Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal benefited the lives of most farmers in many different and powerful ways. The combination of the "alphabet soup" acts and the long lasting effects that they produced transformed the modern individual farmer of the late 1920's and the entire 1930's from the down and out, could barely survive "Okie" farmer, as depicted in John Steinbeck's "Grapes of Wrath", to a more uniform, government backed, stable farmer that still exists today. Many …showed first 75 words of 996 total…

…showed last 75 words of 996 total…Obviously, relief, recovery, and reform movements were necessary and the only things short of a great war that could end the economic fear and greed that was suffocating 95 percent of the American populations, most painstakingly: farmers. Even though they never did reach back to the days of the Calvin Coolidge prosperity, without the New Deal, family farms would have become a thing of mythology and "Hoovervilles" would have become just another element of everyday reality.