Indisputably, the Great Depression, which began with October 29, 1929 stock market crash and created a need for the subsequent extensive New Deal legislation of the 1930's, changed America's public and private sectors, and American citizens' expectations of their government, for the rest of the 20th century and beyond. Thus New Deal legislation and programs greatly altered the existing relationship between American citizens and their government, as well as between public and private sectors of American life. Earlier, (and throughout U.S. history up to this point) the United States government had been far more limited, in its ability to shape economic and social policies, programs, and changes. However, the great Depression and the subsequent New Deal programs, policies, and social changes that sprang from it, helped create powerful labor unions; and ushered in farm subsidies; and government-sponsored projects like the WPA and the TVA. .

             During the dozen or so years between the beginning of the Great Depression and America's entry, in 1941, into World War II, Americans came to expect much more, as a result of the Great Depression and its aftermath, from their federal government. The mood of the relatively prosperous, free-wheeling 1920's, a comparatively ebullient decade leading up to the stock market crash, had been extremely business-oriented (Calvin Coolidge and then Herbert Hoover, both pro-business Republicans, preceded Franklin D. Roosevelt into the White House). The dominant American mood of the 1920's was quite the opposite of the 1930's, and in the 1920's, the strong national feeling was that everyone should (and could and would) shift for himself or herself; to not do so was contrary to the American spirit of individual independence and self-sufficiency.

             But the Great Depression and the New Deal quickly led to radical changes in that perspective as it grew increasingly clear that all too many Americans simply could no longer provide for themselves.