The Great Depression presented an unprecedented challenge to American institutions and assumptions, and in no sphere were the consequences more profound than in the treatment of poverty and destitution. To the men and women who sought quick relief for people in distress the response seemed to be exasperatingly slow; in retrospect the speed of change was remarkable. Public responsibility for the consequences of economic failure was recognized; functions that had been exclusively local were assumed by states; national agencies carried national power into areas hitherto reserved for the states; and if new ideas about the nature of poverty continued to rest on insecure philosophic foundations, old ideas were discarded.

The magnitude of the change raises perennial questions of continuity and discontinuity, of tradition and innovation, of survivals and new departures. How far were the changes, made in response to economic disaster, the acceleration of existing trends? Were they newly planted or did they grow from seeds sown in earlier years? Was there a break with the past or merely readjustment to changed circumstances?

There has been much discussion of the extent to which the New Deal was anticipated by Herbert Hoover's administration, but rather less of the relationship between the 1930s and the preceding decade. In the popular view the 1920s are still seen as the last and discredited gasp of an old order, a time of reaction and complacency, of froth and heedless optimism, the years that the locust had eaten.