issues, Johnson tried to get the poor and lower classes to support his politics…

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References

Johnson, L. (1964). Great society speech. Retrieved from http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=26262

Woods, R. (2016). How the Great Society reforms of the 1960s were different from the New Deal. Retrieved from http://time.com/4280457/new-deal-great-society-excerpt/


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