an essay of new deal

The New Deal — A Guide to FDR’s Plan for Relief, Recovery, and Reform

The New Deal was a series of programs and policies implemented in the 1930s by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in response to severe economic and social issues in the United States.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1944. Image Source: FDR Presidential Library & Museum on Flickr .

New Deal Summary

The New Deal was a series of programs and policies implemented in the 1930s by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt — commonly referred to as FDR — in response to severe economic and social issues in the United States. Each New Deal program and policy fell into one or more of three areas, known as the “Three Rs” — Relief, Recovery, and Reform.

At the end of the Roaring Twenties, the 1929 Stock Market Crash triggered the Great Depression started when the stock market crashed in 1929. Starting in 1931, the southwestern Great Plains suffered from a severe drought, which led to massive dust storms. The area was called “The Dust Bowl” and thousands of people were forced to abandon their homes and move west. In the wake of these events, Roosevelt ran for President in 1932, promising a “New Deal” for Americans, and defeated incumbent Herbert Hoover.

Roosevelt was inaugurated on March 4, 1933. In his First Inaugural Address, he delivered the famous line, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” FDR moved quickly to ease the effects of the Depression on Americans by passing New Deal legislation during “The First Hundred Days” of his Presidency.

FDR started by restoring faith in banks, which had suffered due to the stock market crash of 1929. A Bank Holiday was declared and Congress followed by passing the Emergency Banking Relief Act, which allowed the government to inspect the financial health of banks before allowing them to reopen.

The New Deal aimed to tackle unemployment by creating programs that provided job opportunities. The Civil Works Administration (CWA) and the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) employed millions of Americans to work on infrastructure projects, such as building roads, bridges, and schools. Other programs, like the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), developed hydroelectric power plants to bring electricity to communities where none existed.

The New Deal also addressed labor relations by passing the National Labor Relations Act — also known as the (Wagner Act). It protected the rights of workers, allowing them to join unions and engage in collective bargaining. The act also established the Fair Labor Standards Act, which set a minimum wage for workers.

The New Deal programs and policies created a significant expansion of the Federal government. They also redefined the government’s role in dealing with economic and social issues. The New Deal was controversial when it was implemented, and its legacy continues to be debated by historians, economists, and others. However, the significance of the New Deal and its impact on the United States during the era leading up to World War II cannot be denied.

What did the New Deal do?

This video from the Daily Bellringer provides an overview of the New Deal and its programs. It also touches on the controversy caused by the New Deal which was caused by the expansion of the Federal Government.

New Deal Facts

• The name “New Deal” came from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1932 acceptance speech for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. In the speech, he said, “I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people.”
• The New Deal was designed to deal with the economic and social issues created by the 1929 Stock Market Crash, the Great Depression, and the Dust Bow.
• On March 4, 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected President. He gave a speech on Capitol Plaza in Washington DC to 100,000 people. He said the “only thing we should be afraid of is fear itself.”
• He took action right away by calling Congress into a special session known as “The Hundred Days,” during which legislation was passed to deal with the Depression and provide economic aid to struggling Americans.
• In an effort to restore the public’s confidence in banks, FDR declared a Bank Holiday and Congress passed the Emergency Banking Relief Act.
• The New Deal dealt with unemployment by creating programs like the Civil Works Administration (CWA) and the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), providing jobs for millions of Americans and improving the nation’s infrastructure.
• The New Deal was followed by the Second New Deal, which included the National Labor Relations Act, the  Works Progress Administration, and the Social Security Act.
• The New Deal also included labor-related legislation, such as the National Labor Relations Act (Wagner Act) and the Fair Labor Standards Act, which gave workers the right to join unions, negotiate collectively, and established a minimum wage.
• The New Deal paved the way for the repeal of the 18th Amendment, which established Prohibition. The Beer-Wine Revenue Act of 1933 amended the Volstead Act by raising the amount of alcohol allowed to 3.2 percent and also levied a tax.
• Social programs established by the New Deal are still in effect today, including Social Security and the “Food Stamp Plan.”

New Deal AP US History (APUSH) Terms, Definitions, and FAQs

This section provides terms, definitions, and Frequently Asked Questions about the New Deal and the Second New Deal, including people, events, and programs. Also, be sure to look at our Guide to the AP US History Exam .

The New Deal was a series of policies and programs implemented by President Franklin D. Roosevelt during the 1930s in response to the Great Depression. The New Deal aimed to provide relief to the unemployed and poor, promote economic recovery, and reform the financial system. The New Deal included programs such as the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), and the National Recovery Administration (NRA). It also created numerous agencies and programs such as the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), and the Social Security Administration.

The second phase of the New Deal, which was enacted in 1935. The Second New Deal focused on providing economic security to Americans through the creation of Social Security and other welfare programs. It also included measures to stimulate the economy, such as the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). The Second New Deal was instrumental in helping to alleviate poverty and providing employment opportunities during the Great Depression.

FDR’s Alphabet Soup refers to the numerous programs and agencies created during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency as part of the New Deal. These initiatives, often known by their acronyms, aimed to provide relief, recovery, and reform during the Great Depression. Examples include the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps), the TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority), and the WPA (Works Progress Administration).

The New Deal was a series of economic programs and reforms enacted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Great Depression. The New Deal sought to provide relief, recovery, and reform to the American economy. It included programs such as Social Security, the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), and the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). These programs were instrumental in helping to protect workers’ rights and providing employment opportunities during the Great Depression. However, the New Deal was controversial, with some arguing it was a “raw deal” for workers and others arguing that it helped to alleviate the suffering of millions of Americans.

The three Rs of the New Deal were 1) Relief for the needy, 2) Recovery of the economy, and 3) Reform of the financial system. Each of the New Deal Programs generally fell into one of these areas. The goal of the three Rs was to keep the United States from falling into another Economic Depression.

New Deal People and Groups

Herbert Hoover — Herbert Hoover served as the 31st President of the United States from 1929 to 1933. He faced the immense challenges of the Great Depression and was criticized for his belief in limited government intervention. Despite his efforts to address the crisis, Hoover’s presidency is often associated with economic hardships and the initial response to the Depression.

John L. Lewis — An American labor leader who was instrumental in the formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1935. He was a key figure in the Second New Deal and helped to pass the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). He was also responsible for leading several major strikes during the Great Depression, including the United Mine Workers strike of 1934. Lewis worked to protect workers’ rights and provide employment opportunities during the Great Depression.

Franklin D. Roosevelt — Franklin D. Roosevelt was the 32nd President of the United States, serving from 1933 to 1945. He was elected to the presidency during the Great Depression, and his presidency is closely associated with the New Deal, a series of policies and programs aimed at addressing the economic crisis and promoting economic recovery. He was re-elected for an unprecedented four terms and his leadership during the Great Depression and World War II solidified the role of the Federal government in the American economy and society.

Eleanor Roosevelt — The wife of Franklin D. Roosevelt and one of the most influential First Ladies in American history. She was an advocate for civil rights and women’s rights, and she used her position to promote social reform.

FDR’s Brain Trust — A group of advisors to President Franklin D. Roosevelt who helped him develop the New Deal. They included prominent academics and intellectuals such as Raymond Moley, Rexford Tugwell, and Adolf Berle.

New Deal Democrats —  New Deal Democrats were a faction within the Democratic Party during the 1930s and 1940s that supported Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal policies. These Democrats supported increasing government intervention in the economy and expanding social welfare programs.

United Mine Workers — A labor union that was formed in 1890. The union was instrumental in the formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1935 and led several major strikes during the Great Depression, including the United Mine Workers strike of 1934.

Hundred Days Congress — The Hundred Days Congress was a special session of the United States Congress that ran from March 9 to June 16, 1933. It was called in response to the economic crisis of the Great Depression and was used to pass a number of laws known as the New Deal. During this period, President Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed a series of sweeping reforms designed to provide relief for those affected by the depression, as well as to stimulate the economy. The Hundred Days Congress passed a number of laws, including the Emergency Banking Relief Act, the Glass-Steagall Act, and the National Industrial Recovery Act.

New Deal Events

1932 Presidential Election — The 1932 Presidential Election marked a pivotal moment in American history as the nation grappled with the Great Depression. It was primarily a contest between Republican incumbent Herbert Hoover and Democratic candidate Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR). FDR emerged victorious, promising a “New Deal” to combat the Depression and implementing a series of reforms that fundamentally reshaped the role of the federal government.

Bank Holiday — A bank holiday is a period of time during which banks are closed, usually by government order. In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared a national bank holiday in order to address the banking crisis caused by the Great Depression. During the holiday, which lasted four days, the government examined the books of all banks and only those that were found to be sound were allowed to reopen. This action helped stabilize the banking system and restore public confidence in banks.

Fireside Chats — The Fireside Chats were a series of radio addresses given by President Franklin D. Roosevelt during his presidency. The chats were designed to provide the American people with information about the government’s policies and actions and to explain the reasoning behind them in plain language. The chats were informal and conversational in tone, and they were delivered from the White House, often in the evening, giving the impression that Roosevelt was speaking directly to the American people from the warmth and comfort of their own homes. The Fireside Chats were a powerful tool for Roosevelt to communicate with the American people, build public support for his policies and maintain public confidence during a time of economic crisis.

Great Depression — The Great Depression refers to the severe economic downturn that occurred in the United States and other countries during the 1930s. It was characterized by widespread unemployment, poverty, and a sharp decline in industrial production and trade—ultimately leading to a fundamental restructuring of the American economy and significant social and political changes.

Roosevelt Recession — A period of economic contraction that occurred during the Great Depression, starting in 1937 and lasting until 1938. It was caused by a combination of factors, including President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s decision to reduce government spending, an increase in taxes, and the Federal Reserve’s decision to raise interest rates. This resulted in a decrease in consumer spending and investment, leading to a decrease in economic activity. The Roosevelt Recession was a major setback for the New Deal and led to increased unemployment and poverty.

United Mine Workers Strike of 1934 — A major strike led by the United Mine Workers Union during the Great Depression. The strike was in response to wage cuts and other grievances. It lasted for several months and resulted in a victory for the miners, who were able to secure higher wages and better working conditions.

New Deal Programs

Agricultural Adjustment Act (1933) — A law passed by Congress in 1933 as part of the New Deal. The AAA was designed to help farmers by providing subsidies for reducing crop production and encouraging soil conservation. It also established the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), which was responsible for implementing the provisions of the act. The AAA was instrumental in helping to stabilize agricultural prices and providing economic relief to farmers during the Great Depression.

Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) — The CCC provided employment for young men between the ages of 18 and 25, who were paid to work on conservation projects such as planting trees, building roads, and constructing dams. The CCC also provided educational opportunities for its workers, including classes in literacy, math, and vocational skills. The CCC was instrumental in helping to restore the environment and providing employment opportunities during the Great Depression.

Civil Works Administration (CWA) — An agency created by the Federal Emergency Relief Act of 1933 as part of the New Deal. The CWA was responsible for providing jobs to millions of Americans during the Great Depression. It provided employment in construction, repair, and maintenance projects such as building roads, bridges, and public buildings. The CWA was instrumental in helping to alleviate poverty and providing employment opportunities during the Great Depression.

Emergency Banking Relief Act (1933) — A law passed by Congress in 1933 which allowed the federal government to provide emergency loans to banks in order to stabilize the banking system. The act was part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and was designed to restore public confidence in the banking system. It provided for the reopening of solvent banks, the reorganization of insolvent banks, and the establishment of a Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) to insure deposits up to $2,500. The act was instrumental in helping to stabilize the banking system during the Great Depression and restoring public confidence in banks.

Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) — An independent agency of the United States government created in 1933 as part of the New Deal. The FDIC provides insurance for deposits up to a certain amount in member banks, protecting depositors from losses due to bank failures. The FDIC also regulates and supervises financial institutions to ensure that they are operating safely and soundly. It is one of the most important financial regulatory agencies in the United States and has helped to restore public confidence in the banking system.

