How successful was the New Deal?

Cambridge IGCSE History 0470 · Paper 1 Section B, Depth Study D Syllabus: 2027 and 2028 Depth study D: The United States, 1919 to 1941 Key Question 4 of four

This file covers one Key Question: whether Roosevelt's response to the Depression worked. That means what the New Deal was when it began in 1933, how it changed after 1933, who opposed it and why, why unemployment was still high at the end of the decade, and the argument that runs through all of it, which is whether a programme that did not end unemployment can still be called a success.

The command word is successful, and it is the whole examination. Cambridge is not asking you to describe the agencies. It is asking you to judge a programme, and it has built the counter-argument into the specification: two of the five focus points are about the New Deal failing, and one of those two is phrased as an open question that invites you to argue back. A file that only listed what each agency did would arm you for one side of a ten mark question, and one side is capped in the middle of the mark range no matter how much detail it carries.

Three warnings before anything else.

This is the most two-sided topic in the Depth Study. In the 48 Paper 1 mark schemes read for these notes, this Key Question supplied a ten mark question 25 times, and every one of those 25 asked you to weigh something against something else. Not one asked you to narrate.

The alphabet agencies are a trap, not a shortcut. A list of initials is the commonest way to write a long answer that scores in the lower half. Section 4 explains why, and section 12 shows what the papers do with the agencies instead.

This is content where a confidently invented figure is worse than a lost mark. Unemployment totals, agency spending, the numbers each agency employed and the names of Supreme Court cases are exactly the places where a plausible-looking number is wrong. Every figure below comes from a Cambridge document, section 15 lists the places where Cambridge's own documents give the same figure two ways, and the closing section says which document each claim comes from.

The marking is not repeated here. How this paper is marked, what an explanation has to look like on the page, and the two rules that changed for the 2024 series are all set out in How Cambridge marks History 0470 Paper 1. Read that page once, early. Nothing on this page restates it.

1. What the syllabus actually asks

The Key Question

This is the wording printed in the Cambridge IGCSE History 0470 syllabus for 2027 and 2028, in the Depth Study D content, which begins on page 25.

4 How successful was the New Deal?

The focus points

Five, printed in this order. This is the complete list, verbatim.

- What was the New Deal as introduced in 1933?
- How far did the character of the New Deal change after 1933?
- Why did the New Deal encounter opposition?
- Why did unemployment persist despite the New Deal?
- Did the fact that the New Deal did not solve unemployment mean that it was a failure?

Two features of that list are worth pausing on, because they tell you how to revise.

Five, not four. Every other Key Question in Depth Study D has four focus points. This one has five, and the fifth is the only focus point in the whole Depth Study that is phrased as a proposition rather than a neutral enquiry. Cambridge has written a debating motion into the specification.

Three of the five are about failure. Focus points 3, 4 and 5 are about opposition, persistent unemployment and the charge of failure. Only focus points 1 and 2 are about what the programme did. If you revise this Key Question as a story of what Roosevelt built, you will have revised two fifths of it.

Each focus point is a ready-made ten mark title. Sections 5 to 9 treat them that way, and each of those sections ends with both sides written out.

The specified content, printed once for the whole Depth Study

Here is the point most likely to cost you time. Cambridge does not print specified content per Key Question in the Depth Studies. It prints all four Key Questions and their focus points, then one undivided list of specified content for the whole of Depth Study D on the following page. There is no heading in that list saying where Key Question 3 stops and Key Question 4 begins, and Cambridge does not supply one.

This is the whole list, verbatim, in Cambridge's printed order.

- The expansion of the US economy during the 1920s:
- government policies
- mass production in industries for cars and other consumer goods
- the fortunes of older industries
- the development of credit and hire purchase
- the decline of agriculture
- Weaknesses in the economy by the late 1920s
- Society in the 1920s:
- the 'Roaring Twenties'
- film and other media
- Prohibition and gangsterism
- restrictions on immigration, the 'Red Scare', religious intolerance
- discrimination against Black Americans
- the Ku Klux Klan
- the changing roles of women
- The Wall Street Crash and its financial, economic and social effects
- The reaction of President Hoover to the Crash
- The presidential election of 1932; Hoover's and Roosevelt's programmes
- Roosevelt's inauguration and the 'Hundred Days'
- The New Deal legislation, the 'alphabet agencies' and their work, and the economic and social changes they caused
- Opposition to the New Deal:
- the Republicans
- the rich
- business interests
- the Supreme Court
- radical critics like Huey Long
- The strengths and weaknesses of the New Deal programme in dealing with unemployment and the Depression

The items that belong to this Key Question are the last four bullets, from "Roosevelt's inauguration and the 'Hundred Days'" to the end. That is the inauguration and the Hundred Days, the New Deal legislation and the alphabet agencies, the five named strands of opposition, and the strengths and weaknesses in dealing with unemployment and the Depression.

The division is a reading of the list, not something Cambridge prints, and one bullet genuinely straddles the boundary. "Roosevelt's inauguration and the 'Hundred Days'" sits immediately after the 1932 election, which belongs to Key Question 3, and immediately before the New Deal legislation, which belongs here. Treat it as shared. The election campaign and why Roosevelt won it are Key Question 3's; what he did once he was sworn in is yours.

Everything above the Wall Street Crash bullet belongs to Key Questions 1 and 2. The Crash, Hoover's reaction and the 1932 election belong to Key Question 3.

Two points about the printed wording

Cambridge prints the Depth Study title as "The United States, 1919 to 1941" using a dash between the years, and it shortens the second year. These notes write date ranges out in full throughout, in the syllabus quotation above and everywhere else. Nothing else about any quoted wording has been changed.

The syllabus never expands a single alphabet agency. The phrase it uses is "the 'alphabet agencies' and their work", in inverted commas, and that is the only place the agencies appear in the specification. Every full agency name in this file comes from a mark scheme, not from the syllabus, and section 15 records the four agencies whose names Cambridge itself prints two different ways.

2. Where this Key Question stops, and where its neighbours begin

Three boundaries matter here, and crossing any of them wastes time on material that earns nothing in the question you were asked.

Key Question 3 owns the Crash, the Depression and the 1932 election

Key Question 3, What were the causes and consequences of the Wall Street Crash?, owns speculation, the Crash itself, the banking collapse, the Hoovervilles, the Bonus Marchers, Hoover's response, and the presidential election of 1932 including why Roosevelt won it. The syllabus is explicit: "Why did Roosevelt win the election of 1932?" is a focus point of Key Question 3, not of this one.

That boundary is worth learning precisely, because it is the one candidates cross most. Roosevelt's promise of a "new deal" was made in the 1932 campaign, which is Key Question 3 territory, and the papers set questions on that promise as election questions. If a question asks why Roosevelt's promises appealed to voters, or why Hoover lost, you are being examined on Key Question 3, and an answer full of the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Wagner Act is answering a different question.

Your Key Question starts at the inauguration. Yours is the response, not the disaster.

The Depression itself is the same story from the other side of the line. You need it as the problem the New Deal was trying to solve, and every judgement in this file measures the New Deal against the size of that problem, but the causes of the Depression are not your content. Use the Depression as a yardstick, never as a narrative.

