REEP LESSON PLAN FORM

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1 TEACHER'S NAME: Angie A. Felix REEP LEVEL(s): REEP LESSON PLAN FORM LIFESKILLS UNIT: The Great Depression and The New Deal LESSON OBJECTIVE/s: Students will be able to... - use topic-specific vocabulary to discuss the Great Depression and the New Deal - report orally and in writing - scan text for specific information - write a detailed summary TECHNOLOGY INTEGRATION (if any): Students have previously read and done internet research on The Great Depression and The New Deal web sources: Wikipedia entry on GDND. LANGUAGE SKILLS TARGETED IN THIS LESSON (X all that apply): X Speaking X Listening X Reading X Writing ESTIMATED TIME: 3 hours RESOURCES AND MATERIALS NEEDED: Cosby, B. and Maday, C. (Executive Producers). (1998). The Great Depression. History Channel. (Part I, The Shake-up ) student notes taken from internet Included in this file: o Reading text on the Great Depression and New Deal (adapted summary from various sources) LESSON PLAN AND TEACHER S NOTES Motivation/Background Building: Teacher introduces topic by asking: What is the Great Depression? Does anyone know anything about it? -Teacher shows a table (from the reading text) showing economic impact of the GDND -Teacher shows a 2 minute clip from the film, The Great Depression, Part I, The Shake-up. Presentation: Focusing on the lesson, the teacher introduces a modified jig-saw activity: students are divided into four groups, and each group is given paragraphs from the reading text. Each group elects a leader who discusses the paragraph/s and asks questions from the group. Practice: The members of the group share their answers and make sure that they can summarize their paragraph/s.

2 Each member of the group now presents an oral summary of their assigned paragraph/s, using adjectives and vocabulary from the reading text. Retelling: (oral) After all the groups have presented their part, they now attempt to present the reading as a whole (in sequence) and compare this with the original reading text (which is distributed by the teacher immediately after the previous activity). Application and Evaluation: Students will write a Comparative Essay comparing the Great Depression and the New Deal, with today s economic conditions, with emphasis on the following: unemployment, housing problems (mortgages), bank failures/closures, wholesale/retail sales, the stock market, etc. (550) Students will write a detailed summary of the GDND, to include the following issues: unemployment, bank failures, housing problems, stock market, wholesale/retail sales, etc. (500) Extension Activities for the Classroom and Beyond: In preparation for an Oral Presentation (3 to 4 minutes) based on the experience of a survivor or someone who has experienced the Great Depression, students conduct Internet research. They choose one survivor s experience and write a first person report I lived during the Depression, (for 550) which will include the following: Introduction (date or year, city or town); the person s occupation; Details (that relate how the person lived/survived the experience. And a Conclusion (i.e., lessons learned from the experience). For 500: students conduct Internet research about a survivor s experience during the Depression, and write a narrative essay about that person, a third person report. Students write their impressions about that survivor after narrating his story.

3 The Great Depression and The New Deal 1 The year was It was a time when most Americans had little money because the overall business environment was deteriorating. Prior to this, in the mid-1920s, Americans had been enjoying an economic boom. At the time, they purchased new cars, new houses and other goods. The investor class bought and sold stocks at the New York Stock Exchange. Some of these investors over speculated (i.e., gambled) on stocks which led to stock prices being simply overpriced. Then came October 1929 when the U.S. stock market collapsed, resulting in the greatest market crash of all time. However, it is worth mentioning that the stock market crash by itself did not cause the rest of the economy to collapse. But because the U.S. banks had loaned so heavily for stock purchases, the falling stock prices endangered local banks whose borrowers failed to pay off their loans. As a result, these bank failures, between 1929 and 1933, caused the economy s credit supply to dry up, taking down with them local businesses, increasing bankruptcies, job lay-offs and curtailing consumption. Thus, it was during this period (1929 and 1933), that Americans were living through the years of the so-called Great Depression. (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/new_deal). The Depression s impact on the economy Banks in operation 25,568 14,771 Prime interest rate 5.03% 0.63% Volume of stocks sold (NYSE) 1.1B 0.65B Privately earned income $45.5B $23.9B Personal & corporate savings $15.3B $2.3B Source: Historical Statistics of the U.S., pp. 235, 263, 1011, and 1007 The Depression s impact on people Consumer spending (in billions) on selected items, Food $19.5 $11.5 Housing $11.5 $ 7.5 Clothing $11.2 $ 5.4 Automobiles $ 2.6 $ 0.8 Medical Care $ 2.9 $ 1.9 Philanthropy $ 1.2 $ 0.8 $ 89.0 $ Adapted by Angie Felix from the following sources: Badger, Anthony J. The New Deal: The Depression Years, (Chicago: 1989, Paper, ISBN ); Bernstein, Vivian, America s Story, (TX: Steck-Vaughn Co., 1995) ; Stewart, Gail B., The New Deal (NY: New Discovery Books, 1993); Social Studies: Strategies for Success, Steck-Vaugh Advisory Council, (Tx: Steck-Vaugh Co., 1987), 51-52; Welcome to History 1302 Online, U.S. History: Part II, Depression and War, (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/new_deal).