Federal Emergency Relief Act (1933) — A law passed by Congress in 1933 as part of the New Deal. The FERA provided federal funds to states and local governments to create relief programs for the unemployed. It also established the Civil Works Administration (CWA), which was responsible for providing jobs to millions of Americans during the Great Depression. The FERA was instrumental in helping to alleviate poverty and providing employment opportunities during the Great Depression.

Federal Housing Administration (FHA) — An agency created by the National Housing Act of 1934 as part of the New Deal. The FHA was responsible for providing mortgage insurance to lenders, which allowed them to make home loans with lower down payments and easier credit requirements. This helped to increase homeownership and provided jobs to thousands of Americans during the Great Depression. The FHA helped stabilize the housing market and provide employment opportunities during the Great Depression.

Glass-Steagall Act (1933) — The Glass-Steagall Act was a law passed by Congress in 1933 as part of the New Deal. It was designed to separate commercial and investment banking, and it prohibited banks from engaging in certain types of speculative investments. The act also established the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), which provided insurance for bank deposits up to a certain amount. The Glass-Steagall Act helped restore public confidence in the banking system and prevent another financial crisis.

National Industrial Recovery Act (1933) —  The National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) was a law passed by Congress in 1933 as part of the New Deal. It was designed to stimulate economic growth by providing government assistance to businesses, setting minimum wages and maximum hours for workers, and establishing codes of fair competition. The NIRA also established the National Recovery Administration (NRA), which was responsible for enforcing the provisions of the act. The NIRA was eventually declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1935.

The Public Works Administration (PWA) — An agency created by the National Recovery Administration of 1933 as part of the New Deal. The PWA was responsible for providing jobs to millions of Americans during the Great Depression. It provided employment in construction, repair, and maintenance projects such as building roads, bridges, and public buildings. The PWA played an important role in helping to alleviate poverty and providing employment opportunities during the Great Depression.

The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) — An agency created by the Tennessee Valley Authority Act of 1933 as part of the New Deal. The TVA was responsible for developing the infrastructure and resources of the Tennessee Valley region, including hydroelectric power, flood control, navigation, reforestation, and soil conservation. It also provided jobs to thousands of Americans during the Great Depression. The TVA played an important role in helping modernize the region and providing employment opportunities during the Great Depression.

Second New Deal Programs

Committee for Industrial Organizations (CIO) — An organization formed in 1935 as part of the Second New Deal. The CIO was responsible for organizing workers into unions and bargaining collectively with employers.

Fair Labor Standards Act (1938) — An act passed in 1938 as part of the Second New Deal. The Fair Labor Standards Act was responsible for establishing a minimum wage, overtime pay, and other labor standards.

National Labor Relations Act (1935) — An act passed in 1935 as part of the Second New Deal. The NLRA was responsible for protecting the rights of workers to organize and bargain collectively with their employers. It also established the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which was responsible for enforcing the provisions of the act.

Social Security Act (1935) — An act passed as part of the Second New Deal. The Social Security Act was responsible for providing economic security to Americans through the establishment of a federal retirement program and other welfare programs. It also provided unemployment insurance and disability benefits.

Wagner Act — Also known as the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), it was passed in 1935 as part of the Second New Deal. The Wagner Act was responsible for protecting the rights of workers to organize and bargain collectively with their employers. It also established the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which was responsible for enforcing the provisions of the act.

Works Progress Administration (WPA) — An agency created by the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935 as part of the Second New Deal. The WPA was responsible for providing jobs to millions of Americans during the Great Depression. It funded a variety of projects, including construction, infrastructure development, and arts and culture programs. The WPA was instrumental in helping to stimulate the economy and providing employment opportunities during the Great Depression.

More New Deal Terms and Definitions

21st Amendment — The amendment to the U.S. Constitution that repealed the 18th Amendment and ended Prohibition. The 21st Amendment was ratified in 1933 as part of the New Deal and allowed states to regulate the sale and consumption of alcohol within their borders. It also gave states the power to collect taxes on alcohol sales, which provided a much-needed source of revenue during the Great Depression.

Boondoggling — A term coined by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to describe wasteful government spending on public works projects. The term was used to criticize the New Deal programs, which were seen as a form of government waste and corruption. Boondoggling became a popular term during the Great Depression and is still used today to refer to any wasteful or unnecessary government spending.

Tennessee River Valley — The Tennessee River Valley refers to the region in the southeastern United States encompassing parts of Tennessee, Alabama, and Kentucky. It gained prominence during the New Deal era due to the establishment of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), a federal agency tasked with developing the area’s water resources, controlling flooding, and promoting economic development through hydroelectric power generation and irrigation projects.

National Parks — National Parks are protected areas designated by the federal government to preserve and showcase the country’s natural, historical, and cultural heritage. These areas, managed by the National Park Service, offer opportunities for recreation, conservation, and education. Notable examples include Yellowstone, Yosemite, and the Grand Canyon. National Parks serve as significant landmarks and contribute to the nation’s tourism industry and environmental conservation efforts.

Why is the New Deal important?

The New Deal is important to United States history for several reasons:

1. Response to the Great Depression: The New Deal was a direct response to the economic crisis of the Great Depression, which was one of the most challenging periods in American history. It represented a major shift in the role of the federal government in addressing economic issues and providing relief to citizens.

2. Economic Recovery and Relief: The New Deal implemented a range of programs and policies aimed at stabilizing the economy, creating jobs, and providing relief to those affected by the Great Depression. It helped alleviate immediate suffering and provided assistance to millions of Americans through employment, financial aid, and social welfare programs.

3. Expansion of Federal Government Power: The New Deal marked a significant expansion of the federal government’s role in regulating the economy and addressing social issues. It introduced new agencies and programs, such as the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and Social Security, that had long-lasting impacts on American society and established a precedent for increased government intervention in the economy.

4. Transformation of American Society: The New Deal’s programs had a transformative effect on American society. It brought about improvements in infrastructure, public works, and conservation projects, enhancing the nation’s physical landscape. It also introduced labor reforms, such as the right to unionize and the establishment of minimum wage standards, which aimed to improve working conditions and workers’ rights.

5. Legacy and Long-Term Impacts: Many of the programs and policies initiated during the New Deal era had lasting impacts on American society. Social Security, for example, continues to provide financial security to elderly and disabled Americans. The New Deal also shaped the political landscape, as the Democratic Party under FDR gained support from various social groups and established a coalition that would dominate American politics for decades.

• Written by Randal Rust

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What Was the New Deal?

The New Deal was the effort by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who took office in 1933, to respond to the calamity of the Great Depression and alleviate the despair besetting America.  FDR and the New Dealers launched scores of new programs to respond to a wide range of problems facing the country: stabilizing the banks and stimulating the economy, creating jobs and raising wages, investing in public works and modernizing lagging regions, and giving ordinary Americans a new sense of security and hope.  The New Deal lasted until American entry into the Second World War at the end of 1942.  In ten years it transformed the country and restored our faith in the ability of government to serve the people.

Economic Recovery

National output had fallen by one-third from 1929 to 1933 and thousands of banks had collapsed, taking households savings with them.  The New Deal stabilized the banks and cleaned up the financial mess left over from the Stock Market crash, allowing credit to flow again.  It stabilized farm prices, aided state and local governments, and injected a surge of federal spending into the economy that bolstered household incomes and business revenues. Growth rebounded to annual rates hitting 10% and by 1939 national income was back to the level of 1929.

Jobs, Wages and Income Security

By 1933, one in four Americans was out of work by 1933 (one in three in the private sector) – roughly 15 million workers. The New Deal created a multitude of agencies that provided over 10 million jobs for the unemployed, whose wages saved millions of families from destitution. Unemployment was reduced to 10%  by 1942.  The rights of workers to organize was recognized, leading to a huge surge in union membership and rising wages, and a federal minimum wage was introduced.  The Social Security system was begun to support pensions for seniors, along with support for mothers with children.

Public Works and Modernization

The New Deal used an array of federal agencies, local governments, and private contractors to upgrade and expand the nation’s infrastructure.  It built hundreds of thousands of new roads, bridges, and tunnels; city halls, libraries and post offices; hospitals, schools and auditoriums; dams, water works and sewage systems; and airports, parks and military installations. It spread these improvements across the country, bringing lagging regions into the 20th century with paved roads, electric wires and telephone lines.  These massive waves of public investment helped to underwrite the war effort and postwar prosperity.  Because it was well built, most New Deal infrastructure is still in use today.

Civic Uplift

The New Deal touched every state, city, and town, improving the lives of ordinary people and reshaping the public sphere.  New Dealers and the men and women who worked on New Deal programs believed they were not only serving their families and communities, but building the foundation for a great and caring society.

In less than a decade, the New Deal changed the face of America and laid the foundation for success in World War II and the prosperity of the postwar era – the greatest and fairest epoch in American history.  Most of all, the New Deal inspired a civic, cultural, and economic renaissance.

Unfortunately, the New Deal is fading from the collective memory of Americans — a casualty of time, neglect, and politics.  The Living New Deal is making visible that enduring legacy.

To find out more, click below for briefs on New Deal programs, New Deal leaders, New Deal Inclusion and The New Deal Worked, as well as a timeline of the New Deal. You can also use the pull down menu under “History” on any page .

New Deal Programs

New Deal Timeline

New Dealers

New Deal Inclusion

The New Deal Worked

For a further introduction, see:

The First New Deal    – a lecture powerpoint by Richard A Walker (2019)

New Deal in Brief  by Richard A Walker (2011)

R. Walker & G. Brechin, The Living New Deal: the Unsung Benefits of the New Deal for the United States and California (2010)

Living New Deal. Still Working for America.

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• The New Deal

Roosevelt Election

In 1928, Herbert Hoover ran for office at the height of American prosperity. He promised "a chicken in every pot," and there was every indication he could deliver. A short four years later, the nation had plummeted to the depths of its worst depression, and the electorate was angry. In spite of scorching criticism, Hoover wanted to see his recovery programs given more time to work, so he sought a second term as president. Indeed, no other Republican was enthusiastic about being drafted into the seemingly hopeless 1932 presidential race.

Hoover found himself pitted against Democratic nominee Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), governor of New York State. Besides being a Democrat, which in this election was a benefit, Roosevelt was blessed with charm, wit, intelligence, and self-assurance. He was also a mesmerizing speaker, which in this era of the radio was crucially important. Roosevelt had a resonant voice and a gift for employing phrases that struck a strong chord with his listeners. In a campaign speech, he used the term "forgotten man," and in his nomination acceptance speech he pledged "a new deal for the American people." These simple descriptors were exactly right for the time and place and contributed greatly to his success.

Although no spendthrift in normal times, Roosevelt's liberal use of government resources to deal with the depression as governor of New York was in his favor. Roosevelt felt the needs of people took precedence over a strict budget in times of hardship. As governor, he had opened the state's coffers in relief of those hardest hit by unemployment and bank closings. After his nomination, Roosevelt went on the stump with speeches and "whistlestop tours" to vigorously campaign for the presidency.

Following a nearly fatal bout with polio in 1921, Franklin Roosevelt had been confined to a wheelchair. He spent years trying to recuperate from the illness and its terrible effects. Though fortunate to be able to afford the intensive and prolonged physical therapy that was successful in restoring a small portion of mobility to his affected muscles, the lingering paralysis in Roosevelt's legs would not allow him to stand on his own or even to walk with metal braces.

Understanding the importance of projecting a strong and vital appearance in the frightening times of the depression, Roosevelt and his staff were careful that voters only see him, whether in person or in a photograph, either sitting in an ordinary chair or standing with unobtrusive support, such as an aide or a podium. A sympathetic press abstained from dwelling on his infirmity, and his political opponents wisely refrained from making an issue of his misfortune. As a testament to his resilience and strength of character, Roosevelt was never prevented from fulfilling the duties of the office of president due to his disability. According to long-time friends and acquaintances, meeting the challenge of polio conferred on him a remarkable degree of tenacity, sympathy, and tolerance—traits that were desperately needed in the depression years and perhaps even more in the war years to follow.

