WASHINGTON – The New Deal was really a series of new deals, spread out over more than six years during the Great Depression — a menu of nationally scaled projects that were one part make-work and many parts lasting impact.
They delivered a broad-shouldered expression of presidential authority whose overall benefits were both economic and psychological.
Not all of them worked. Some failed badly. But it was a try-anything moment by Franklin D. Roosevelt at a time of national despair.
And it remade the role of the federal government in American life. Men were hired to plant trees in Oklahoma after the Dust Bowl and to build roads, bridges and schools.