Depth Study E owns the Second World War

Your period ends in 1941. Whether the Second World War rather than the New Deal ended the Depression is a legitimate and examinable argument, and Cambridge's own mark schemes print it repeatedly, on both papers, as a credited point. Section 10 shows how to make it.

What you must not do is narrate the war. The war belongs to Depth Study E, The Second World War in Europe and the Asia-Pacific, which is a separate Depth Study with its own two questions on the paper. In this Key Question the war is one sentence of causal argument, not a topic. Rearmament orders, the draft, Pearl Harbor and Lend-Lease are not your content, and a paragraph on them is a paragraph not spent on the New Deal.

The way to make the argument without straying is to keep the war at the level Cambridge keeps it at: as the thing that finally did what the New Deal had not done, dated to the end of your period, and used in a judgement sentence rather than in a body paragraph.

Key Questions 1 and 2 own the 1920s

The boom, mass production, credit and hire purchase, the decline of agriculture, Prohibition, the Ku Klux Klan, the Red Scare, immigration restriction and the changing roles of women all belong to Key Questions 1 and 2. The only 1920s material you need here is enough farming background to explain why the Agricultural Adjustment Act was doing what it did, and that is a clause, not a paragraph.

3. How Paper 1 and Paper 4 set this Key Question

Cambridge does not publish any of what follows. It comes from reading the printed question stems in all 48 Paper 1 mark schemes from 2018 to 2024, and every Paper 4 mark scheme in the same range.

Section B begins at Question 9, and Depth Study D is Question 15 and Question 16

Section B is headed "SECTION B: DEPTH STUDIES" and starts at Question 9. Each Depth Study gets two consecutive questions in syllabus order, so Depth Study D is Question 15 and Question 16. That held in all 48 papers read, with no exception.

Two things about the surrounding numbering matter if you are working through old papers. Papers from 2018 to 2023 ran to Question 22, because there were then seven Depth Studies rather than five. From the 2024 series the paper ends at Question 18. Depth Study D sat at Questions 15 and 16 in both eras, so every past paper in this corpus is usable for this topic, which is not true of every Depth Study.

This Key Question was set in 25 of 48 papers, and in every one it was Question 16

Of the 48 Paper 1 mark schemes read, 25 set a question on the New Deal, which is just over half. Every single one of those 25 was Question 16. Not one was Question 15.

That is a sharper pattern than the general rule for Section B, which is that Cambridge does not tie a Key Question to a slot within a Depth Study. Inside Depth Study D the two questions have in practice divided by period, not by Key Question number:

There is exactly one exception on each row, and they are not the same paper. In one June 2018 paper, Question 15 was set on the Crash and the 1932 election, so both questions came from the second half of the Depth Study. In one November 2022 paper, Question 16 was set on Prohibition, gangsters and intolerance, so both came from the first half.

Use that as a tendency, not a guarantee. Two things follow from it, and they point in opposite directions.

The useful one: if you open the paper and Question 16 is on the Crash rather than the New Deal, that is the commonest way for this Key Question to be absent, and it happened in 23 of 48 papers. You should be able to answer on Key Question 3 as well.

The dangerous one: the split is a habit, not a rule Cambridge has published, and one paper in the corpus broke it in each direction. Do not walk into the exam having revised Question 16 only.

Within Question 16, the ten mark part is dominated by opposition

Across the 25 Question 16 papers that set this Key Question, the ten mark part divided like this:

Opposition is nearly a third of the ten mark questions on this Key Question, which is more than any other theme, and it is a single focus point. Section 7 is the longest section in this file for that reason.

Question 16 is the slot the examiner reports most often skip

There is a recurring sentence in the Principal Examiner reports for this paper: that there were too few responses to a question for meaningful comments to be made. It attaches to Question 13 and upwards routinely, and Question 16 is inside that range.

In the reports read for these notes, Question 16 was given no comment at all in the large majority of series. Where it did get comment, the report often opened by saying the question was answered by a small number of candidates, or that answers to it were comparatively rare.

That has a direct consequence for how you revise. The examiner reports cannot tell you much about this Key Question, so the mark schemes have to. Section 14 is built from the handful of reports that do comment plus the pattern of what the mark schemes reward and refuse, which is available on every paper whether or not anyone wrote a report about it.

Paper 4 sets the Depth Study at Questions 7 and 8

If your school enters you for Paper 4, the Alternative to Coursework, rather than the coursework component, this Depth Study is examined there as well, at Questions 7 and 8, in every Paper 4 mark scheme read. The New Deal is overwhelmingly the Question 8 topic.

Paper 4 changed format for the 2024 series. Before 2024 it set a single 40 mark essay per question, phrased "How important was..." at Question 7 and "How significant was..." at Question 8. From 2024 it sets (a) 15 marks, "Write an account of", and (b) 25 marks, "Discuss the importance of" or "Discuss the impact of".

That matters for you even if you never sit Paper 4, because the Paper 4 mark schemes are the most detailed statement Cambridge publishes of what it will credit on this Key Question. They print figures that never appear on Paper 1, and several facts in this file come from them. They are labelled where they do.

Paper 2 never examines a Depth Study

Paper 2's prescribed topic is always taken from Core Content. Source skills and this Key Question never meet.

4. The frame: what "how successful" is being measured against

Before any of the five focus points, settle what success would look like. Almost every weak answer to this Key Question is weak because it never fixed a standard, so it ends up saying that the New Deal did a lot of things and some people did not like them.

Roosevelt's own aims, in Cambridge's words

Cambridge's mark schemes credit a three-word statement of what the New Deal was for, and it is the single most useful thing to have in your head, because it gives you three separate tests instead of one vague one:

relief, recovery and reform

That comes from a Paper 1 mark scheme answering the question of what Roosevelt meant by a New Deal. The same mark scheme credits, in the same list, that he wanted to bring relief to the poverty-stricken, to rebuild the economy in both industry and agriculture, to bring stability to the banking system, to create employment through new agencies, to improve pay and conditions for those in work, to give people hope, and to create a fairer and more just society.

That gives you a ready-made structure for a judgement:

1. relief: did people stop starving?
2. recovery: did the economy return to health?
3. reform: was the system changed so that it could not happen again?

The power of that structure is that the three tests give different answers, and a ten mark answer that says so is doing exactly what the top band asks for. On relief the New Deal has a strong case. On reform it has a strong case. On recovery, judged by unemployment, it does not, and Cambridge's own mark schemes say so repeatedly.

The four yardsticks the mark schemes actually use

Read across the 25 Question 16 papers and the Paper 4 schemes, and Cambridge measures success against four things and no others:

1. Unemployment. The hardest test, and the one the New Deal fails on its own terms. Focus point 4 is about nothing else.
2. Confidence and hope. The test the New Deal passes most clearly, and the one Cambridge credits most warmly. Mark schemes describe restoring confidence in the banks, in the government and in the future, and one ten mark question asked directly whether restoring Americans' confidence in their government was the New Deal's most important achievement.
3. Who was helped and who was not. Farmers against farm labourers, industrial workers against sharecroppers, white Americans against black Americans. This is where the failures live, and it is the source of most of the questions in the popularity and fairness group above.
4. Permanence. Whether the jobs and the changes lasted. Mark schemes return again and again to the word temporary.