Roosevelt's wife, Eleanor, aided him immeasurably throughout his political career from the time he served in the New York legislature, through his years as assistant secretary of the Navy, and during his governorship of New York. Unstinting in her campaign efforts on his behalf during the presidential election, she later influenced her husband in shaping the programs of the New Deal. Even more than her husband, Eleanor Roosevelt championed the poor, the oppressed, and the dispossessed. Her genuine and heartfelt concern for the plight of unemployed and hungry Americans during the depression endeared her to the American people, while her intelligence and tireless advocacy impressed even her husband's enemies.

The presidential campaign of 1932 was a study in contrasts. Roosevelt was bold, energetic, optimistic, and campaigned vigorously. He promised a new deal, but was vague about the specifics. He assured voters that he would balance the budget, though not how that could be accomplished. Many of his speeches were written for him by the "Brain Trust," a group of young college professors with innovative ideas about the economy and government. Though the path ahead was not clear, even perhaps in Roosevelt's mind, the country was restless for change, and Roosevelt and the Democrats could give it to them.

By comparison, Hoover and the Republicans were overwhelmed by the enormity and intractability of the depression. Until the last several weeks of the campaign, Hoover put in long hours in his office attempting to hold back a complete economic collapse. At last he was persuaded to take time off to campaign, but by then he was exhausted and discouraged. Crowds were either hostile or apathetic toward the measures Hoover had taken and the dangers he perceived in Roosevelt's aggressive approach to spending and relief. Hoover's philosophy of "rugged individualism" seemed to be just empty advice in those times when people needed opportunities to work and help just to survive.

To no one's surprise, Roosevelt won easily, taking even a large portion of the black vote, which had traditionally gone to Republicans in loyalty to Abraham Lincoln. During the lame duck period between election day in November and the presidential inauguration in March, Hoover's hands were tied, preventing him from taking any action as the depression steadily deepened with ever more unemployed workers and closed banks. By the time Roosevelt took office, 25 percent of the workforce was idle—50 percent in many cities—and eight out of ten banks had closed their doors.

Roosevelt began his presidency March 4, 1933, with a ringing speech from the inauguration platform in which he pledged a New Deal for the American people and cautioned them against giving in to fear. Immediately thereafter he began instituting a series of bold, nearly revolutionary reforms. On March 6, 1933, he closed the banks and announced a bank holiday. This gave banks relief from the threat of ruinous runs, but sent anxiety through the country as people wondered how safe their money was and what powers the government might give itself in the name of emergency.

On March 9, Roosevelt called a special session of Congress to deal with the banking crisis. Congress immediately passed the Emergency Banking Relief Act that allowed the president to regulate banking transactions and foreign exchange and to reopen those banks that were still solvent. Several months later, Congress passed the Glass-Steagall Banking Reform Act that created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which initially insured deposits up to $5,000.

In the first of his half-hour "fireside chats" via radio, Roosevelt reassured the American people that their money was now safer in a bank vault than under their mattress or in other less-than-safe places in their home. With these kinds of assurances and legislative guarantees to back them up, people's faith in the banking system was largely restored. Banks could now reopen their doors without fear of a run, and individuals and companies began depositing their money in banks again. Even so, many Americans who lived through those times harbored a deep distrust of banks and were slow to resume using a bank as a safe repository for their money.

Next, Roosevelt moved to separate the nation's currency from the stranglehold of being tied to a single commodity—gold. Both the value and the availability of gold fluctuated too much to support a modern economy. During the depression, people hoarded gold as a hedge against the possible failure of the dollar and banks. As gold became scarce, the value of the dollar rose causing deflation, which left debtors to repay loans in more valuable dollars. In addition, goods that had cost a fixed amount to produce now brought in fewer dollars on the marketplace.

Roosevelt's solution was to order all gold to be exchanged at the Treasury for paper currency. In addition, all contracts that contained a payment-in-gold clause were required to cancel that provision. To get more currency into the economy, the Treasury paid a premium price for gold on a sliding scale from $21 an ounce in 1933 to $35 an ounce in 1934. At this high price, people were eager to cash in their gold coins, though conservative economists criticized the president for manipulating the value of money by "running the printing presses" and creating inflation. Roosevelt's aim, however, was reform of banking and the money supply with the goal of a managed currency that would remain relatively stable and dependable regardless of the fluctuations of the precious metals market.

In 1934, the U.S. returned to a gold standard on a very limited basis with regard to international trade. Because foreign sellers sometimes required gold rather than dollars, they could request payment in gold at the rate of $35 per ounce. But within the United States, paper currency became the only legal method of payment for all debts. As the Greenback Party had wanted 50 years before, America was off the gold standard.

Following the Emergency Banking Relief Act, Roosevelt and his advisors crafted a deluge of legislation, which Congress passed with few alterations. Roosevelt retained the "Brain Trust" of his election days as his advisors and cabinet members in departure from the usual president's cabinet that was made up of politicians and businessmen. Notable cabinet members and members of Roosevelt's "inner circle" included Secretary of State Cordell Hull, Secretary of Interior Harold Idkes, Secretary of Labor and first woman cabinet member Frances Perkins, Roosevelt's friend Harry Hopkins, and his wife, Eleanor.

Relief, recovery, and reform were the goals of the New Deal legislation that was passed from 1933 through 1935. Because of the immediacy of need, relief and recovery were the priorities for the first 100 days of the new Congress from March 9 to June16, 1933. Roosevelt did not have a developed plan when he took office, however. His aim was to seek practical solutions to real-world problems, and he did it on a broad scale in departure from the previous practice of legislating either general guideline laws or very specific laws to address closely defined problems. Along with programs of the New Deal, Congress approved legislation that gave the president powers unprecedented in American history.

The creation of multitudes of programs was a wholly new phenomenon in America. To communicate with the American people and reassure them about the blizzard of changes, Roosevelt regularly addressed the nation via radio in his informal fireside chats. This in itself was a novelty, but in these distressed times people took great comfort from hearing the genial FDR tell them that things were on the way to being better.

Due to the haste of their creation, the track record of these first programs was uneven, and some were notably more successful than others. Many of the programs overlapped in their areas of concern, some contradicted one another, and a few produced negative results. From a psychological perspective, however, this flurry of activity was what the country needed. Something was being done, and with new optimism people pulled themselves out of lethargy and things began to happen.

Economists debate whether Roosevelt's programs or the natural progress of the economic cycle played a greater role in getting the country on the road to recovery. But the lasting legacy of the New Deal was to reinstate a Progressive stamp on national politics and to temper traditional American laissez-faire with enough regulation to moderate the boom-and-bust cycles characteristic of capitalism.

Throughout World War I and the booming twenties, Progressives had been forced to keep a low profile on social reform. With the election of a Democratic Congress and president, the Progressives and their liberal heirs were quick to link the economic disaster of the depression with what they saw as social ills. Part of their agenda, including unemployment insurance, a minimum wage, and child labor laws, clearly had both social and economic aspects. In other areas, such as conservation, old-age insurance (social security), and direct relief to individuals (welfare), the benefit was less clearly tied to the overall economic well-being of the nation and more to the social agenda of the movement.

Eager to promote programs that would get more currency into circulation, Roosevelt welcomed the often-expensive Progressive agenda. Critics warned that once these programs were in place and part of the landscape of American life, they would become entrenched. Indeed this has been the case as most Americans now expect unemployment benefits if they are laid off, social security benefits at retirement age, and a safety net of welfare and social services in the event that they should need them. The majority of Americans agree that these measures have generally been for the better, though debate is far from over concerning their ultimate effects. For better or worse, the New Deal irrevocably altered the culture as well as the business of the United States.

New Deal Programs

With unemployment the highest it had ever been in the nation's history, the most pressing problem facing Roosevelt when he took office was to get people back to work. His first request to Congress was for the Unemployment Relief Act, which created the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). Over the course of its existence, the CCC employed some three million young men on conservation projects such as flood control, draining swamps, and planting trees. The CCC did more than just provide jobs—it kept many young men off the streets and gave them hope and dignity. CCC employees were not only able to earn money for themselves, but part of their pay was sent to their parents, so the benefit was spread to their families and ultimately to the economy. CCC workers were given uniforms, housed in barracks, and fed regular meals. Critics complained about the militarization of America's youth, but many CCC workers would have gone without the basic necessities of food, shelter, and clothing without this program.

To assist families and adult unemployed workers, Congress passed the Federal Emergency Relief Act (FERA), which gave $3 billion to states to be used as welfare and to supplement work projects. Harry L. Hopkins, a New York social worker, was put in charge of the agency. Roosevelt also ordered the Civil Works Administration (CWA) as a sub-agency of FERA. The CWA provided strictly temporary jobs, many of them inconsequential in nature, in order to help people through the winter of 1933 to 1934. While the CCC and FERA had both relief and recovery aims, the CWA was designed solely for relief.

Farmers and homeowners were also in desperate need of assistance. The Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) and the Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC) provided millions of dollars in mortgage assistance so families could keep their homes and farms. Secondarily, mortgage-holding banks were saved from huge losses and in some cases even collapse with mortgage holders once again being able to make their payments. As with the CCC and FERA, these mortgage assistance agencies were for both immediate relief and longer-term recovery.

In addition, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration was created to maintain farm income. The agency's strategy was to reduce the supply in the market by paying farmers to decrease their acreage under production. The government also bought surpluses and destroyed them, to the chagrin of people who could not afford food. The scheme was to be paid for by taxes on food processors such as grain mills and slaughterhouses, who would pass on the increases to the public.

In Butler v. U.S. in 1935, the Supreme Court ruled the government's method of taxation unconstitutional and the AAA program was scrapped. In its place, the government created the Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act of 1936 where the government paid farmers to allow some of their land to lie fallow or to plant part of their acreage in soil-conserving crops such as beans or buckwheat. In 1938, it followed up with the Second Agricultural Adjustment Act with the goal to support farm prices and restore farm income to be on a par with the incomes of other segments of society.

As if nature had joined in a conspiracy against the American economy, the 1930s witnessed a devastating drought in the region drained by the Mississippi River. Conditions were so dry that the especially hard-hit areas of eastern Colorado and western Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska were called the Dust Bowl. Farming there became virtually impossible as the land turned to desert. Most of the region's farming population headed west in the great migration memorialized by John Steinbeck in his 1939 classic, Grapes of Wrath.

The Roosevelt administration endeavored to deal with in the problems caused by the Dust Bowl by sending to Congress the Frazier-Lemke Farm Bankruptcy Act of 1934, which mandated a suspension of mortgage foreclosures for five years. The Supreme Court struck down the Frazier-Lemke Act, but Congress passed an amended act that forestalled foreclosures for three years. In 1935, the government created the Resettlement Administration to assist Dust Bowl farmers with relocating to better land. Meanwhile, CCC workers planted 200 million seedling trees in the Dust Bowl region as windbreaks. The rains began to fall again by the 1940s, but after the 50-year experiment in farming this fragile area, much of it was returned to grazing because the tough prairie grasses hold the soil during the cyclical droughts that plague the region.

Along with banking and unemployment, the Roosevelt administration was committed to repealing prohibition. In practical terms, prohibiting alcohol had simply not been successful. Those who wanted a drink were seldom prevented from getting one. In fact, alcohol consumption had increased in the 1920s. From a sociological standpoint, prohibition was a disaster because the illicit market for alcohol was so lucrative that it fostered the growth of criminal organizations such as that of Al Capone in Chicago. When alcohol became legal, these organizations did not disappear but turned to making a profit in other criminal arenas, notably drugs and prostitution.

