After reading the poem “Debts” by Karen Hesse and the speech by President Franklin Roosevelt, write an essay in which you argue why the New Deal gave people hope during the Great Depression. Support your argument with evidence from both the poem and the speech.

Must be five paragraphs in length.

Each paragraph should have a topic sentence, three supporting sentences, and a conclusion sentence. The first paragraph should be the introduction and the last paragraph should be the conclusion.

Make sure to use several different sentence types, openers, and dress-ups.

DEBTS

By Karen Hesse

Daddy is thinking

of taking a loan from Mr. Roosevelt and his men,

to get some new wheat planted

where the winter crop has spindled out and died.

Mr. Roosevelt promises

Daddy won’t have to pay a dime

till the crop comes in.

Daddy says,

“I can turn the fields over,

start again.

It’s sure to rain soon.

Wheat’s sure to grow.”

Ma says, “What if it doesn’t?”

Daddy takes off his hat, roughs up his hair,

puts the hat back on.

“Course it’ll rain,” he says.

Ma says, “Bay,

it hasn’t rained enough to grow wheat in

three years.”

Daddy looks like a fight brewing.

He takes that red face of his out to the barn,

To keep from feuding with my pregnant ma.

I ask Ma

how, after all this time, Daddy still believes in rain.

“Well, it rains enough,” Ma says,

“now and again, to keep a person hoping.

But even if it didn’t

your daddy would have to believe.

It’s coming on spring,

and he’s a farmer.”

President Franklin Roosevelt took office in 1932, during the worst depression American had ever known. The stock market had crashed in 1929, thousands of banks had failed, millions of people were unemployed. Until 1932, there was no safety net for the country, with no government help, so people were on their own. During his first term of office, Roosevelt created a program called the New Deal, in which government took a huge role in putting people back to work, creating Social Security, and creating many types of government assistance for people. Roosevelt was overwhelmingly re-elected in 1936. What follows is the speech he made at the inauguration for his second term.

Second Inaugural Address, President Franklin D. Roosevelt

January 20, 1937

1 My fellow countrymen, when four years ago we met to inaugurate a President, the Republic, single-minded in anxiety, stood in spirit here. We dedicated ourselves to the fulfillment of a vision—to speed the time when there would be for all the people that security and peace essential to the pursuit of happiness. We of the Republic pledged ourselves to drive from the temple of our ancient faith those who had profaned it to end by action, tireless and unafraid, the stagnation and despair of that day. We did those first things first.

2 Our covenant with ourselves did not stop there. Instinctively we recognized a deeper need—the need to find through government the instrument of our united purpose to solve for the individual the ever-rising problems of a complex civilization. Repeated attempts at their solution without the aid of government had left us baffled and bewildered…

3 We of the Republic sensed the truth that democratic government has innate capacity to protect its people against disasters once considered inevitable, to solve problems once considered unsolvable. We would not admit that we could not find a way to master economic epidemics just as, after centuries of fatalistic suffering, we had found a way to master epidemics of disease. We refused to leave the problems of our common welfare to be solved by the winds of chance and the hurricanes of disaster.

4 In this we Americans were discovering no wholly new truth; we were writing a new chapter in our book of self-government.

5 Our progress out of the depression is obvious. But that is not all that you and I mean by the new order of things. Our pledge was not merely to do a patchwork job with secondhand materials. By using the new materials of social justice we have undertaken to erect on the old foundations a more enduring structure for the better use of future generations...

6 But here is the challenge to our democracy: in this nation, I see tens of millions of its citizens—a substantial part of its whole population—who at this very moment are denied the greater part of what the very lowest standards of today call the necessities of life.

7 I see millions of families trying to live on incomes so meager that the pall of family disaster hangs over them day by day.

8 I see millions whose daily lives in city and on farm continue under conditions labeled indecent by a so-called polite society half a century ago.

9 I see millions denied education, recreation, and the opportunity to better their lot and the lot of their children.

10 I see millions lacking the means to buy the products of farm and factory and by their poverty denying work and productiveness to many other millions.

11 I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.

12 But it is not in despair that I paint you that picture. I paint it for you in hope—because the nation, seeing and understanding the injustice in it, proposes to paint it out. We are determined to make every American citizen the subject of his country’s interest and concern and we will never regard any faithful law-abiding group within our borders as superfluous. The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.

13 Government is competent when all who compose it work as trustees for the whole people. It can make constant progress when it keeps abreast of all the facts. It can obtain justified support and legitimate criticism when the people receive true information of all that government does.