Why a list of agencies cannot reach the top band

Every mark scheme on this Key Question prints agency detail. That detail is worth marks. What it will not do on its own is answer the question, and the reason is structural rather than a matter of taste.

A ten mark answer needs an explanation on each side of the question asked. An agency list has no sides. It is a set of facts that are equally compatible with the New Deal having succeeded and with it having failed, which is precisely why Cambridge is willing to print the same agency in the credited material for a question about success and a question about failure in the same series.

The move that turns agency knowledge into an argument is to attach each agency to a yardstick and then say what it shows:

1. the Civilian Conservation Corps employed young men for six months at low wages
2. so it reduced the unemployment figure without creating a permanent job
3. so it is evidence for relief and against recovery

That is one agency doing argumentative work. Four agencies described are worth less than one agency used.

5. Focus point: what was the New Deal as introduced in 1933?

What was the New Deal as introduced in 1933?

This focus point sets the scope of the First New Deal, and it is the one place in this Key Question where you do need to know what the agencies were. Everything Cambridge names is below. Nothing is named that Cambridge does not name.

The Hundred Days

Cambridge's Paper 4 mark schemes describe the First New Deal as introduced in the first Hundred Days by Roosevelt with his Brains Trust, and describe him using fireside chats to explain the reforms to the American people over the radio.

The fireside chats are worth more attention than their length suggests, because they are the mechanism behind the confidence yardstick. Mark schemes credit that they let Roosevelt explain his policies, that they made people feel the nation was united in facing its problems, that they kept the American people informed about what the government was doing, and, most specifically, that when he explained the banking changes people were encouraged to put their savings back into the banks. A Paper 1 question asked directly why Roosevelt gave them.

Banking first, and why Cambridge keeps asking about it

Of the 25 Question 16 papers, five set the six mark part on the banking crisis or the Hundred Days, which is more than any other single subject. Cambridge asks it in several forms: why Roosevelt focused on banking first, why the Emergency Banking Act mattered, why he did so much in the Hundred Days, and, at ten marks, whether saving the banks was the New Deal's most important achievement.

What Cambridge credits about the Emergency Banking Act:

• A national bank holiday of four days while the Act went through Congress.
• Banks judged unsound were closed permanently. Paper 4 puts a figure on it: about 5 per cent of banks were permanently closed.
• The remaining banks reopened with government loans, grants and advice.
• Roosevelt broadcast to the public to say the reopened banks were safe.
• Paper 4 also credits the separation of commercial and investment banking, and the setting up of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.
• Paper 4 prints one figure for the effect: 1 billion dollars redeposited by customers in 1933.

The Securities Exchange Commission, which is how Cambridge's Paper 4 mark schemes expand the initials SEC, is credited as making rules to curb reckless speculation and help prevent another crash.

The reason this comes first in the mark schemes is the reason it should come first in your answer, and it is a causal chain rather than a fact:

1. the banks held the savings that funded investment
2. so no bank system meant no recovery in industry or farming
3. so every other New Deal measure depended on this one being done first

That chain is exactly what turns "he passed the Emergency Banking Act" into an explanation, and it is the argument that wins the ten mark question about the most important achievement.

The agencies of 1933, with only the names Cambridge gives

Cambridge names these, and expands them as shown. Where Cambridge expands an agency's name two different ways, the variants are in section 15 and you should not treat either as safer than the other.

The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). Voluntary employment for young men aged 18 to 25, on conservation projects: planting trees, clearing land, working against soil erosion. Cambridge prints that men could stay only six months. It prints that the corps planted 200 million trees. It also prints, in the same corpus, four different totals for how many it employed, which section 15 sets out. Cambridge credits, on both papers, that its camps operated racial segregation.

The Civil Works Administration (CWA). Temporary work over the winter of 1933 to 1934, mainly road building, airports and schools. Cambridge prints that it created four million jobs, and elsewhere that it provided work for nearly four million Americans.

The Public Works Administration (PWA). Construction work for skilled workers on large projects: dams, bridges, hospitals, roads, schools and houses. Paper 4 prints that over 7 billion dollars was spent between 1933 and 1939, and that the PWA built 75 per cent of American schools and 35 per cent of American hospitals during the Depression era.

The Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA). Direct relief for the destitute: soup kitchens, clothing and bedding. Paper 4 prints a budget of 500 million dollars, and describes it as having created 20 million part-time jobs by 1935, or in another paper as having provided temporary work of six months to over 20 million Americans.

The Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA). Cut production in order to raise prices. Cambridge credits paying farmers to take land out of cultivation, ploughing up sown land, reducing livestock, and compensating farmers for the lost production. Paper 4 puts numbers on it: millions of acres of sown land ploughed up, and six million piglets slaughtered. The effect Cambridge credits is that prices rose and farm incomes went up, and the figures it prints for that are in section 15 because there are three of them.

The National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), which set up the National Recovery Administration (NRA). Codes of fair competition covering wages, working hours and prices; voluntary codes that businesses signed up to; the Blue Eagle as a symbol that consumers were urged to buy from firms that had joined. Cambridge credits that it improved working conditions and reduced child labour, and one Paper 4 scheme credits it with introducing the first federal minimum wage.

The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). An authority that cut across state and local government to regenerate a region across seven states. Cambridge credits: building dams to control flooding and irrigate the land, dealing with soil erosion, planting forests, making the river navigable, providing cheap electricity, creating leisure facilities, and creating thousands of jobs and attracting new industry. One Paper 1 scheme prints that 33 dams were built. Cambridge also names the new town of Norris, in the context that black Americans were not allowed to live there.

HOLC. Cambridge credits that over one million people received loans through it to prevent the loss of their homes. Cambridge nowhere expands these initials, so do not expand them either. Write HOLC, or write "loans to prevent people losing their homes", and leave the name alone.

Two further 1933 measures Cambridge credits: help with farm mortgages, and the Beer and Wine Act of 1933, which Paper 4 mark schemes allow both as a job creator in brewing, distilling and cereal farming and as a source of tax revenue to pay for the New Deal.

The case that 1933 was a rescue

Everything in the Cambridge material points the same way on the immediate crisis. The banking system was saved. The homeless and the starving were given relief. Jobs were created in the millions. Businesses were kept from bankruptcy. Farm prices were pulled up. And the fireside chats gave a frightened country a government that was visibly acting.

The strongest single line, because it changes the standard of comparison, is one the mark schemes make explicitly: before the First New Deal the United States was in the Depression with its economy in a terrible state, and the drastic action did not solve everything but it stopped complete disaster.

The case against

Cambridge credits, in the same series: the AAA raised prices by destroying food while people went hungry, and it did so at the cost of the sharecroppers and farm labourers who worked the land that was taken out of cultivation. The CCC paid low wages, ran for six months at a time, and segregated its camps. The CWA jobs lasted one winter. The PWA and CWA spent enormous sums of public money. Many companies simply did not sign up to the NRA codes. And the First New Deal did not solve unemployment, which is the charge focus points 4 and 5 exist to press.