On March 22, 1933, just 18 days after Roosevelt took office, Congress legalized light (3.2% alcohol) beer and wine. This did more than end prohibition; it spurred employment in a domestic industry that had been suppressed for a decade. Even more important, perhaps, a tax of $5 was levied on each barrel of wine and beer, which provided needed revenue to the Treasury. Later in 1933, prohibition was abolished altogether with the Twenty-first Amendment.

Another institution in desperate need of reform was the stock market. Small margin requirements and insider trading had allowed swindlers to manipulate the market and make fortunes at the expense of investors. During the first hundred days of the emergency session, Congress passed the Truth in Securities Act that called for complete disclosure concerning a stock before it was sold. In 1934, Congress solidified its fair trading policy by creating the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). This agency set rules and regulations concerning trading that put all investors on a level playing field.

In 1935, Congress passed the Public Utility Holding Company Act to address the huge utility conglomerates that had swallowed up hundreds of local utility companies under the umbrella of a holding company that was held by a parent holding company, and so on. As an example of the dangers of this pyramiding, Samuel Insull's utility behemoth had failed in 1932 sending shocks throughout the business world and creating distress for the company's tens of thousands of customers. The Insull failure had an immediate response from the first emergency Congress. Roosevelt's New Deal cabinet and Congress wanted to counter the monopolistic utility companies, especially the electric power companies, with a model government program that could be used as a gauge for fair prices and practices. Senator George W. Norris of Nebraska was a particular champion of this idea.

The Tennessee River valley, which was badly eroded from incessant flooding and whose population had been especially hard hit by the depression, was the ideal location for a pilot project of impressive proportions. The president promoted and Congress passed the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) legislation that mandated the project. More than 20 dams on the river and its tributaries were constructed to prevent flooding and provide power to generate electricity for the entire region. Building this flood control and power generating system employed thousands of workers, which helped bring needed dollars to the local populace. Erosion was all but eliminated, and CCC workers restored much of the land to forest.

The TVA was a notable success, in spite of efforts by privately owned utility companies to discredit the achievement. Initiating similar large-scale projects on other river systems met with resistance, however, as conservatives and even moderate Democrats became concerned over the dangers of slipping into a socialistic, managed economy. But smaller projects and individual dams built to provide both water and power in the driest areas of the West proved great boons to those areas in the years to come.

Housing was another critical area addressed by the New Deal. In 1934, Roosevelt inaugurated the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) to make small loans to homeowners for home improvements or completing construction on a home. The project was extremely well received, and in 1937 Roosevelt supplemented it with the United States Housing Authority (USHA) aimed at sponsoring new home construction. Housing funds were allocated for over a half million low income families, but the initiative was obstructed by entrenched interests in real estate and construction who felt that government-sponsored, low-income housing would interfere with their livelihood. Enough housing was built to get many families out of the worst of the urban slums, however, and housing assistance through the FHA continues to this day.

A far-reaching program called the National Recovery Administration (NRA) attempted in 1933 to coordinate business and labor and to address unemployment both for the short and long term. The NRA called for self-restraint on the parts of both business and labor. Businesses were to abide by codes of fair competition. Minimum wages and maximum work hours were established for workers in order to employ a greater number of people. Labor was encouraged to use collective bargaining.

The National Recovery Administration program was expensive for industries, and workers who already had a job found their net pay reduced because they were restricted in the number of hours they could work. In addition, labor felt its bargaining impact blunted in not being able to threaten a strike. After a warm reception, the plan began to founder as each group felt it was being asked to sacrifice too much. The NRA's semi-voluntary nature made it easy for individuals to cheat on the rules when they felt unfairly burdened. Finally, in the Schechter case, the Supreme Court ruled that not only had Congress overstepped its bounds by delegating its legislative authority to the executive branch, but also that the federal government did not have jurisdiction for regulating local businesses that were not engaged in interstate activity.

A companion to the ill-fated NRA was the Public Works Administration (PWA) that was also aimed at unemployment relief and economic recovery. Headed by Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes, the PWA pursued tens of thousands of public works projects, including the Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia River, which provided water for irrigation and hydroelectric power for the region. The success of the PWA and later the Works Progress Administration (WPA) lay in the fact that government was much more successful as a contractor for work than as a mediator between business and labor, as it tried to be with the NRA.

The reforms of the New Deal placed a value on heritage as well as progress. Concerned that Indians under the Dawes Act, which had called for assimilation, were losing their native identity, the Roosevelt administration sponsored the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, which provided for tribal self-government and the means to preserve native traditions. Of nearly 300 tribes, 200 participated in the reorganization. The remainder balked due to concerns that reviving Indian culture could lead to further marginalization of Native Americans in the predominantly white American culture.

In spite of pump priming, jobs programs, and outright welfare, unemployment was still high in 1935, and many people had exhausted every resource. The mood of the country was desperate. Roosevelt decided that all of the previous programs had not gone far enough to keep people employed, and he began another round of reforms sometimes called the Second New Deal. At his request, Congress created the Works Progress Administration (WPA) as a large-scale remedy. Harry Hopkins headed the WPA, which over time spent approximately $11 billion on public works projects, education, and the arts.

WPA workers constructed bridges, paved roads, and built public buildings. Many of the brick roads laid down by WPA workers are still in use today. Workers also assisted all levels of education as graders and teaching assistants. They wrote histories and produced art for government buildings. Wages were $.25 to $.35 an hour, but people who had been earning nothing were thrilled to get any sort of pay, and WPA jobs helped people keep their self-respect.

In an effort to help organized labor after the demise of the NRA, in 1935 Congress wrote the National Labor Relations Act, sometimes known as the Wagner Act, which created the National Labor Relations Board. This agency fostered the organization of unions and protected their right to bargain collectively.

Perhaps the most revolutionary New Deal reform for America was the Social Security Act of 1935. This law provided government-sponsored insurance for the unemployed, dependent children, retirees, and the handicapped. The plan was funded by mandated contributions from both workers and employers. Social Security payments were from $10 to $85 a month, but have regularly increased to keep pace with inflation. Originally the plan did not cover self-employed persons, though that provision soon changed.

Conservatives bitterly opposed Social Security as pernicious socialism that celebrated leisure and denigrated work. They also charged that the plan was a "ponzi scheme," an illegal form of investment where the incoming funds of people investing in the scheme are used to pay off those collecting their returns, but no principal is actually generating a dividend income. Mathematically, ponzi schemes always fail because at some point those who are receiving exceed in number those who are paying in.

Liberal theorists have maintained that if there should be shortfalls in the Social Security System, the federal government is large enough to absorb them. With the Baby Boom bulge in the population now approaching retirement, politicians and economists are scrambling to plan ways to keep Social Security afloat while shielding the working generation from a crushing tax burden. Time will tell how the story of Social Security plays out, but for the 70-some years of its existence it has provided necessary and humane retirement support for millions of Americans at a reasonable cost to those in the workforce.

Critics and Challenges

During the Great Depression, America was searching for solutions. Because of this, people with radical opinions, who in better times would have been ignored, were able to capture the attention of the nation. Some made valuable contributions by presenting new ideas for debate. Others seemed to be merely obstructionist complainers or even rabble rousers just trying to make trouble. The majority, however, seemed to fall in an intermediate category of outspoken people who had many valid objections, a few good ideas, and a love for getting on a soapbox.

At this time, Hitler and Stalin were undertaking massive propaganda campaigns describing how they were lifting their countries out of poverty and how democracy and capitalism were not the universal answer to the problems of a society. The propaganda lured many to consider the benefits of a "benign dictatorship" such as Hitler's regime purported to be, or the blessings that might be had from the communal ownership of the means of production and equal shares in the generated wealth as Stalin claimed was blossoming in Russia. These ideas were especially appealing to workers struggling to organize and collectively negotiate for humane working conditions and a living wage. While the fascist and communist tyrannies were marred with flaws that even aggressive propaganda could not conceal, with such troubled times at home many Americans could not help but consider that their faith in capitalism may have been misplaced and that some other economic formula might better answer their needs.

Father Charles Coughlin was a Catholic priest from Michigan who began broadcasting his views on the radio in 1930. Initially a New Deal supporter, he later bitterly criticized Roosevelt and his policies believing that the NRA and AAA benefited only industry and well-off farmers. His favorite phrase was "social justice," and he called Roosevelt a liar for not nationalizing the banks, as Coughlin had believed was Roosevelt's intention from speeches prior to taking office. Father Coughlin had the largest radio audience in U.S. history—40 million listeners. Eventually he resorted to anti-Semitism and fascist rhetoric, which caused his show to be canceled in 1942 when the Catholic Church insisted he give up radio broadcasting.

Senator Huey P. ("Kingfish") Long was an ultra-progressive senator from Louisiana who promoted an agenda of wealth redistribution that shocked even the Liberal Democrats. Long's "Share Our Wealth" program promised to make "Every Man a King" by supplying each family with $5,000 at the expense of the prosperous. As governor in Louisiana he had been very popular with a majority of the electorate due to his raising taxes on the higher income earners to gain funds for schools, hospitals, road improvement, and bridge construction. Among other income-generating programs, Long instituted high inheritance taxes on large estates. His iron-fisted methods antagonized the wealthy, however, who felt he had pandered to the worst impulses of greed and envy among the poor in order to gain a voter mandate. Had Long not been assassinated in 1935, he might have posed a challenge to Roosevelt in 1936.

A retired doctor who had been reduced to poverty by the troubles of the depression, Dr. Francis Townsend organized over five million supporters for his Old Age Revolving Pension Plan. He advocated giving $200 per month (about twice the average worker's salary) to each senior citizen over the age of 60. This money had to be spent within the month, however, in order to keep it circulating and prevent hoarding, which had been a stumbling block during the depression. Townsend's scheme was to be funded by a national sales tax, but simple calculations proved that it would cost the Treasury about half the national income.

Taking the radically opposite view from Coughlin, Long, and Townsend, a group of wealthy Republicans and conservative Democrats, including Al Smith and John W. Davis, formed the American Liberty League in 1934 to fight what they considered the socialism of the New Deal. Their goal was to defend the interests of business and to promote open shop laws. This group supported Alfred M. Landon, governor of Kansas, for the Republican nomination in the 1936 presidential election. Former President Hoover backed Landon in vigorously opposing the New Deal programs, which the League characterized as wasteful, radical, and hopelessly muddled.

The rhetoric surrounding the presidential election of 1936 resurfaced an on-going political debate concerning the role of government in society, a debate that is no less intense today than it was in 1936. Americans continuously seek to refine and redefine the optimum balance between the benefits arising from individuals being able to amass capitol that creates jobs and industries but also makes them wealthier and the benefits derived from the redistribution of wealth via taxes and social programs back to the general population. A century has not blunted the immediacy of the debate, which attests to the monumental challenge posed to the candidates in 1936 to define the problems facing the nation and to articulate possible solutions.

In the desperate political climate of the depression, Republican Alfred Landon lost by a landslide as Roosevelt marshaled a coalition of city dwellers, minorities, and the poor. In an election that divided the nation along class and income lines, those benefiting from New Deal programs simply outnumbered those who felt they were paying for them. Roosevelt was sworn in for a second term January 20, 1937, rather than March 4, which was the old inauguration date. The Twentieth Amendment, ratified in 1933, moved the date up by six weeks and thus shortened the "lame duck" period.

Perhaps taking his easy victory too much to heart, Roosevelt began casting a resentful eye at the conservative Supreme Court, which had cashiered seven of his New Deal Programs. Six of the justices were over the age of 70, which, in one of his few errors in judgment, Roosevelt thought could give him an excuse to appoint new judges. Shortly after he was inaugurated for his second term, Roosevelt asked Congress to allow him to add a justice of his choosing to the Supreme Court for every justice over 70. He set a maximum number of judges at 15. He claimed that the Supreme Court was behind in its work and needed younger justices to carry the load. His assertion that the Supreme Court was backlogged proved to be incorrect, which invalidated his argument and cast a pall of suspicion over his motives. At the very least he was criticized for attempting to upset the system of checks and balances provided for by the Constitution. Some went so far as to accuse Roosevelt of preparing the way to take over as dictator. This was absurd, but the episode threw a chill over his proposals for additional New Deal programs.

