To the editor:

“Black Thursday,” Oct. 24, 1929, was the worst depression in history.

President Hoover did not understand the plight of Americans — so much for a “business man” trying to run our country.

In 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected by a landslide. He promised that he would act swiftly to face the “dark realities of the moment,” that he would wage war against the emergency, that they had elected a man who was not afraid to take bold steps to solve the nations problems. Unemployment had reached staggering levels during the Depression. By 1933, Toledo, Ohio’s unemployment level had reached 80%, Lowell, Massachusetts had reached nearly 90%. On March 6, Roosevelt declared a four-day bank holiday to stop people from withdrawing their money from shaky banks. On March 9, Congress passed Roosevelt’s Emergency Banking Act, which reorganized the banks and closed the ones that were insolvent. In his first “fireside chat” three days later, the president urged Americans to put their savings back in the banks, and by the end of the month, almost three-quarters of them had reopened.

Those days came to be known as “The First 100 Days.” Roosevelt kicked out things by asking Congress to take the first step ending Prohibition, one of the more divisive issues of the 1920s, by making it legal once again to buy beer. At the end of the year, Congress ratified the 21st Amendment that ended prohibition for good.

In May, he signed the Tennessee Valley Authority Act into law creating the TVA and enabling the federal government to build dams along the Tennessee River that controlled flooding and generated inexpensive hydroelectric power for the people in the region. Roosevelt created the Works Progress Administration which gave some 8.5 million people jobs on construction projects which produced 650,000 miles of roads, 25,000 public buildings, 75,000 bridges and 8,000 parks. The National Recovery Administration which was give authority to help shape industrial codes governing trade practices, hours, child labor laws and collective bargaining.

This was what to become known as “The New Deal.”

This is how I remember these events. I was there — I was born in 1926.

Joe DeMarco

Jay