By the election of 1932, many had lost hope that President Hoover could get the country out of the Depression.
He ran for reelection against Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Roosevelt campaigned with the promise of a “new deal for the American people.” He won by a landslide.
By the time he took office in 1933, one-quarter of the U.S. workforce was unemployed. That was 15 million people! Hourly wages were 60 percent lower than they had been in 1929. Right away, Roosevelt took action with a program of relief, recovery, and reform called the New Deal. His philosophy was that it was better to try something and fail than not to try at all.
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