6. Focus point: how far did the character of the New Deal change after 1933?

How far did the character of the New Deal change after 1933?

This is the second commonest ten mark theme on the Key Question, at four of the 25 papers, and Cambridge sets it in three forms: whether the Second New Deal was more important than the First, whether it had more impact on people's lives, and whether the two were very different.

What Cambridge says the Second New Deal did

The Social Security Act of 1935. Cambridge's list, repeated almost word for word in two different series, is: a national insurance scheme, old age pensions, pensions for widows, unemployment benefit, help for the sick, help for the disabled, and money to public health to investigate disease. One mark scheme specifies a state pension for everyone over 65 and help for mothers with dependent children. Cambridge also credits, on the other side, that domestic workers were not included, and that many of them were black women.

The Wagner Act of 1935. Employers were forced to accept unions; workers gained the right to organise and bargain; unfair practices used to prevent unions were outlawed; it became illegal to sack a worker for union membership; and it set up a national labour board to act between unions and management. Cambridge credits the reason for it directly: it replaced part of the NIRA after the Supreme Court struck the NIRA down.

The Works Progress Administration (WPA), formed in 1935. Cambridge credits that it brought together the other job creation agencies, that it was headed by Harry Hopkins, who had run FERA, and that it created work for unskilled workers on roads, schools, sewers, bridges and tunnels. It also created projects for artists, writers, musicians, actors and photographers, and Paper 4 puts that at 7 per cent of the budget. Paper 4 prints a total of 8.5 million people given work by 1943, a budget of nearly 5 billion dollars, the criticism that it was boondoggling, and the criticism that the South, where poverty was highest, received 75 per cent less funding for job creation than the North.

The Resettlement Administration (RA), set up in 1935, and the Farm Security Administration (FSA), which replaced it in 1937. The RA moved half a million farming families to better land and houses and set up labour camps for migrant farm workers. The FSA provided loans so that tenant farmers and sharecroppers could buy their own land.

The Rural Electrification Administration, which Cambridge credits with bringing electricity to rural areas.

The case that the change was fundamental

Cambridge's own credited explanation runs: the First New Deal was about rebuilding the economy and the banking system, and the Second was about helping the victims of the Depression through social justice and workers' rights. Where the First had rescued institutions, the Second gave individuals rights and entitlements that they kept. That was a major change in a country whose organising belief had been that individuals support themselves and their families.

The strongest evidence for that reading is that the Second New Deal reached the groups the First had missed or hurt: sharecroppers, tenant farmers, farm labourers, migrant workers, the old, the widowed, the sick and the unemployed, and organised workers.

The case that it was not

Cambridge credits the other reading just as fully: both New Deals were about dealing with the Depression and helping people who were struggling; both created jobs through public works; both dealt with agriculture; both helped the poor. On this reading the Second New Deal extended the First rather than replacing it, and the continuity in personnel makes the point, since the man who ran the biggest new agency had run the biggest old one.

The trap: "the Second New Deal proves the First had failed"

Cambridge set that exact proposition as a ten mark question. It is a trap in both directions, and the mark scheme prints both escapes.

Agreeing: the Second New Deal was introduced to deal with what the First had been weak on, which was workers' rights and welfare, and critics such as Huey Long had said the First was not helping the unemployed and the poor.

Disagreeing: the First New Deal did an enormous amount and was a success on its own terms. Banks were saved, employment was provided, industry was helped to recover, farmers' incomes rose. It did not solve every problem, but a programme that stops a catastrophe and is then extended has not been shown to have failed.

The judgement that reaches the top band on this question is the one that separates the two claims:

1. the Second New Deal shows the First was incomplete
2. an incomplete programme is not a failed one
3. so the extension is evidence of what the First did not reach, not evidence that what it did reach did not work

7. Focus point: why did the New Deal encounter opposition?

Why did the New Deal encounter opposition?

This is the biggest section in the file because it is the biggest slice of the examination. Eight of the 25 ten mark questions on this Key Question were about opposition, and four of the 25 six mark questions were about the Supreme Court, four more about the radical critics, and three about the Republicans and the business opposition. Between them, opposition supplied well over a third of everything asked.

The syllabus names five sources of opposition, and the mark schemes add a sixth. Cambridge's five, in its printed order, are the Republicans, the rich, business interests, the Supreme Court, and radical critics like Huey Long. The sixth, which mark schemes credit repeatedly, is the states' rights campaigners who argued that the New Deal took powers that belonged to the states.

The structural point that makes this focus point tractable is that the opposition came from two opposite directions, and the whole examinable argument lives in the gap between them.

Opposition from the right: Republicans, the rich and business

What Cambridge credits, drawn from Paper 1 and Paper 4 mark schemes:

• Republicans believed in keeping government intervention in the economy to a minimum, and in low taxation.
• They believed in rugged individualism, that people should look after themselves and their families and stand on their own two feet, and that the New Deal would make people lazy and dependent on government help.
• They believed businessmen knew best how to help the economy recover, and that industry had prospered in the 1920s precisely because it was left alone.
• They resented the taxes needed to fund the New Deal, and the wealthy resented them particularly.
• They said the New Deal was socialism, that it was un-American, and that it went against the free enterprise and the freedoms that let business prosper. Paper 4 mark schemes credit the sharper version of this: that the NRA and the TVA were compared to Stalinist economic planning.
• They accused Roosevelt of acting like a dictator, most loudly over his attempt to change the Supreme Court.
• They objected to the New Deal's support for trade unions, particularly after the Wagner Act.
• States' rights campaigners argued that federal government was interfering with the states' right to manage their own affairs, and the TVA, which cut across seven states, was their exhibit.

Business specifically. Cambridge credits that business leaders formed the Liberty League in 1934 to unite opposition to Roosevelt's policies. Their objections, as Cambridge prints them: welfare payments were too generous and undermined self-reliance; they resented being told how to run their businesses by the NRA codes; they were opposed to the unions Roosevelt encouraged; they thought his policies socialist and un-American; and, as one mark scheme puts it, agencies like the TVA created unfair competition for private companies. Cambridge also credits that they were a serious threat because they were influential in political circles in both parties.

The Supreme Court

The commonest six mark subject on this Key Question, and Cambridge sets it four different ways: why the Court opposed the New Deal, why it was important to the New Deal, why Roosevelt could not deal with its opposition effectively, and why he put forward proposals to reform it in 1937.

What Cambridge credits:

• The Court's constitutional job was to decide whether measures passed by the President and Congress were consistent with the Constitution.
• Most of the judges were Republican, and Cambridge credits both a constitutional motive and a political one: they had, in one mark scheme's phrase, a natural political dislike of the New Deal.
• The Court held that the New Deal undermined the rights of the individual states and moved the country from individualism towards collectivism.
• The NRA and the AAA were both declared unconstitutional. Cambridge dates the NIRA ruling to 1935 and the AAA ruling to 1936.
• Paper 1 prints one figure: by the end of 1936 the Court had ruled against seven of the nine New Deal cases that had come before it.
• Roosevelt's response, in 1937, was to ask Congress to let him appoint six new judges, arguing that the existing judges were too old and reactionary and that there were not enough of them to get through the work. Cambridge credits that his real aim was judges sympathetic to the New Deal, that the plan caused great concern and made him look like a dictator, that it was rejected, and that Roosevelt backed down.
• Cambridge then credits the twist that decides the ten mark question: after the confrontation, the Court stopped challenging the New Deal, and the Wagner Act and the Social Security Act passed unhindered.