On the other hand, this court-packing challenge must have sounded something of a wake-up call to the justices, who began to view Roosevelt's programs in a more sympathetic light. In subsequent cases the Court upheld the Wagner Act (the National Labor Relations Act), Social Security, and minimum wage for women. Ironically, during his four terms as president, Roosevelt would be called on to name nine judges to the Supreme Court on account of retirements and deaths. Time provided him with the court he wanted. Had he been patient, he could have avoided a damaging fight.

Feeling that the worst of the depression was over and the economy was strong enough to be weaned from "pump-priming," in early 1937 Roosevelt backed off from federal employment programs in an attempt to reduce deficit spending and fulfill his campaign promise of a balanced budget. But the economy was not as robust as Roosevelt had hoped, and it was beginning to feel the pinch of the new Social Security payroll taxes.

In 1938, the country slipped into a deep recession wiping out most of the gains that had been made since 1933. In the face of this setback, Roosevelt began to employ the economic theory of John Maynard Keynes, who argued that in a recession government should use deficit spending and expect to make up the losses in good times through increased tax revenues. Programs such as the WPA that gave direct aid through work were resumed, and the economy began to improve later in 1938. These programs were intended to provide temporary relief for people in need, and be disbanded when the economy improved, but Roosevelt realized in the wake of the recession that they could not be too hastily discontinued without disruptions.

Congress passed the Wages and Hours Bill, or Fair Labor Standards Act, in 1938. This bill required all industries involved in interstate commerce to establish maximum hours per week and minimum wage standards. The goal was a 40-hour week and $.40 an hour wage. Business complained that these were impossible standards to meet. Even so, farm workers (such as migrant workers), service employees (such as waiters), and domestic workers (such as housekeepers) were excluded from the bill, which meant that its protections were not extended to the many women and minorities engaged in these occupations. In that year also, the Committee for Industrial Organization changed its name to the Congress of Industrial Organization, and it continued its sometimes detrimental feuding with the American Federation of Labor.

In the Congressional elections of 1938, Democrats lost 80 seats in the House and all but gave up control of the legislature. A "Conservative Coalition" in Congress could now successfully block Roosevelt's legislation, and no more New Deal programs were passed after 1939. With the programs already in place, the economy continued to mend, albeit slowly, but not until the wartime manufacturing boom of the early 1940s would America again see full employment.

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The new deal.

• Wendy L. Wall Wendy L. Wall Department of History, SUNY Binghamton
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.013.87
• Published online: 22 December 2016

The New Deal generally refers to a set of domestic policies implemented by the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in response to the crisis of the Great Depression. Propelled by that economic cataclysm, Roosevelt and his New Dealers pushed through legislation that regulated the banking and securities industries, provided relief for the unemployed, aided farmers, electrified rural areas, promoted conservation, built national infrastructure, regulated wages and hours, and bolstered the power of unions. The Tennessee Valley Authority prevented floods and brought electricity and economic progress to seven states in one of the most impoverished parts of the nation. The Works Progress Administration offered jobs to millions of unemployed Americans and launched an unprecedented federal venture into the arena of culture. By providing social insurance to the elderly and unemployed, the Social Security Act laid the foundation for the U.S. welfare state.

The benefits of the New Deal were not equitably distributed. Many New Deal programs—farm subsidies, work relief projects, social insurance, and labor protection programs—discriminated against racial minorities and women, while profiting white men disproportionately. Nevertheless, women achieved symbolic breakthroughs, and African Americans benefited more from Roosevelt’s policies than they had from any past administration since Abraham Lincoln’s. The New Deal did not end the Depression—only World War II did that—but it did spur economic recovery. It also helped to make American capitalism less volatile by extending federal regulation into new areas of the economy.

Although the New Deal most often refers to policies and programs put in place between 1933 and 1938, some scholars have used the term more expansively to encompass later domestic legislation or U.S. actions abroad that seemed animated by the same values and impulses—above all, a desire to make individuals more secure and a belief in institutional solutions to long-standing problems. In order to pass his legislative agenda, Roosevelt drew many Catholic and Jewish immigrants, industrial workers, and African Americans into the Democratic Party. Together with white Southerners, these groups formed what became known as the “New Deal coalition.” This unlikely political alliance endured long after Roosevelt’s death, supporting the Democratic Party and a “liberal” agenda for nearly half a century. When the coalition finally cracked in 1980, historians looked back on this extended epoch as reflecting a “New Deal order.”

• Franklin Delano Roosevelt
• Great Depression
• Hundred Days
• work relief
• industrial unionism
• Tennessee Valley Authority
• Works Progress Administration
• Social Security

Defining the “New Deal”

On July 2, 1932 , Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) accepted the Democratic Party’s nomination for president and pledged himself to a “new deal for the American people.” 1 In so doing, he gave a name not only to a set of domestic policies implemented by his administration in response to the crisis of the Great Depression but also to an era, a political coalition, and a vision of government’s role in society. The New Deal has been described as a “potpourri” of sometimes-conflicting policy initiatives, and scholars and popular commentators have long debated its ideological sources, beneficiaries, and legacy. 2 Nevertheless, most agree that it marked “a pivotal moment in the making of modern American liberalism.” 3 As this suggests, the New Deal cast a long shadow over the remainder of the 20th century, and it remains a touchstone for contemporary political debate.

When Roosevelt took office in March 1933 , the nation was more than three years into the greatest economic cataclysm that either the United States or global capitalism had ever experienced. The stock market crash in October 1929 had led to a financial meltdown, prompting a collapse in industrial production that began in the United States but soon spread to other countries. A rise in prices for raw materials—commodities ranging from cotton and wheat to tea, silk, lumber, and steel—soon followed. This prostrated farmers, miners, and loggers, not only in the United States but also around the globe. By the spring of 1933 , the U.S. gross national product had fallen to just half of its 1929 level. More than five thousand U.S. banks had failed, and thousands of families across the country had already lost farms and homes to foreclosure. On the day Roosevelt was inaugurated, roughly one-quarter of the American workforce was unemployed. In cities like Chicago and Detroit, home to hard-hit industries like automobiles and steel, the unemployment rate approached 50 percent. 4

On the campaign trail, Roosevelt had been vague about precisely how he planned to grapple with the economic crisis: He famously recommended “bold, persistent experimentation.” 5 Once in office, the president turned his abundant energy to implementing this pragmatic philosophy. He surrounded himself with advisors who had strikingly different viewpoints and agendas, and set them to work tackling a troika of problems: relief, recovery, and reform. 6 The result was one of the greatest outpourings of legislation ever seen in American history. Between 1933 and 1938 , Roosevelt and his New Dealers pushed through legislation that, among other things, regulated the banking and securities industries, shored up agricultural prices, established vast public works projects, repealed Prohibition, created new mortgage markets, managed watersheds, reversed a half century of American Indian policy, bolstered the power of unions, and provided social insurance to millions of elderly, unemployed, and disabled Americans. As historian David M. Kennedy has written, “Into the five years of the New Deal was crowded more social and institutional change than into virtually any comparable compass of time in the nation’s past.” 7

As Kennedy suggests, the term New Deal is most often used to refer to the set of domestic policies implemented by the Roosevelt administration in the 1930s in response to the Great Depression. In this narrow sense, the “New Deal” might be seen as paralleling Teddy Roosevelt’s “Square Deal,” Harry Truman’s “Fair Deal,” or Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Great Society.” Scholars have also used the term more expansively to encompass later domestic legislation that seemed to be animated by the same values and impulses. Glenn Altschuler and Stuart Blumin, for instance, argue that the 1944 GI Bill built on specific New Deal policies, while reflecting FDR’s broader desire to use the power of the federal government to extend a safety net to American citizens. For this reason, they dub the GI bill “a New Deal for veterans.” 8 Ira Katznelson goes even further, redefining the New Deal as “the full period of Democratic rule” that stretched from Roosevelt’s election in 1932 to the election of Dwight Eisenhower two decades later. Only by looking at this longer time span, he suggests, can historians understand how the New Deal “reconsidered and rebuilt the country’s long-established political order.” 9

If some historians have extended the chronology of the New Deal, others have expanded its geographic scope. Scholars have most often applied the term to FDR’s domestic agenda, but Elizabeth Borgwardt argues that there was also a “New Deal for the world.” As World War II drew to a close, she suggests, Roosevelt administration planners translated “the New Deal’s sweeping institutional approaches to intractable problems” to the international arena, establishing a framework of multilateral institutions designed to stabilize the global system and advance human rights. The International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the United Nations, and the charter that set the parameters for the Nuremberg Trials were designed to extend economic and political security to people around the globe, she writes, “much as New Deal programs had redefined security domestically for individual American citizens.” 10 In a similar vein, Kiran Klaus Patel argues that the United States “played a major role in redefining the international order by trying to project the principles of the New Deal regulatory state onto the world.” 11 Sarah Phillips suggests that the success of New Deal programs like the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) convinced many liberals that they had “found the tools for conquering the problem of rural poverty.” The postwar Point Four program of foreign assistance, she argues, drew on these lessons and attempted to “export the New Deal.” 12

Neither the domestic nor the global New Deal would have been possible had FDR not mobilized a new political coalition. From 1896 until 1932 , the Republican Party dominated national politics; only in the “Solid South,” which had opposed Republicans since the Civil War, did the Democratic Party consistently win elections. In 1932 , Roosevelt swept into office largely because of widespread animosity toward President Herbert Hoover, who had failed to end the Depression or significantly ameliorate suffering. Over the next four years, however, Roosevelt won over Catholic and Jewish immigrants and their voting-age children, industrial workers, African Americans, and large segments of the so-called chattering classes. Together with white Southerners, these groups formed what became known as the “New Deal coalition.”

The New Deal coalition brought together unlikely bedfellows—for instance, African Americans and union members with conservative white Southerners who opposed racial equality and organized labor. Nevertheless, this unwieldy political alliance endured long after Roosevelt’s death, supporting the Democratic Party and a “liberal” agenda for nearly half a century. Every president elected between 1932 and 1980 was a Democrat, with the exceptions of Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. The Democratic Party also controlled both houses of Congress for all but four of those 48 years. When the coalition finally cracked in 1980 , historians looked back on this extended epoch as reflecting a “New Deal order” with “an ideological character, a moral perspective, and a set of political relationships among policy elites, interest groups, and electoral constituencies.” 13

Battling the Great Depression

Before scholars could reflect on a New Deal “order,” there was what FDR and his contemporaries called simply the New Deal: the set of policies put in place during Roosevelt’s first two presidential terms in direct response to the ravages of the Great Depression. Most of that legislation came in one of two great bursts. The first followed Roosevelt’s inauguration on March 4, 1933 . 14 Within days of taking office, the new president called Congress into special session. By the time Congress adjourned precisely one hundred days later, Roosevelt had signed fifteen bills into law. Taken together, they restructured vast swaths of the American economy and authorized billions of dollars in federal spending for everything from dam construction and crop subsidies to unemployment relief. Roosevelt proposed—and Congress passed—so much legislation during this first “Hundred Days” that the time frame became a benchmark for all subsequent U.S. political leaders.

The second burst of legislation came in the first nine months of 1935 . The previous November, the president’s party had bucked historical trends by winning, rather than losing, seats in the midterm election. The victory was a landslide: When the new Congress convened in January 1935 , Democrats held two-thirds of the seats in both the House and the Senate. The election signaled the political realignment that created the New Deal coalition, and it gave Roosevelt a mandate. This second legislative burst enabled some of the best-remembered policies of the New Deal, including the Works Progress Administration, federal support for organized labor, and the Social Security program.

