FDR: A Presidency for American Community

FDR is the president that built the American community. A sense of national pride was restored when he ascended to the presidency. The Great Depression created a sense of lost to the American public and a loss of faith in laissez-faire capitalism championed by Herbert Hoover. Robert Susman’s ‘The Culture of the Thirties,” speaks of the creation of collective interests resulting in the American community. Susman’s piece is the text of FDR’s presidency and what it came to mean to the national character during the dark days of the Depression. Susman explains the redefining of the role of American government, ushering a new welfare state. In this paper, the community that is created because of FDR’s political viewpoint will be analyzed by visual representations of the era.
The Great Depression was a time of great economic peril for the common American citizen. The libertarian republican views of the 1920s and President Hoover left little recourse for the American people stem the horrors of the Depression. President Hoover sought for states and charity from the wealthy American elite would help people to take care of their families. President Hoover did not reassess his political views to account for the monumental distress of the Great Depression. The last number of the film “The Gold Diggers” just scratches the surfaces of the horrors of the Depression on the American character. The sadness demonstrated in the faces of the World War 1 veterans in movie’s last number is representation of the misery that gripped the country was not addressed by the Hoover administration. When FDR came onto the national scene advocating a new form of government it forever changed the American community. Susman’s body of work shows a substantial change in American culture. FDR redefined what is meant to be a free American.
FDR’s four freedoms that everyone American is entitled too created a collective action American community that built a new sense of nationalism. Nationalism was not a characteristic of American culture until the New Deal…
New Deal legislature created a culture that changed the role of the American government. Government previously was seen as a necessary evil to run the country. Government was not supposed to take care of people’s well being. President Hoover and the republicans saw that any widening of government would inhibit the freedom of the American people and create a welfare state. However, the Great Depression ruined the global economy effectively taking away ordinary Americans to take care of themselves and their children.
New Deal legislation changed the scope of the ….