March 25-March 31, 1933
This is the week that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt introduced two landmark pieces of emergency legislation: first, the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), and second, the Securities Bill of 1933. Both were baby steps toward the policies of protecting the general welfare which FDR's Administration ultimately fashioned, in that they inserted the Federal government into the process of providing emergency relief (in the case of the FERA), and of supervising the banking industry (in the case of the Securities Act), without providing any enforceable standards, or entitlements.
The FERA was devised to address the fact that local governments had literally run out of money to aid the unemployed, and the destitute. It was intended to provide a pool of money$500 million, to be precisethat could be disbursed in relief grants to states. In addition, it gave the Federal Relief Administrator, who would be New York's Henry Hopkins, broad supervisory power over the states' use of the grantsa provision that caused a total uproar among those who were still crazy enough to think that the Federal government didn't have to take charge of bringing the country out of depression.
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Volume 1, Number 2
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