The New Deal
The state takes on responsibilities it had never held
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When Roosevelt became president in 1933, one American in four was out of work and thousands of banks had failed. The Social Security Act of 1935 is the lasting part, and it permanently changed the relationship between citizen and state. The programmes were at the same time shaped by accommodations to southern Democrats: agricultural and domestic work were excluded from the insurance schemes, the occupations in which two of every three Black Americans worked. The mortgage programmes introduced redlining, which shaped segregation in American cities for decades.
For children
During the Great Depression the United States launched enormous public programmes: roads, dams, schools and parks built by people who would otherwise have been unemployed. Unemployment insurance, old-age pensions and bank deposit guarantees came too.
Sources
- Social Security Act (1935)
- Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White (2005)
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