In 1933, in his first inaugural address, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared, .". the only thing we have to fear is fear itself." Yet, Roosevelt knew that the fear he spoke of was grounded in reality. With one-third of the nation's workforce unemployed, grown men scrounged in garbage cans for discarded scraps to feed their families. Six thousand street-corner apple vendors sold their product in New York City alone. Fear, indeed, stocked the land of the 1930s during Great Depression a defining event of 20th-century America. With the introduction of Roosevelt's New Deal, many families found relief through public works projects and other government-funded posts.

The Great Depression and the New Deal describes how the nation coped and how it overcame a true national calamity.