Cambridge names no Supreme Court case anywhere in this corpus. One mark scheme describes the case that struck down the NRA in detail, as a company found guilty of breaking NRA regulations because it sold diseased chickens and exploited workers, and it still does not name it. If you write a case name, you are writing something Cambridge has not printed, for no marks, in a paper where the fifth mark comes from detail that sits inside an explanation. Describe the ruling instead.

Opposition from the left: the radical critics

The syllabus names Huey Long, and the mark schemes name two others.

Huey Long. Cambridge credits: a Democrat politician, Governor of Louisiana, a Senator by 1932, who had taxed big business in Louisiana and used the money to help the poor, and who at first supported the New Deal. His criticism was that it did not go far enough for the poor. His alternative was the Share Our Wealth scheme, which Cambridge describes as confiscating large fortunes, lump sums for American families, pensions for everyone over 60, minimum wages, free education, and, in two schemes, free washing machines and radios for the over-60s. Cambridge prints that he had millions of supporters, and Paper 4 puts that at 7.5 million in 1935. It credits that he planned to stand for president. And it credits that he was assassinated in 1935, which is the fact that decides one whole side of the ten mark question about how significant he was.

The exact thresholds in his scheme are printed three different ways in Cambridge's own materials, and they are in section 15. Do not pick a number and defend it.

Dr Townsend. Cambridge credits that he wanted everyone over 60 given a pension, that one scheme puts the figure at 200 dollars a month, that a later scheme adds the condition that the pension had to be spent each month in order to stimulate the economy and create jobs, and that Townsend Clubs were formed to campaign for it.

Father Coughlin. Cambridge credits that he attacked the New Deal as inadequate, that he wanted social justice for all and, in one scheme, state control of industry, and that he thought the poor were not being helped enough. Paper 4 names his organisation as the National Union for Social Justice.

Which opposition was most serious: the argument the papers keep setting

Cambridge has set this comparison in almost every possible form: whether the main critics were Republicans, whether the most serious opposition came from business leaders, whether the Supreme Court's criticism was more serious than criticism from other groups, whether the New Deal was opposed because it increased the power of government, whether it was opposed because it interfered with business, whether it was opposed because it failed to help the poor enough, and whether it was opposed because it did not do enough to solve the Depression.

Every one of those is the same question with a different label on the front, and there is a single argumentative move that answers all of them. It is the one Cambridge itself prints in a 2024 mark scheme, and it is worth having ready:

1. the Republicans wanted government to move in the opposite direction, while the radicals wanted it to move further in the same direction
2. so the Republicans disagreed fundamentally about the role of government and the radicals only about the pace
3. so the right-wing opposition was the deeper disagreement

And Cambridge prints the exact counter, in the mark scheme for a different paper, which is why this question is genuinely two-sided rather than a question with an answer:

1. businessmen and the wealthy opposed the New Deal but did not change what Roosevelt did
2. the criticism that he did not go far enough is what produced the Second New Deal
3. so the opposition that mattered was the opposition from his own side

Either of those reaches a supported judgement. What does not reach one is a list of opponents.

A rule for this focus point

Cambridge sets narrow opposition questions as well as broad ones: why the Republicans opposed it, why the Liberty League opposed it, why some Democrats criticised it, why some radicals opposed it, why Huey Long criticised it. An examiner report on one of those names the fault exactly: candidates wrote generally about all the opposition to the New Deal rather than keeping to the group the question defined.

If the question names a group, everything you write must be about that group. Material about the other five is worth nothing, and on this Key Question it is the easiest way to write a long answer that scores in the lower half.

8. Focus point: why did unemployment persist despite the New Deal?

Why did unemployment persist despite the New Deal?

Cambridge has set this focus point nearly verbatim as a six mark question: why was unemployment still high at the end of the 1930s. It is the pivot of the whole Key Question, because it is the fact on which the charge of failure rests.

What the numbers Cambridge prints actually show

Cambridge prints several unemployment figures across the corpus, and they do not all agree. Section 15 sets out the disagreements in full and tells you what to do about them. What every version of the figures agrees on is the shape:

• Unemployment was in the region of 12 to 13 million at the bottom of the Depression, and Paper 4 prints that as a quarter of the workforce.
• It fell substantially by 1937.
• It rose again in 1938.
• It was still counted in millions in 1941, at the end of the period you are examined on.

That shape is the argument. The New Deal cut unemployment by a large amount and never came close to ending it, and the recovery it produced was not stable enough to survive a change of policy.

Six reasons Cambridge credits

Straight from the mark scheme for the question that asks this directly, plus the credited material on either side of the ten mark questions about unemployment:

1. Wages stayed low throughout the 1930s, particularly in the countryside, so Americans could not buy what industry made, so factories could not offer new jobs. Cambridge prints this chain as its own model explanation.
2. The jobs the agencies created were often temporary. The CCC ran for six months per man. The CWA covered a single winter. Mark schemes name the temporary character of relief work again and again, and one prints the consequence directly: the jobs would disappear when government funding stopped.
3. Roosevelt cut public spending in 1937, which slowed the economy and produced another wave of depression. This is the single most important item in the list, because it is the one that shows the recovery depended on the spending rather than having replaced it.
4. Mechanisation reduced the number of jobs, in farming and in industry alike.
5. New Deal farm policy destroyed farm employment. Cutting production meant fewer people were needed to work the land, so sharecroppers, tenant farmers and farm labourers lost their jobs. The programme that raised farm incomes raised rural unemployment.
6. The Depression was worldwide. Other countries were suffering from it too, so the export demand that might have absorbed American production was not there.

There is a seventh Cambridge credits in the ten mark material rather than the six mark material: some sections of society did not benefit from the New Deal at all, so their unemployment was never being addressed. Section 11 is about who they were.

The 1937 relapse

Give this its own sentence in any answer about unemployment, because it does more work than any other single fact on this Key Question. Cambridge prints it twice, in different series and different words: that Roosevelt reduced public spending in 1937 and this slowed the economy, and that as soon as the government spent a bit less in 1937 there was another wave of depression.

1. the recovery held while federal money was going in
2. spending was cut in 1937
3. unemployment rose again in 1938
4. so the New Deal had been holding the Depression down rather than curing it

That chain is the strongest single explanation available on the failure side of any ten mark question in this Key Question, and it is available whether the question is about unemployment, about success, about the First New Deal against the Second, or about opposition.

9. Focus point: did the fact that the New Deal did not solve unemployment mean that it was a failure?

Did the fact that the New Deal did not solve unemployment mean that it was a failure?