Contemporary journalists called these two torrents of legislation the First and Second New Deal, and historians have generally followed their lead. For decades, both scholars and popular writers argued that the two phases of the New Deal were ideologically distinct, although they often disagreed on the precise nature of that difference. 15 In recent years, historians have suggested that any ideological shift between 1933 and 1935 was exaggerated. Many have embraced the argument made by David Kennedy that New Deal policies were designed, above all, to provide security—security not only for “vulnerable individuals” but also for capitalists, consumers, workers, farmers, homeowners, bankers, and builders. “Job security, life-cycle security, financial security, market security—however it might be defined, achieving security was the leitmotif of virtually everything the New Deal attempted,” Kennedy writes. 16

Stabilizing the Financial System

The most urgent matter that Roosevelt confronted when he took office in March 1933 was the banking crisis. The nation’s banking system had been teetering on the edge of collapse since the end of 1930 as fearful domestic and foreign investors scrambled to pull their gold and currency deposits out of U.S. institutions. A new round of panic the month before the inauguration prompted governors in state after state to close their banks to prevent runs. On the morning FDR became president, such “bank holidays” had closed all banks in 32 states. In six more, the vast majority of banks were closed. In the remainder, depositors could withdraw only 5 percent of their funds. 17

Some politicians and political observers urged Roosevelt to nationalize the banking system. 18 Instead, the new president declared a national bank holiday, called Congress into emergency session, and persuaded them to pass the Emergency Banking Act. That act affirmed the temporary bank closure, authorized the Federal Reserve to issue more currency, and took other steps designed to restore the system’s liquidity. With banks set to reopen on March 13, Roosevelt took to the airwaves, delivering the first of the radio addresses that would become known as “fireside chats.” Using simple language and speaking in an authoritative yet avuncular voice, Roosevelt explained both the workings of the banking system and the steps that the federal government had just taken to preserve it. “I can assure you,” the president told his 60 million listeners, “that it is safer to keep your money in a reopened bank than under the mattress.” 19 Roosevelt’s combination of quick action and calming explanation worked. As his advisor Raymond Moley later wrote, “Capitalism was saved in eight days.” 20

New Deal efforts to shore up the banking system did not end with these emergency measures. A few months later, Congress passed the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated investment from commercial banking in an effort to insure that banks did not speculate with depositors’ savings. The act also established the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which guaranteed bank deposits up to an initial level of $2,500. (That figure has been raised many times since.) Although FDR initially opposed deposit insurance, it almost immediately halted bank runs. These two moves dramatically stabilized the banking system. Even during the prosperous 1920s, more than six hundred U.S. banks had failed each year. In the early 1930s, that number climbed into the thousands. Beginning in 1934 , fewer than a hundred U.S. banks failed annually; by 1943 , the number had dropped to under ten. 21

Other New Deal financial measures were aimed at steadying the securities markets or strengthening the economy more generally. In the spring of 1933 , FDR followed Britain’s lead and took the United States off the gold standard, allowing the exchange value of the dollar to fall. One of the president’s advisors warned that the move would spell “the end of Western civilization,” but it gave New Dealers more flexibility to combat low prices by trying to stimulate inflation. Coupled with political instability in Europe, the end of the gold standard also prompted overseas investors to begin exchanging gold for dollars, further increasing the U.S. money supply and bolstering the banks. 22 The Securities Act of 1933 sought to end insider trading in the stock market by requiring publically traded companies to disclose financial information. The following year, Congress created the Securities and Exchange Commission to guard against market manipulation. Finally, the Banking Act of 1935 put the Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee—the body that influenced the nation’s money supply and thus the availability of credit—under the direct control of a Board of Governors appointed by the president. This move helped centralize the nation’s banking system, and improved the Federal Reserve’s ability to shape the business cycle.

Relief for the Unemployed

Having stabilized the banking system, FDR turned quickly to the problem of unemployment relief. In the spring of 1933 , some 12.4 million men and 400,000 women—roughly one-quarter of the national workforce—were unemployed. Most were their families’ principal breadwinners. 23 The collective need of these American families had already overwhelmed the resources of local governments and private charities, as well as family and community support networks. With millions unable to pay rent or buy food, men, women, and children lined up at soup kitchens, grubbed for scraps in garbage cans, hopped freight trains, or moved into makeshift shantytowns that sprang up in parks and open spaces on the edges of American cities.

FDR first focused on the problem posed by young men—a problem captured in a 1933 film entitled The Wild Boys of the Road . Teenagers and men in their twenties had fewer skills and less experience than their older counterparts; thus, they were more likely to be unemployed, to leave home, and to become hobos and vagrants. Events in Europe suggested the threat that such footloose young men might pose to the social order. Roosevelt believed that sending them to work in the countryside would not only improve the nation’s rural infrastructure but also transform the young men into upstanding future citizens. He proposed a Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) to employ those between the ages of 18 and 35 on a variety of forestry, flood control, and beautification projects. To be selected for the program, men had to be single, healthy, and U.S. citizens and to come from families on relief. Living in military-style camps operated by the War Department, they built roads, firebreaks, trails, and campgrounds. They also planted trees, fought fires, and drained swamps. CCC workers served stints of less than two years and were required to send home $25 of the $30 they earned each month to their families. Between the program’s establishment in 1933 and its expiration nine years later, the CCC put three million young men to work. It quickly became one of the New Deal’s most popular initiatives, and remained popular even in conservative areas. 24

Although the CCC kept many young men from taking to the road, it was hardly enough to relieve the distress of American families. Thus, Roosevelt urged establishment of a new agency, the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA). He persuaded Congress to appropriate $500 million to FERA, and used it to provide direct relief to needy Americans who were able to pass a means test. Some FERA funds were funneled through the states. Others were passed out by Harry Hopkins, the former social worker whom FDR tapped to run the agency. Hopkins had held a similar position in New York State when Roosevelt was governor there. Both men felt great sympathy for the poor, and both also knew how to use FERA to political advantage. By enlarging the federal role in awarding relief, they helped to transfer the political allegiance of America’s unemployed from local officials and political machines to Washington, D.C.

FERA made life marginally easier for many, but it never had sufficient funds. As the United States headed into the fifth winter of the Depression, unemployment remained high. In November 1933 , Hopkins persuaded Roosevelt to establish yet another agency to employ people directly. Drawing tools and materials from army warehouses, the Civil Works Administration (CWA) put Americans to work fixing roads, docks, and schools; laying sewer pipe; and installing outhouses for farm families. The CWA paid far more than FERA and did not subject all workers to a means test; it was soon employing more than 4 million men and women. By February 1934 , the CCC, FERA, and CWA together were reaching 22 percent of the U.S. population, an all-time high for public welfare in the United States. The president, however, worried both about the escalating costs of such programs and about relief becoming “a habit with the country.” He ordered the CWA to close down at the end of March, noting that nobody would starve when the weather was warm. 25

Americans made it through the rest of 1934 , but as the new Congress convened in early 1935 , the unemployment rate still hovered near 20 percent. Moreover, some 5 million Americans remained on relief. FDR and many of his advisors continued to worry about deficit spending, but they also believed that something had to be done and that only the federal government had “sufficient power and credit” to do it. Work relief cost more than direct payments, but the latter, as FDR declared in his annual message to Congress, was “a narcotic.” “The lessons of history, confirmed by the evidence immediately before me,” he added, “show conclusively that continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fibre.” FDR proposed a massive public employment program to get 3.5 million abled-bodied but jobless Americans off the relief rolls. 26

The result was the Works Progress Administration (WPA), one of the most ambitious and best-remembered New Deal programs. Headed by Hopkins, the WPA put more than 3 million people to work in its first year. Roosevelt wanted all projects to be labor intensive and useful, and when possible to come to a natural end. He also wanted WPA to pay more than relief but less than market rates so as not to compete with private enterprise. WPA workers built highways, schools, airports, parks, and bridges. They bound books, supervised recreation areas, ran school lunch programs, and sewed garments for the needy. WPA workers even entered the arena of public health, building hospitals and clinics, conducting mass immunization campaigns, and churning out posters that promoted nutrition and warned against the dangers of tuberculosis and syphilis.

Many of those posters were produced by employees of the Federal Arts Project, part of a massive and unprecedented federal venture into the arena of culture. Both Hopkins and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt believed that the New Deal should provide work for unemployed artists, musicians, actors, and writers, and so the WPA set up a series of cultural programs known collectively as “Federal One.” The Federal Writers’ Project produced dozens of state and city guidebooks, and conducted thousands of oral histories with former slaves, immigrants, stonecutters, packinghouse workers, Oklahoma pioneers, and others. It also sent folklorists to record the music and stories of Appalachian banjo pickers, southern bluesmen, Mexican American balladeers, and Okies in resettlement camps in the West. The Federal Music Project sponsored symphony orchestras and jazz groups, while the Federal Arts Project commissioned muralists and graphic artists. Both hired individuals to teach music, painting, and sculpture to schoolchildren.

If New Dealers wanted to aid unemployed artists, they also hoped to democratize culture and to generate support for New Deal programs and political values. No New Deal initiative better illustrates this goal—or the controversy it generated—than the Federal Theatre Project, which brought plays, vaudeville acts, and puppet shows to small towns across the country. It also staged controversial shows like Orson Welles’s production of Macbeth , which featured an all-black cast. Finally, the Federal Theatre Project developed a new theatrical genre, the Living Newspaper, to dramatize current events and expose social issues. One Living Newspaper, Power , traced the development of the electrical power industry and urged greater support for public ownership of utilities. Other Living Newspapers dealt with agricultural policy, the shortage of affordable housing, the labor movement, and syphilis.

Not surprisingly, Federal One drew intense criticism from critics on the right: In June 1939 , a more conservative Congress dissolved the Federal Theatre Project, charging that it spread New Deal propaganda and encouraged racial mixing in stage productions. Budget cuts to the other cultural programs soon followed. Conservatives warned that all WPA programs were endangering the American way of life by providing jobs for the undeserving. They also complained that the WPA was simply a Democratic Party patronage machine. (FDR did use the program to reward local power brokers who supported the New Deal, although these included progressive Republicans like New York City’s Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, as well as Democratic political bosses in cities like Chicago and Memphis.) 27

Not all criticism of the WPA came from the right. Leftist critics noted that the WPA was chronically underfunded; despite its size, it could provide jobs for only a third of those who needed them in the United States. 28 To avoid competing with the private sector, WPA jobs always paid less than the “prevailing wage” in a given community. Since that standard differed by region, gender, and race, it reinforced existing patterns of discrimination. The editors of The Nation complained that the program required workers to toil “at depressed wages in a federal work gang” and was “a morbid substitute for relief.” 29 Nevertheless, between 1935 and its dismantling in 1943 , the WPA employed some 8.5 million Americans, roughly one-fifth of the nation’s workforce, at a total cost of roughly $11 billion. Many were grateful to have a job rather than a handout. “We aren’t on relief anymore,” the wife of one WPA worker reportedly said. “My husband is working for the Government.” 30

Aiding Farmers

Both the crisis in the banking system and the spike in unemployment were problems brought on by the Great Depression. The plight of America’s farmers had deeper roots, however. Rural America had been mired in depression since shortly after the end of World War I, a situation that farmers found particularly vexing given the general economic prosperity of the 1920s. 31 The deflationary spiral of the early 1930s pushed farm income down an additional 60 percent. 32 Across the country, crops rotted in the field because prices were so low that farmers could not justify harvesting them. Western ranchers slit the throats of livestock they could afford neither to feed nor to market. Dairymen in upstate New York dumped milk into ditches, while growers in California lit mountains of oranges on fire. 33 Since taxes and mortgage payments did not fall, farmers across the country lost homes, land, and equipment to foreclosure. Many rebelled, joining “farm strikes,” disrupting auctions, and nearly lynching an Iowa judge who refused to suspend foreclosure proceedings.

