Depression? World War? Polio? FDR said 'hold my cigarette holder' and rewrote America.
Elected in November 1932, as the economic crisis ravaged the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt immediately put all his campaign promises into action: it was time for the "New Deal". This bold plan, designed to turn around a nation on the brink of collapse, where unemployment was at an all-time high and the working poor were suffering from the precariousness of the job market, was intended to give hope to a country that had been battered before anything else. Once he came to power, the new president from the Democratic Party immediately passed some fifteen laws designed to revive the economy.
Editing
Archive footage cuts like a heist montage but for policy.
Writing
Explains Keynesian economics without making you nap.
Director
Julia Bracher
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
FDR's fireside chats invented the presidential podcast—intimate, theatrical, and weirdly ASMR for 1933.
The documentary's French production explains its cooler distance from American hagiography—notice how it side-eyes the cult of personality?
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