Franklin Roosevelt's sweeping response to the Great Depression, from 1933 to 1939 — a blizzard of programs that put millions to work, insured banks and savings, and built a permanent safety net through Social Security, remaking the federal government into a guarantor of economic security and defining American politics for half a century, even as it left millions of Black Americans deliberately behind.
When Franklin Roosevelt took office in 1933, about one in four workers was out of work and the banks were collapsing. In the years that followed his government did something the country had never asked of it: it put millions to work building roads and schools, insured the savings of ordinary people, and promised the old and the jobless a check from Washington. That promise rebuilt the relationship between Americans and their government, and it lasted for fifty years. It also left most Black Americans out, through the compromises that built it.