New Dealers believed that boosting farm incomes would help not only rural Americans but also the entire U.S. economy. In 1933 , farmers still made up roughly one-third of the nation’s workforce, and their purchasing power dramatically lagged that of residents in urban areas. By restoring prosperity to the farm economy, New Dealers argued, they would increase farmers’ ability to buy nonfarm goods, in turn contributing to a more general economic recovery. Such reasoning reflected not only the thought of many in the Roosevelt administration regarding the economy, but also their tendency to romanticize the nation’s pastoral past and their awareness of the continuing political power of rural America. 34

The centerpiece of the New Deal’s efforts to raise farm incomes was the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA), passed in May 1933 . The act charged the federal government with raising the price for key farm commodities in order to bring the prices that farmers received for their products into balance or “parity” with their production and living costs. It pointed to the years just before World War I as the ideal of parity. While the act was vague about the exact mechanism the government should use to achieve this end, it established a new agency and sanctioned a variety of remedies that farm advocates had been battling over for years. To prevent farmers from planting surplus crops, the AAA levied a tax on flour millers and other crop processors and used the proceeds to pay farmers for taking land out of production. At the same time, the agency tried to maintain a floor under prices by keeping harvested crops off the market when prices were low. It did this by offering farmers loans secured by their crops at above-market rates, then storing the surplus. If crop prices rose, farmers could repay the loans, redeem their crops, and sell at the higher prices. Finally, the act established a Farm Credit Administration (FCA) to provide mortgage relief to farmers.

From the beginning, the New Deal’s farm policy proved controversial. Cotton and wheat farmers had already planted their crops by the time the farm bill passed. A severe drought on the plains constrained the wheat supply naturally, but AAA officials paid farmers to plow up 10 million acres of cotton. The agency also bought and slaughtered some 6 million piglets and 200,000 sows to prevent a future glut of hogs. 35 While much of this pork eventually fed hungry people, the destruction of crops and livestock angered many Americans. When journalist Lorena Hickok went on a fact-finding tour for the administration in the fall of 1933 , people in Minnesota and Nebraska complained to her about the New Dealers’ methods. 36 “As long as there are 25 million hungry people in this country, there’s no overproduction,” one Iowa farm leader declared. “For the government to destroy food and reduce crops at such a time is wicked.” 37

Considered in the aggregate, rural America benefited from New Deal farm policies. Within 18 months of its establishment, the FCA had refinanced one-fifth of all farm mortgages. 38 Prices for crops like corn, wheat, and cotton surged, and net farm income rose by 50 percent between 1932 and 1936 . 39 Yet these benefits were not evenly distributed, and AAA policies often exacerbated the plight of tenant farmers and sharecroppers. New Deal officials relied heavily on county-level committees to set production quotas, monitor acreage-reduction contracts, and dispense federal payments. Agricultural Secretary Henry Wallace considered this decentralized approach to be “economic democracy in action,” but local committees were often dominated by the largest growers. 40 Large planters and landowners frequently pocketed checks for keeping acreage fallow, then pushed out the tenants and sharecroppers who were actually farming the land. In the South, many of these sharecroppers were African Americans, and so they bore the brunt of such policies. In California, where “factory farms” used migratory laborers, growers rarely restored wages to pre-Depression levels, even after prosperity returned. Tenants, sharecroppers, and farmworkers sometimes fought back—joining groups like the Southern Tenant Farmers Union and the Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union—but such efforts often provoked violent reprisals. Liberals within the Department of Agriculture who pleaded the case of the disempowered were purged. 41

Although the Roosevelt administration did little to keep tenants and sharecroppers on their land, it did establish two agencies ostensibly designed to give impoverished farmers a fresh start. The Resettlement Administration (RA), set up in 1935 , built three “greenbelt” towns, which were close to big cities and surrounded by countryside. In 1937 , it was absorbed into a new agency, the Farm Security Administration (FSA), which established a chain of migrant labor camps and granted low-interest loans to enable some tenants to buy farms. Both agencies, however, faced opposition from farm corporations and southern landlords who wanted to keep their cheap labor. The RA had hoped to move half a million farm families, but ultimately resettled fewer than 5,000. 42 Photographers hired by the FSA to document America and build support for New Deal programs provided many of the most iconic pictures of the Great Depression, and the agency’s migrant camps came to public attention when John Steinbeck depicted one in his epic novel The Grapes of Wrath in 1939 . Nevertheless, the FSA’s congressional opponents kept its appropriations low, limiting its ability to make a real dent in rural poverty.

Conservation and Regional Change

As FSA photographs and books like The Grapes of Wrath attested, the problems plaguing rural America were not limited to low commodity prices. Across the nation, uncontrolled lumbering had scarred and depleted forests, while intensive farming had ravaged the land. Meanwhile, droughts, wind, and floods depleted the soil. A massive flood on the Mississippi River in 1927 inundated thousands of square miles and displaced some 700,000 people. 43 A single dust storm on the Great Plains in May 1934 sucked 350 million tons of topsoil into the air and deposited it as fair east as New York City and Boston. 44 New Dealers believed that only by developing more sustainable agriculture—and by distributing natural resources more equitably—could the living standards of Americans in rural areas be brought up to the same level as those of their urban counterparts.

To achieve this, New Dealers undertook a variety of initiatives. They retired land, sought to restore forests and soil, engaged in flood control and irrigation projects, and produced cheap hydropower to fuel farms and new industries. Historian Sarah Phillips has suggested that these projects reflected a “New Conservation,” focused less on the preservation of wild areas or the efficient use of natural resources than on the welfare of rural residents. 45 Since the South and West were the most rural parts of the nation, those regions benefited disproportionately. In fact, New Deal land use and energy policies contributed to the emergence of what would eventually become known as the “Sunbelt.” 46

The first, most ambitious, and ultimately most successful of these New Deal projects was the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), established by Roosevelt during his first Hundred Days. Cutting across seven states in one of the most impoverished parts of the nation, the TVA brought economic progress and hope to a region that had seen little of either since the end of the Civil War. In addition to most of Tennessee, the TVA covered swaths of Kentucky, Mississippi, Alabama, Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia. TVA dams prevented spring floods from displacing residents and washing away topsoil. They also provided ample cheap electricity, which the agency sold to rural co-ops and municipal power systems. TVA experts developed fertilizer, built model towns, upgraded schools and health facilities, planted trees, and restored fish and wildlife habitats. In 1933 , 2 percent of farms in this region had electricity; by 1945 , 75 percent were electrified. Cheap electricity also attracted new industries to the region, including such corporate behemoths as Monsanto and the Aluminum Company of America (ALCOA). 47 Through its generation of power, not only did the TVA help to modernize the upper South, but it also inserted the federal government more fully and permanently into the private economy than did any other New Deal agency.

The success of the TVA prompted New Dealers to dive more fully into rural electrification. Private power companies had long argued that they could not afford to provide electricity to isolated farms and small, rural communities. As a result, many Americans were still living without the benefits of running water, indoor toilets, lights, refrigeration, or labor-saving devices. In 1935 , over the protests of private utilities, New Dealers convinced Congress to establish the Rural Electrification Administration (REA), a move that profoundly changed rural lives. The REA sponsored the creation of hundreds of nonprofit electric cooperatives and offered them low-cost loans for generating plants and power lines. In the early 1930s, fewer than one in ten American farms had electricity. By 1941 , the number had risen to four in ten. By 1950 , 90 percent of U.S. farms were electrified. 48

Industrial Policy

If rural electrification was one of the New Deal’s greatest successes, industrial policy was one of its biggest failures. When FDR took office, both he and his advisors were convinced that the economy needed a major stimulus, but few agreed on what form that should take. Some businessmen and New Dealers considered the Depression the result of destructive competition. They argued for suspending antitrust laws and forging industry-wide agreements that would allow businesses to stabilize prices, end overproduction, and ultimately raise wages. Others, more distrustful of the business community, argued either for stimulating competition or for engaging in national economic planning. Many advocated federal spending on public-works projects to “prime” the economic pump; yet the president and most around him still hoped to avoid running federal deficits. This policy discord prevented FDR from taking any action until near the end of his first Hundred Days. When the Senate passed a work-sharing bill that the president opposed, he ordered staffers who favored differing plans to shut themselves in a room and develop a compromise. 49

The resulting bill, which Roosevelt proposed in May 1933 , contained what one of his advisors later called “a thorough hodge-podge of provisions.” 50 Declaring a state of industrial emergency, it largely suspended antitrust laws and created the National Recovery Administration (NRA) to oversee the development of codes to regulate prices, wages, hours, and working conditions for hundreds of industries. Section 7a of the bill gave industrial workers the right “to organize and bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing,” marking a historic reversal of the federal government’s traditional refusal to back unionization. Finally, the bill appropriated $3.3 billion to be spent by a new Public Works Administration (PWA). New Dealers hoped that the public works spending would jump-start the economy, buying time for the industrial codes to take effect.

This unwieldy industrial policy foundered from the start. Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, who had been charged with overseeing the PWA, moved with great caution in order to avoid accusations of misusing funds. In the agency’s first six months, he spent only $110 million of the billions allocated. 51 As a result, the PWA failed to provide any short-term economic stimulus. The cotton textile millers quickly drafted an industrial code, but other industries were slow to follow. Hugh Johnson, the colorful former general appointed to head the NRA, tried to compensate for this sluggish pace by resorting to the tactics of propaganda and community pressure that had been used successfully by the United States during World War I. Employers who agreed to sign a blanket wage-and-hour code were allowed to display NRA signs picturing a stylized Blue Eagle and the slogan “We Do Our Part.” The NRA’s Blue Eagle soon landed in store windows and on delivery trucks, and cities across the nation held “Blue Eagle” rallies and parades. This campaign made the NRA one of the most recognized aspects of the New Deal, but it did little to boost employment or improve incomes.

The code-writing process slowly moved forward. Although Johnson and the NRA had been given formal authority over the enterprise, they had no means to enforce compliance. Thus, the largest producers in each industry tended to dominate the proceedings. Mechanisms to fix prices and control production often hurt smaller operators. Code-making panels were supposed to include labor and consumer representatives, but they rarely did. As a result, price rises tended to outpace wage increases. The law eventually produced so many overlapping industrial codes—more than five hundred—that even businessmen complained about NRA bureaucracy. 52 In October 1934 , FDR finally secured Johnson’s resignation. The following May a unanimous Supreme Court declared the NRA unconstitutional.

Although slow to get started, the PWA ultimately proved more successful. In contrast to other jobs programs launched by the New Deal, the PWA embodied a “trickle-down” approach. The agency paid higher wages than did other work-relief projects, hired more skilled workers, and drew fewer employees from relief rolls. By focusing on large-scale construction projects, Ickes hoped to stimulate industries that provided materials and components, thus creating jobs indirectly. Between 1933 and 1939 , PWA workers built schools, courthouses, city halls, hospitals, and sewage plants. They built the port of Brownsville, Texas; the LaGuardia and Los Angeles Airports; two aircraft carriers; and numerous cruisers, destroyers, gunboats, and planes. The PWA constructed New York City’s Lincoln Tunnel, Virginia’s Skyline Drive, the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge, the Bonneville and Grand Coulee dams in the Pacific Northwest, and the highway that links Key West to the Florida mainland. Surveying this legacy, one scholar compared Ickes to the Egyptian pharaoh who oversaw construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza. 53

Crafting Social Security

The PWA and the WPA both provided jobs for able-bodied Americans. They did little, however, for the sick, the disabled, or the elderly—those whom one sympathetic House member called “America’s untouchables.” 54 Few workers had pensions, and so most worked as long as they were able. Those considered unemployable because of age or health were forced to rely on their families or on local welfare agencies. To help these citizens, to ensure that the elderly did not take jobs away from younger compatriots, and to give all Americans the promise of future “security,” the president proposed a sweeping program of unemployment and old-age insurance. The Social Security Act, which FDR signed into law in August 1935 , laid the foundation for the U.S. welfare state, reshaping the lives and futures of Americans for generations to come. One Roosevelt biographer called it “the most important single piece of social legislation in all American history, if importance be measured in terms of … direct influence upon the lives of individual Americans.” 55

Historians have argued that the Social Security Act in some ways marked a historic reversal of American political values. Politicians and political commentators had long celebrated individualism and self-help, and for most of the nation’s history, the federal government provided little in the way of pensions or insurance to citizens who were not veterans of war. By contrast, the Social Security Act created a national system of old-age insurance, while using federal tax incentives to encourage states to set up their own unemployment insurance plans. The act also provided federal matching funds to states for aid to dependent mothers and children, the blind and the physically disabled. The Social Security Act marked “a tremendous break with the inhibitions of the past,” Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., wrote in 1958 . “The federal government was at last charged with the obligation to provide its citizens a measure of protection from the hazards and vicissitudes of life.” 56

If the Social Security Act was revolutionary in some respects, however, it was deeply conservative in others. New Dealers had hoped to include national health insurance in the bill, but dropped these plans in the face of intense opposition from doctors. Southern Democrats, who were key to FDR’s political coalition, worried that giving African Americans too much aid would prompt them to reject backbreaking work at low wages. As a result, the bill’s drafters excluded both domestic workers and agricultural laborers from old-age insurance. They also exempted both groups, plus employees of small firms, from unemployment compensation. The cost of these exclusions fell disproportionately on women and racial minorities. Administration of unemployment insurance was also left up to the states, a move that multiplied the possibilities for discriminatory treatment.