The fifth focus point is the Key Question in miniature, and Cambridge has set it at ten marks in almost exactly this form: "The New Deal was a success." How far do you agree. It also set "The successes of the New Deal were more important than its failures", and "The greatest failing of the New Deal was that it did not end racial discrimination in American society".

Notice what the focus point actually asks. It does not ask whether the New Deal solved unemployment; focus point 4 has already settled that it did not. It asks whether that one failure settles the verdict. The question is about the standard of judgement, not about the facts, which is why it can be argued either way with the same facts on both sides.

The case that it was not a failure

• It was not built only to end unemployment. Judged against relief, recovery and reform, unemployment is one test of three. A programme can fail one test and pass two.
• It stopped the Depression getting worse. Cambridge credits this in almost these words, and it is the most defensible claim in the whole Key Question.
• It saved the banking system, which was the precondition for any recovery at all.
• It reduced unemployment substantially, whichever set of Cambridge's figures you use, and one mark scheme puts it at a fall of over 30 per cent between 1933 and 1939.
• It gave people hope and restored confidence in government. Cambridge credits this as an achievement in its own right, and one ten mark question was built on it.
• It changed the country permanently. Pensions, unemployment insurance, union rights, help for the sick and the disabled. Cambridge credits the underlying point directly: the New Deal established the principle of government help and intervention in a country that had not accepted it.
• The voters agreed. Cambridge credits Roosevelt's 1936 landslide, in which he won all but two states, and credits that the Republicans fought that election on the New Deal and lost it.
• The physical legacy remained. Schools, roads, dams, bridges, hospitals, sewage plants and electricity in the Tennessee Valley, all still there after the funding stopped.

The case that it was

• It did not end the Depression, which was what it was for.
• The recovery was not self-sustaining, and 1937 proved it.
• Many of the jobs were temporary, so the improvement in the figures was partly an artefact of the schemes themselves.
• Whole groups were left out, and section 11 names them.
• Its own farm policy put people out of work.
• It cost enormous sums of public money, which is the criticism Cambridge credits from the Republican side and which is not answered by pointing at the schools that money built.
• It took a war to finish the job. Section 10.

The judgement, and the move that reaches the top band

The weakest ending on this Key Question is a summary of the two lists above. The strongest ending does one of three things, and each of them is a single sentence.

Split the verdict by test. The New Deal succeeded at relief and at reform and failed at recovery, and it is only a failure if recovery was the only thing that counted.

Change the comparison. Judge the New Deal not against a solved Depression but against what came before it, which was a government that had not acted.

Attack the premise. Not ending unemployment shows the limits of what public works could do, not that the programme failed, because the thing that finally ended unemployment was on a scale no peacetime programme was ever going to reach.

10. The war argument, made without narrating the war

Cambridge credits the argument that it was the Second World War rather than the New Deal that ended the Depression. This is not a controversial addition to the syllabus; it is printed in mark schemes for both papers, in several series, on the credited side of the question.

What Cambridge prints

Paper 1 mark schemes credit, in different series: that the Depression was not ended until the Second World War started and the demand for American goods increased; that unemployment only dropped when war started; and, in a list of creditable points, the flat statement that the war ended United States unemployment rather than the New Deal.

Paper 4 mark schemes credit the same argument with the mechanism attached: that the war created a boost to United States industry, that the drafting of troops lowered unemployment levels, and that supplying food and armaments to the Allies and lending them money put American industry to work. One Paper 4 scheme states that the Second World War in 1941 finally brought the United States out of the Depression. Another, on the impact of the Second New Deal, credits the flat point that the war solved the unemployment problem rather than the New Deal.

How to use it

As one link in a chain, in a judgement, and then stop:

1. the New Deal reduced unemployment but never ended it
2. what ended it was war production and the draft, on a scale no peacetime programme reached
3. so the New Deal failed the test it is most often judged by, and failed it because the test was set at a level only a war could meet

That is a complete use of the argument. What it is not is an invitation to write about the war. Do not narrate the war. Not Pearl Harbor, not Lend-Lease, not rearmament programmes, not the war economy. Those belong to Depth Study E, and on this question they earn nothing.

The date limit

Your period ends in 1941, and Cambridge respects that boundary in its own question wording: one Paper 4 question asked about improving life for the American people up to 1941. When a question carries a date limit, everything after it is marked at nothing, and on this Key Question the temptation to run past 1941 is unusually strong because the story gets better immediately afterwards. Stop where the question stops.

11. Who the New Deal did not reach

This section exists because it supplies the failure side of almost every ten mark question in the Key Question, and because Cambridge has set questions directly on it, including one asking why black Americans benefited less from the New Deal than other social groups.

Black Americans

What Cambridge credits:

• No civil rights legislation was passed, and Cambridge names specifically that Roosevelt did not pass an anti-lynching law.
• Cambridge credits the reason as a political calculation: Roosevelt needed the support of southern Democrats in Congress to pass New Deal legislation, and those congressmen were strongly opposed to civil rights for black Americans.
• The CCC operated segregated camps.
• Black Americans were not allowed to live in Norris, the new town built in the Tennessee Valley.
• Domestic workers were excluded from the Social Security Act, and Cambridge notes that many of them were black women.
• Local officials who administered New Deal programmes discriminated.
• Black Americans were less likely to be found jobs, and those with jobs often had work other Americans did not want.
• Segregation in transport and education continued in the South throughout.
• One Paper 1 mark scheme prints a figure: by 1935, 35 per cent of African Americans were living on relief.

Cambridge also credits a framing worth having, because it distinguishes intent from effect: that much of the harm was not intentional, and that the New Deal had unexpected consequences for black Americans. That distinction is what lets you argue both that the New Deal failed black Americans and that this was not its purpose, which is a more sophisticated position than either half alone.

One caution. One mark scheme's model explanation contains a claim about the National Industrial Recovery Act and unskilled workers that is expressed in a way that is hard to interpret and that Cambridge does not repeat anywhere else in the corpus. Use the segregated camps, the excluded domestic workers, the flooded land and the absent civil rights legislation instead; they are printed repeatedly and they carry the same argument.

Sharecroppers, tenant farmers and farm labourers

The clearest case of a New Deal measure making things worse for a group, and Cambridge credits it fully. The AAA paid farmers to reduce their acreage and their livestock. In the South, farmers cut their crops in line with the AAA's requirements, and the sharecroppers and tenant farmers who worked that land were no longer needed. Many lost their jobs and their homes. Cambridge also credits that family-run farms were replaced by large agri-businesses, and that TVA dams flooded land that black tenant farmers had been working.

The Second New Deal was Cambridge's own answer to this: the RA moved half a million families, the FSA lent tenant farmers money to buy land, and labour camps were set up for migrant farm workers. That sequence is a complete argument in itself, and it is a good one:

1. the AAA raised farm incomes by cutting production
2. cutting production destroyed the livelihood of the people who worked the land
3. the Second New Deal set up agencies specifically to repair that damage
4. so the New Deal's own remedy is evidence of the harm the First New Deal did

Women

Cambridge credits: that women's average wages were still lower than men's; that the Social Security Act did not restore the faith of all women, in the context of the domestic workers who were left out of it; and, on Paper 4, that insurance was not available to women in many states.

