Roosevelt was focused on the three R's, Relief, Recovery, and Reform. His first goal was to pass programs to provide relief to the millions out of work, homeless, and impoverished around the nation.

The CCC was a jobs program designed to take in single unemployed men 28 and younger. They were put to work on infrastructure projects around the nation on government land. The idea was that these men would have a bed and meals fed to them, as well as a small paycheck, which would help them, and the government benefited because they had large projects done by these workers.

The Eighteenth Amendment, better known as prohibition, was repealed in 1933 by FDR. This law had been in place for 13 years by the time FDR repealed it. He felt that the people of the U.S. were not heeding the law, and it was causing the government to lose out of tax income, so it would be better to repeal it and allow government oversight.

The Social Security Act was made to provide for people who were deemed to be part of at risk or vulnerable populations. These were the elderly, widows, fatherless children, the poor, and the unemployed.

The SEC was, and remains, responsible for making sure nobody is tampering with the stock exchange and other exchanges. The idea was that because the stock market had previously had no overseers, this caused the system to run amok, causing the crash that started the depression. The SEC was made to make sure this did not happen again (even though it totally did).

The TVA was an organization that built hydroelectric dams, created flood controls, and modernized society along the Tennessee River. All of these projects led to greater economic opportunity for the people of Tennessee, Georgia, Virginia, Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky, and North Carolina.

The Purpose of the Homeowners Loan Corporation was to take over the many home loans that were in default across the nation. They did this by refinancing the loans so the home owner could repay the bank, and have more agreeable loan conditions from the government.

In the 1800's and early 1900's people had attempted to create unions, only to be met by violence on the part of factory owners, management, and the police; however, in 1935 FDR changed this when he passed the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, which made the formation of unions an accepted practice.

FDR kept meeting resistance to his New Deal plan from the Supreme Court. Many of the justices on the court were left over from the 12 years of Republican Presidents that came before him. In order to change the makeup of the court to favor his policies he proposed a law that would expand the number of justices to a number that would give him the votes needed to prevent the court from overruling his policies.

Due to the long names of these new organizations their names were often shortened into acronyms. This meant the names were broken down to a jumble of letters. As such the nickname of alphabet soup began to stick.