The Relief and Reconstruction Act of July 1932 authorized the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to lend states up to $300 million to spend on relief assistance to the unemployed and to lend states and municipalities up to $1.5 billion to finance self-liquidating public works projects (for example, toll roads).
President Herbert C. Hoover reluctantly signed the measure as a compromise between his own opposition to federal financial assistance to the unemployed and his concern for fiscal prudence on the one hand and the growing readiness of the Congress to spend on relief and on public works projects on the other. Hoover had earlier in July vetoed the far more expansive Garner-Wagner bill providing direct federal relief to the unemployed and committing the government to a large public works program. His administration then implemented the Relief and Reconstruction Act slowly and grudgingly, lending only a portion of the money authorized to states and localities.
By mid-1932, as the Great Depression neared its nadir and unemployment continued to soar, the question of relief had become an important political issue, with Hoover and most Republicans still opposing direct relief from the federal government and Democrats increasingly supporting the idea. Hoover’s opposition to federal relief was among the factors that made him increasingly unpopular as the election of 1932 approached. The large-scale federal relief and public works programs of the New Deal would mark one of the major differences between the Hoover presidency and that of Franklin
D. Roosevelt.
Further reading: David Burner, Herbert Hoover: A Public Life (New York: Knopf, 1979).
World History