Native Americans

Cambridge credits, in one mark scheme's list of creditable points, that Native Americans remained a poor and excluded group in American society. It also credits, on Paper 4, that 15,000 Native Americans were among those employed by the CCC, which is the one place the corpus records them being reached.

12. What the papers actually ask

Built from the 25 Question 16 papers that set this Key Question.

The 4 mark families

These ask for four separate accurate points, and they cluster tightly. Ordered by how often each was set:

• The TVA, three times: what it was, what it did for the Tennessee Valley, and in what ways farmers benefited from its work.
• The Supreme Court, three times: its objections to the New Deal, its reaction to the New Deal, and how Roosevelt reacted to its decisions of 1935 and 1936.
• Huey Long, three times: who he was, twice, and his opposition to the New Deal.
• What the New Deal did for farmers, three times.
• What the New Deal did for the unemployed, twice.
• The Social Security Act of 1935, twice.
• The alphabet agencies, twice: what they were, and how they created jobs.
• Once each: the AAA, the WPA, the Emergency Banking Act, the fireside chats, what Roosevelt meant by a New Deal, the aims of the NIRA, and how Roosevelt helped industry in the Hundred Days.

Two of those deserve a note. "Who was Huey Long?" was set twice in four years, and the credited points are almost identical both times, which makes it the single most predictable four mark question on this Key Question. And "What were the alphabet agencies?" is a question that rewards saying what they were for, not listing initials.

The 6 mark families

These want explained reasons. Ordered by frequency:

• Banking and the Hundred Days, five times, in four different phrasings.
• The Supreme Court, four times.
• The radical critics, four times: why Huey Long criticised the New Deal, twice, why some Democrats criticised it, and why some radicals opposed it.
• The Republicans and the Liberty League, three times.
• The AAA, twice: why it was introduced, and why it was an important part of the New Deal.
• Once each: why Roosevelt introduced the Second New Deal, why the Wagner Act was introduced in 1935, why Roosevelt gave his fireside chats, why the TVA became a showcase for the New Deal, why black Americans benefited less than other groups, and why unemployment was still high at the end of the 1930s.

The 10 mark families

Every one of the 25 asked you to weigh. The recurring shapes:

• Whose opposition mattered most, or why the opposition happened. Eight papers. Republicans, business leaders, the Supreme Court, government power, interference with business, failure to help the poor, failure to solve the Depression.
• First New Deal against Second. Four papers. More important, more impact on lives, very different, and whether the Second proves the First had failed.
• What the greatest achievement was. Three papers. Restoring confidence in government, and saving the banks.
• Success or failure overall. Three papers, including the bare proposition that the New Deal was a success.
• Unemployment. Two papers: how far it coped with it, and how effective it was in dealing with it.
• Farmers. Two papers, both asking whether the New Deal solved their problems.
• One each: whether the 1936 landslide shows the New Deal was popular; whether the Second New Deal created a fairer society; and who the New Deal helped more, farmers or the unemployed.

The date limits to watch

Cambridge attaches date limits to this Key Question more often than to most, and each one changes what counts:

• "after 1933" excludes the Hundred Days and everything in the First New Deal's opening months.
• "in 1937", used of the Supreme Court proposals, excludes the 1935 and 1936 rulings except as background.
• "at the end of the 1930s", used of unemployment, is asking about the situation after the 1937 cuts, not about the whole decade.
• "up to 1941" on Paper 4 stops at the end of the Depth Study.
• "of 1935" attached to the Social Security Act or the Wagner Act ties you to that Act and not to the Second New Deal in general.

13. Judgement sentences for this Key Question

The tenth mark is a separate act. Each of these states a position and attaches a reason, which is what the top band asks for. They are written to fit the question families in section 12.

On overall success.

• "The New Deal succeeded at relief and at reform and failed at recovery, so calling it a failure means treating recovery as the only test that counted."
• "It should be judged against what preceded it rather than against a solved Depression, and against that comparison it was a success, because the alternative on offer in 1932 was a government that had decided not to act."

On unemployment.

• "The New Deal held unemployment down rather than curing it, and 1937 is the proof, because the moment the spending stopped the figure went back up."
• "Unemployment ended because of a war and not because of a programme, which shows the size of the problem rather than the failure of the response."

On opposition.

• "The opposition from the right was the more serious, because the radicals wanted Roosevelt to go further in the same direction while the Republicans wanted him to stop entirely."
• "The opposition that changed anything came from his own side, because it was the charge that he was not doing enough that produced the Second New Deal, and the charge that he was doing too much produced nothing."
• "The Supreme Court's opposition was the most serious while it lasted and the least serious in the end, because it struck down two of the biggest agencies and then stopped."

On the First New Deal against the Second.

• "The Second New Deal changed what the New Deal was for, moving it from rescuing institutions to giving individuals rights, which is a change of purpose and not just of pace."
• "The Second New Deal shows the First was incomplete rather than failed, because what it added was reach and not repair."

On the greatest achievement.

• "Saving the banks mattered most, because every other measure needed a banking system to work through, and the ones that came later would have had nothing to spend."
• "Restoring confidence mattered most, because a country that believes its government will act behaves differently, and that is what let the rest of the programme function."

On farmers.

• "The New Deal solved the problem of farm prices and created the problem of farm employment, so it helped farmers and hurt the people who worked for them."

14. What examiner reports say candidates get wrong here

The reports comment on Question 16 in only a handful of series, for the reason given in section 3. Where they do comment, and where the mark schemes make the same point by what they refuse to credit, the faults are these.

Answering about the wrong group. A report on the question about radical opposition records that many candidates wrote generally about all the opposition to the New Deal rather than keeping to radicals as the question defined them. This is the characteristic fault of this Key Question, because six named sources of opposition are floating in your memory and the question usually wants one.

Describing the clash with the Supreme Court instead of explaining it. A report on the 1937 proposals question records that weaker answers described the clash, and says they would have been improved by explaining the quarrel about whether New Deal reforms were unconstitutional. The description is the easy part and it does not score.

Listing the agencies without linking them to the question. A report on the question about restoring faith in government records that some responses gave a list of alphabet agencies without explaining how these restored anyone's faith. This is section 4's warning appearing in the examiner's own words.

Writing an unbalanced answer on the success side. A report on the 1936 landslide question records that responses were unbalanced because they focused on success, and that they could have been improved by more emphasis on the criticisms from Republicans and radical politicians. Note the direction of the imbalance: on this Key Question candidates over-write the success side, because it is the side with the agencies in it.

Generalising about the AAA instead of asking who won and who lost. A report on the question about farmers records that responses tended to be generalised accounts of the work of the AAA rather than a discussion about who benefited and who was disadvantaged. That distinction is the whole question.

Missing the actual proposition. A report on the question about whether opposition was surprising records that a number of responses described the opposition but did not address the "it is surprising" aspect. When Cambridge wraps this Key Question in an unusual command, the command is what is being marked.

Drifting into Key Question 3. This one is visible in the mark schemes rather than the reports. Several Question 16 papers pair a New Deal part with a 1932 election part, and the boundary in section 2 is where answers slide. If the question is about the New Deal, Hoover is background at most.

