Comparative Questions

COMPARATIVE QUESTIONS

Document Links

Document 24-1: Martha Gellhorn Reports on Conditions in North Carolina in 1934

Document 24-2: Working People's Letters to New Dealers

Document 24-3: Huey Long Proposes Redistribution of Wealth

Document 24-4: A Mexican American Farmworker Describes the Importance of Sticking Together

Document 24-5: Conservatives Criticize the New Deal

  1. According to Martha Gellhorn, Jose Flores, Herbert Hoover, and Minnie Hardin, how did working people who favored the New Deal view the government differently from those who opposed the New Deal?
  2. What might Republican opponents of the New Deal have said about Huey Long's plans? To what extent were Long's policies a departure from the New Deal or merely an extension of it? How might a New Dealer criticize Long's proposals?
  3. How might working people who talked with New Dealers or wrote to the Roosevelt administration have responded to Minnie Hardin's claims that people on relief were “human parasites” and “pampered poverty rats”?
  4. The documents in this chapter express conflicting views about the relationship between individual freedom and government action. To what extent did the New Deal try to alter that relationship? To what extent did it succeed?