4 Source: Historical Statistics of the U.S., p The initial plunge of the stock market, however, marked only the beginning. Confidence in the U.S. economy (and, subsequently, other parts of the world economy, especially Europe) continued to be shaken. Between 1929 and 1933, unemployment in the U.S. rose from 3 percent of the workforce to 25 percent, while manufacturing output collapsed by one-third. Factories closed, workers were laid off or their hours were cut, banks closed, and families lost houses or farms to mortgage foreclosures. (The New Deal, Anthony Badger, 1989). Meanwhile, in the Midwest, Dust Bowl farmers and their families packed their belongings into cars, tied their few possessions on their back, and looked for work in the agricultural fields or cities of the West no longer independent land owners. Between 1929 and 1932 the income of the average American family was reduced by 40 percent, from $2,300 to $1,500. These incomes could only pay for subsistence purchases. Shanty towns called Hoovervilles (named after then President Herbert Hoover) sprang up in many large cities across the country, with the largest located in New York right in the middle of Central Park. One historian described the shacks of a Hooverville as the size of a dog house or chicken coop, often constructed out of wooden boxes, metal cans, strips of cardboard or old tar paper. Here human beings lived on the margin of civilization (The New Deal, Gail B. Stewart, 1993). Families living in such communities were jobless and homeless, with nowhere else to go. Many families survived by going to soup kitchens for food, or begging in the streets, or searching garbage cans for scraps of leftover food. It was obvious that President Hoover s economic policies had failed to correct the situation and instead made the Depression worse. Several factors had contributed to this: The U.S. central bank (the Federal Reserve Bank) maintained a tight money policy during with the government raising taxes significantly in 1932, and the increasing of taxes on imports (with the idea of protecting U.S. companies) led to a collapse in world trade. During the presidential election, Hoover was widely blamed for the economic situation and voters overwhelmingly welcomed the new leadership offered by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, (FDR), who had served two terms as governor of New York State. Thus, it was no surprise that in November 1932, FDR was elected by a landslide. When he took office the following March, he launched an aggressive program to turn the economy around. Roosevelt had viewed the Depression as mainly a matter of lack of confidence people had stopped spending, investing and employing labor because they were afraid to do so. As he put it in his inaugural address: "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself." He therefore set out to restore confidence through a series of bold gestures in his First Hundred Days. He declared a "bank holiday" to prevent runs on the banks and called an emergency session of Congress to stabilize the financial system. The Federal Deposit Insurance Administration (FDIC) was created to guarantee the funds held in all banks in the Federal Reserve System, and thus prevent more bank failures. Roosevelt's New Deal program represented a new relationship between the American people and their government, a relationship which included the creation of many new federal agencies. These agencies were called "alphabet agencies" because of their use of acronyms. Among the more significant of these New Deal programs were the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) which gave jobs to unemployed youths and to improve the environment; the WPA (Works Progress Administration) which gave jobs to thousands of unemployed in everything from construction to the arts; and the NRA (National Recovery Administration) which drew up regulations and codes to help revitalize industry. Then came the creation of the Social Security Administration, unemployment insurance and other

5 agencies and programs designed to help Americans during times of economic hardship. Under FDR the federal government took on many new responsibilities for the welfare of the people. This new relationship forged during the New Deal brought the federal government closer to the people: a closeness which had never existed to such a degree before. Roosevelt s other social programs included the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, (AAA), with powers to increase farm prices and support struggling farmers. Following these emergency measures, the National Industrial Recovery Act, (NRA), was created, which imposed an unprecedented amount of state regulation on industry, including fair practice codes and a guaranteed role for trade unions, in exchange for the repeal of anti-trust laws and huge amounts of financial assistance as a stimulus to the economy. Considered one of the largest pieces of state industrial enterprise in American history, the Tennessee Valley Authority, (TVA), was also created. It built dams and power stations, controlled floods, and was intended to improve agriculture in one of the poorest parts of the country. The repeal of prohibition also provided stimulus to the economy, while eliminating a major source of corruption. Roosevelt and the New Deal were criticized by many both in and out of government, and seriously challenged by the U.S. Supreme Court, especially from The court held as unconstitutional a number of Roosevelt s programs and several most importantly the NRA were struck down. After he was re-elected in 1936, he proposed changing the law to allow for extra judges to be added to the ninemember U.S. Supreme Court. Roosevelt s move was widely criticized for attempting to pack the court with justices who agreed with his policy, and was seen as a power grab by FDR and was quickly defeated. But, interesting enough, the Supreme Court started upholding more of the challenged New Deal laws. Social critics also attacked FDR s programs, some from the Left and some from the Right. Some union leaders and liberals, such as Huey P. Long, governor of Louisiana, charged that Roosevelt was not going far enough to change social conditions and was only protecting business owners. But some voices on the Right, especially Father Charles Coughlin, who had an influential radio program based outside of Detroit, Michigan, and Dr. Francis Townsend, a California doctor who led a grassroots movement, said Roosevelt was trying to take the country down a path toward Communism. However, even the large appropriations that Roosevelt extracted from Congress which were spent on relief and assistance to industry were not enough to provide a sufficient fiscal stimulus to revive so large an economy as that of the United States. As a result, the economy remained sluggish throughout the 1930s, and in fact after a partial recovery, slid back towards Depression in 1937 and This was mainly because the high tariff barriers (a tax placed on import and/or export goods) imposed in response to the Depression were not removed, and without a revival of international trade, there could be no full recovery. It took the massive growth in government spending during World War II to restore industrial production to pre-crash levels and eliminate unemployment. Throughout all the turmoil, Roosevelt remained popular with voters, who listened to his weekly radio fireside chats, admired his calm, confident leadership and saw his continued searching for economic solutions as important. When war started in 1939 in Europe, Roosevelt decided to break with tradition and run for a third term. The voters responded and re-elected him (as well as in 1944) the only U.S. president to have served more than two terms of office. Roosevelt s New Deal was not a complete, well-planned program from beginning to end. It was an improvised response to the Great Depression, with stops and starts, controversial failures and

6 questionable successes. But it has left a legacy of government response and action in the face of economic problems and it continues to be a part of American life today.