15. Where Cambridge's own documents disagree

Everything in this section is a real conflict inside Cambridge's own published materials. Do not try to reconcile them. Pick one version, write it as one figure, and move on. Examiners mark what is creditable, and every variant below is creditable because Cambridge printed it.

Unemployment totals

Two genuine contradictions sit inside that table. The starting point is given as 12 million in 1932 in one series and 13 million in 1933 in another. And the floor is given as never below 5 million in one series and as six million still unemployed in 1941 in another. Quote one series. Do not average them and do not write a range.

How many the CCC employed

Cambridge prints four different totals: over 2 million, 2 million, 2.5 million by 1941, and three million. Three of the four come from Paper 4 or Paper 1 mark schemes in different series, and the fourth from a Paper 1 mark scheme in the same corpus. Any of them is creditable. The safest form of words if you would rather not commit is the one Cambridge itself uses more than once, that the CCC gave work to millions of young men.

What happened to farm incomes

These are not all measuring the same thing, since two are about income and two are about prices and the periods differ, but a student cannot be expected to see that from the mark schemes, and Cambridge does not flag it. If you want one figure, "farmers' incomes doubled" is the one Cambridge prints most often.

Agency names Cambridge itself gives two ways

This is the reason for the rule that you only expand an agency's name if Cambridge does. Cambridge's own materials contain all of these:

The safest practice is to use the initials after one expansion, and to prefer the form that appears most often, which is the first in each row above. And HOLC is never expanded anywhere in the corpus, so leave it as initials.

NIRA and NRA

Cambridge is inconsistent about which of these was the Act and which the agency. The dominant usage, which you should follow, is that the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) was the law and that it set up the National Recovery Administration (NRA) to administer the codes. But one Paper 1 mark scheme, answering a question about the aims of the NIRA, prints that it set up the NIRA, which cannot be right, and mark schemes describe the Supreme Court as having struck down the NRA in some series and the NIRA in others. They mean the same ruling.

Huey Long's thresholds

Three different versions of the Share Our Wealth scheme appear:

• Personal fortunes over 5 million dollars to be taken by the state.
• Personal fortunes reduced to a maximum of 3 million dollars, with a maximum annual income of 1 million dollars.
• A maximum income of 1 million dollars a year, with pensions for anyone over 60.

Do not quote a threshold. Write that he wanted large fortunes confiscated and redistributed, which is what all three versions agree on and what Cambridge credits every time.

Dr Townsend's title

The mark schemes call him Dr Townsend and Dr Francis Townsend. One examiner report calls him Father Townsend, which appears to be a slip caused by Father Coughlin sitting next to him in the same list. Use Dr Townsend.

The labour board

The board set up by the Wagner Act is printed as the National Labor Board on Paper 1 and the National Labour Board on Paper 4. This is a spelling difference and nothing turns on it.

Supreme Court cases

Cambridge names none, on either paper, in any series read. It describes the case that struck down the NRA without naming it. Treat every case name you have seen elsewhere as outside the corpus.

16. Quick revision

• The Key Question is How successful was the New Deal?, and the command word successful is the whole examination. Both sides, every time.
• Five focus points, and three of them are about failure. Opposition, persistent unemployment, and whether not solving unemployment makes it a failure.
• Specified content is printed once for the whole Depth Study. Yours is the last four bullets, from the inauguration and the Hundred Days to the strengths and weaknesses in dealing with unemployment and the Depression. The Hundred Days bullet is shared with Key Question 3.
• Key Question 3 owns the Crash, Hoover and the 1932 election. Yours starts at the inauguration.
• Depth Study D is Question 15 and Question 16. This Key Question was set in 25 of 48 papers, and every time it was Question 16. Question 15 was the 1920s in 47 of 48.
• Question 16 is the slot examiner reports usually skip, so build your technique from the mark schemes.
• Paper 4 sets this Depth Study at Questions 7 and 8, and its mark schemes are the fullest published statement of what Cambridge credits here. Paper 2 never examines a Depth Study.
• Roosevelt's aims, in Cambridge's own words, were relief, recovery and reform. Three tests, three different answers, and that is a judgement structure.
• Opposition is nearly a third of the ten mark questions. Six sources: Republicans, the rich, business interests, the Supreme Court, radical critics, states' rights campaigners. The right wanted the opposite direction; the left wanted more of the same direction.
• If a question names a group, write only about that group.
• 1937 is the single most useful fact on the failure side. Spending was cut, and unemployment rose again in 1938.
• The war argument is credited by Cambridge on both papers. Make it in a judgement sentence. Do not narrate the war; it belongs to Depth Study E, and your period ends in 1941.
• Only expand an agency's name if Cambridge does, and never write a Supreme Court case name, because Cambridge prints none.
• Where Cambridge prints a figure two ways, pick one and move on. Section 15 lists every one of them.

Where these facts come from

Everything on this page comes from a Cambridge document, and each claim can be checked against a named one.

The Cambridge IGCSE History 0470 syllabus for 2027 and 2028. The Key Question wording, the five focus points, the whole specified content list for Depth Study D, the fact that the specified content is printed once and undivided, the five named sources of opposition, and the boundaries with Key Questions 1, 2 and 3 and with Depth Study E. Depth Study D begins on page 25 and its specified content is on page 26.

Paper 1 mark schemes, 2018 to 2024, all 48 of them. The Question 15 and Question 16 slot, the count of 25 papers setting this Key Question and the finding that all 25 were Question 16, the question families in section 12, and every agency description, figure, name and credited argument in sections 5 to 11 that is not attributed to Paper 4. The two exceptions to the Question 15 and Question 16 split are a June 2018 paper and a November 2022 paper.

Paper 4 mark schemes, 2018 to 2024. Questions 7 and 8, the 2024 format change, and the fuller figures: the PWA totals and the schools and hospitals proportions, the WPA total and budget and the funding gap between North and South, the FERA budget, the CCC figures including the 15,000 Native Americans, the CWA figures, the piglets and acreage, the RA's half a million families, the bank closure proportion and the redeposit figure, Harry Hopkins, the Brains Trust, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Securities Exchange Commission, the Beer and Wine Act, the Liberty League's founding year, Huey Long's supporter figure, the National Union for Social Justice, and the fullest statements of the argument that the war rather than the New Deal ended the Depression.

Principal Examiner reports, 2018 to 2024. Section 14, and the finding in section 3 that Question 16 is usually given no comment at all. The recurring sentence about too few responses for meaningful comments covers Question 13 upwards in most series.

How Cambridge marks History 0470 Paper 1, on this site, for everything about the marking of the paper. None of it is repeated here.

What is not from a Cambridge document. Three things, and they are marked as such where they appear. The division of the undivided specified content into the parts belonging to each Key Question is a reading of the printed list, not a Cambridge statement, and the Hundred Days bullet genuinely straddles the boundary. The finding that Question 15 and Question 16 have divided by period rather than by Key Question number is a count of the corpus, and Cambridge publishes no such table. And the judgement sentences in section 13 are worked models, not quotations.

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