Essay Questions for Thinking through Sources 22

Notice Point of View: Each of the creators of these documents is responding to the Great Depression and the Roosevelt administration’s efforts to create reforms that would strengthen the American economy and alleviate Americans’ suffering. From what position and with what motivation did each of these writers create their documents? How did each of their social, political, and economic contexts shape their goals and their messages?

Notice What’s Missing: These sources express several different perspectives on Roosevelt and the New Deal, but they do not address the wide variety of perspectives that Americans expressed in the 1930s and 1940s. What perspectives are missing from this collection that might add other dimensions to your understanding of this period? Consider why, for example, attacks against the New Deal by Republicans and business interests were generally unsuccessful. What additional voices might enable you to answer that question?

Assess Change Over Time: What do these sources reveal about the ways the priorities of the Democratic and Republican parties changed between the mid-nineteenth century and the 1930s? How did Roosevelt’s Democratic Party compare to the one that existed during and after the Civil War? What does the Republican Party platform suggest about the ways it had changed since the 1860s and 1870s? If Abraham Lincoln and Charles Sumner had been alive to join a party in the 1930s, which one do you think they might have joined and why?

Integrate Sources and Text Narrative: In what ways do these sources support, illustrate, supplement, or contradict this chapter’s narrative discussion of the depression and the New Deal? How do they add to your understanding of Americans’ affection for Roosevelt and the successes and failures of the New Deal? What do they suggest about the nature of the New Deal? Do you see it as a revolutionary change in American life or as part of a longer political and economic trajectory?