Judged by international standards, one of the most conservative aspects of the Social Security program was its funding mechanism. By the 1930s, most modern industrial nations offered some form of social insurance for the elderly that was funded out of general coffers. 57 FDR, however, insisted that the federal pension plan work like private insurance: Workers would contribute to their old-age pension accounts through payroll taxes, and benefits would be tied to the amount that workers paid in. This regressive tax system prevented Social Security from redistributing income, leading to greater levels of income inequality among the U.S. elderly than among the aged in other industrialized nations. FDR, however, insisted that the decision to fund the program this way was political: “We put these payroll contributions there so as to give the contributors a legal, moral, and political right to collect their pensions and their unemployment benefits,” he declared. “With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program.” 58 In this assessment, Roosevelt proved prescient.

A New Deal for Labor

When Congress passed the National Industrial Recovery Act, United Mine Workers president John L. Lewis likened Section 7a—the section requiring management to engage in good-faith collective bargaining with workers—to Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. For decades, American workers had been divided along skill, race, and ethnic lines, and government at all levels had generally sided with corporations rather than unions. The 1920s had been a particularly difficult decade for organized labor as unfavorable court rulings, cautious union leadership, corporate use of welfare capitalism and government attacks on those perceived as radical all eroded union ranks. Section 7a appeared to reverse the tide, and Lewis jumped to take advantage of the new legislation. Gambling much of the mineworkers’ treasury on a bold campaign, he sent organizers into the coalfields in the summer of 1933 with instructions to invoke the authority of the New Deal: “The President wants you to unionize,” organizers told miners, adding that not doing so was “unpatriotic.” Within months, the union’s membership quadrupled. 59

It soon became clear, however, that Section 7a was not the labor cure-all for which Lewis had hoped. Employers in many industries continued to defy the new law or to evade its requirements by installing company unions that they controlled. The act contained few real enforcement mechanisms, and NRA head Hugh Johnson seemed disinclined to use those that existed. As workers grew increasingly frustrated, industry after industry erupted in strikes. In 1934 , a walkout by textile workers stretched across twenty states. In Toledo, Ohio, striking employees of an auto-parts company battled National Guardsmen in the streets. Strikes by Minneapolis teamsters and San Francisco longshoremen touched off general strikes in both cities.

These strikes, in and of themselves, produced only limited gains for labor, but they signaled a new militancy—and unity—on the part of America’s workers. These changes in part reflected the economic strains of the Depression, but as Lizabeth Cohen has shown, they also reflected important shifts in the orientation of working-class Americans during the 1920s and 1930s. Restrictive legislation passed in the early 1920s curbed the flow of new immigrants into the United States, contributing to the maturation of ethnic communities. Mass consumption and mass culture gradually gave workers of different ethnic backgrounds common ground, creating a more unified working-class culture. Meanwhile, employers’ use of welfare capitalism during the 1920s raised workers’ expectations. The Depression destroyed two safety nets that workers had relied on: the wages and benefits once offered by employers, and the webs of assistance rooted in ethnic and religious institutions. 60

The labor unrest of late 1933 and 1934 helped persuade FDR to throw his support very belatedly behind a new labor law crafted largely by New York Senator Robert Wagner. Roosevelt and his Labor Secretary Frances Perkins hoped to boost workers’ purchasing power through wage-and-hour legislation and laws affecting pensions and unemployment. They were less concerned about extending workers’ political power by guaranteeing their collective-bargaining rights. 61 As a result, Roosevelt initially showed little interest in closing the loopholes that weakened Section 7a. In late May 1935 , however, the Supreme Court nullified the National Industrial Recovery Act, thus limiting FDR’s options. With Congress poised to pass the new labor law in any case, the president finally declared it a high priority.

Passage of the National Labor Relations Act (more commonly known as the Wagner Act) in the summer of 1935 helped set the stage for an historic organizing drive. The economy had begun to recover, making companies more vulnerable to shutdowns. Liberal Democrats allied with the New Deal and sympathetic to labor won the governorships of such key industrial states as New York, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. Lewis decided that the time was ripe to organize mass-production workers in industrial unions. In November 1935 , he and a handful of allies formed what would become the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). 62 In the first four months of 1937 , CIO unions “conquered the two most significant outposts of the open shop in mass-production industry”: General Motors and U.S. Steel. By the end of the year, organized labor had recruited some 3 million new members and unions represented almost 23 percent of the nonagricultural workforce, the largest proportion to that point in U.S. history. 63

Such victories were short-lived. By late 1937 , the CIO’s successes had sparked fierce attacks from corporate adversaries, Southern congressmen, craft unionists in the American Federation of Labor (AFL), and some New Dealers. 64 It would take World War II to again reinvigorate the labor movement. The Wagner Act did, however, help solidify labor support for the Democratic Party. Worker support, in turn, prompted New Dealers to push through the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), which banned child labor and set minimum wage and maximum hour laws. (Agricultural laborers and domestic workers were exempted from the act, just as they had been from Social Security.) “For generations to come,” one historian has written, “the FLSA would stand as the backbone of U.S. employment law.” 65

The Legacies and Limits of the New Deal

Passage of the FLSA in June 1938 marked the end of New Deal reform. Roosevelt won a landslide reelection in 1936 , but his second term proved rocky from the start. Some of the wounds were self-inflicted. Unhappy with Supreme Court decisions overturning key pieces of New Deal legislation, FDR proposed a bill allowing the president to appoint one new justice for every justice over the age of 70 who refused to retire; if passed, the bill would have enabled Roosevelt immediately to appoint six additional justices. This transparently political move drew wrath from New Deal opponents and criticism even from many of FDR’s allies. Before Congress could act, the swing justice switched sides and began voting to uphold New Deal laws. His shift, together with the retirement of another justice, ushered in a new, more liberal Supreme Court era, and effectively killed the Court reform bill. Nevertheless, the backlash associated with FDR’s “court-packing” scheme sapped much of the New Deal’s political momentum. 66

The president’s political problems were soon compounded by an economic downturn that became known as the “Roosevelt Recession.” For most of FDR’s presidency, the economy had improved steadily, in part because of ample government spending. Roosevelt, however, had never abandoned his belief in a balanced budget, and in early 1937 he decided the time had come for federal belt tightening. He ordered dramatic cutbacks in both the WPA and the PWA, even as the first Social Security taxes pulled $2 billion out of the U.S. economy. All this sent the economy into a tailspin. Stock prices began falling in October 1937 and dropped nearly 50 percent in just seven months. Industrial production cratered, and some 4 million workers lost their jobs. 67 Unemployment, which had fallen sharply throughout July 1937 , moved upwards until the following June. 68

FDR’s court-packing scheme, economic duress, and a wave of sit-down strikes by industrial unionists all weakened support for the New Deal in some quarters. In the latter half of 1937 , a group of conservative Democrats, mostly Southerners, joined forces with Republicans to stymie any further New Deal legislation. The FLSA squeaked through, but in the 1938 midterm elections, Republicans made big gains in both houses. In 1939 , Congress began scaling back or killing off federal projects, beginning with the WPA’s Federal Theater and Federal Art projects. By the end of 1943 , Congress had eliminated the CCC, the WPA, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC), and numerous other New Deal programs. 69

So what did the New Deal do and whom did it benefit? New Deal policies did not restore the economy to pre-Depression levels—only World War II did that—but between 1933 and 1937 , the nation’s real gross national product grew at an annual rate of over 8 percent a year. Growth slowed during the Roosevelt Recession, but averaged over 10 percent a year between 1938 and 1941 . As economist Christina Romer has written, these rates are “spectacular, even for an economy pulling out of a severe depression.” 70 By strengthening the power of the federal government and extending federal regulation into entirely new areas of the economy, the New Deal helped to “devolatilize” American capitalism. 71 It stabilized the farm economy after two decades of depression, and introduced programs like crop subsidies and soil conservation that became staples of federal farm policy for decades to come. New Deal work-relief programs like the CCC, the PWA, and the WPA relieved the misery of millions of Americans, while building a vast public infrastructure that permanently changed the American landscape. Over time, Social Security dramatically reduced the number of elderly poor.

America’s industrial workers helped to “make” the New Deal, and white male workers were among its prime beneficiaries. In earlier decades, many members of the working class—particularly those who were foreign born—had not bothered to vote, and their party loyalties were fickle. Many simply found national party politics irrelevant to their lives. By the end of the 1930s, all this had changed. Many workers had received federal relief checks and jobs. Even more benefited from federal bank deposit and unemployment insurance, long-term low-interest mortgages offered by the HOLC, a nationally set minimum wage, and the promise of Social Security benefits in old age. In return, millions of working-class voters became loyal Democrats, ensuring the dominance of the Democratic Party for decades to come. 72

Not all Americans benefited equally from the New Deal, however. Women achieved important symbolic breakthroughs: FDR appointed the first female Cabinet member, Labor Secretary Frances Perkins, as well as the first woman to serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals. Women also played an increasingly important role in the machinery of the Democratic Party. Overall, however, New Deal programs discriminated against women. Most New Dealers, including Perkins and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, saw men as heads of households, who were thus in greater need of work. As a result, federal work-relief programs employed women at a far lower rate than men. Of 1.6 million public-works jobs given out in 1934 , only 11 percent went to women. Women held about 12 percent of WPA jobs, even though they made up at least 25 percent of the unemployed. 73 New Deal programs generally assigned women to gender-specific jobs—for instance, sewing and canning projects—and paid them a fraction of the wages given to their male counterparts. (Professional women, particularly those employed in the WPA’s arts programs, fared somewhat better.)

If gender inequity was built into most New Deal programs, so too was racial inequality. White Southern Democrats played a key role in the New Deal coalition, and “Dixiecrat” politicians exercised inordinate power in both the House and the Senate. 74 As a result, FDR and his advisors went to great lengths to appease them. The CCC established segregated camps for African Americans, often far from population centers. NRA wage codes generally prescribed lower wages for blacks than for whites, while work-relief programs like the WPA often relegated African Americans to the lowest-paying jobs. Federal efforts to promote “grassroots democracy” gave control of the AAA and other New Deal programs to local authorities, who administered them in accordance with local (often racist) mores. Afraid of alienating his southern supporters, FDR refused to support antilynching legislation or a ban on the poll tax.

The New Deal’s social insurance and labor protection programs also discriminated against women and racial minorities. The Social Security Act exempted domestics and agricultural laborers, as well as individuals who worked intermittently and were employed in fields like education and nursing that were heavily female. As a result, more than three-quarters of all female wage earners and at least 65 percent of African Americans were initially denied coverage. 75 These rules—together with similar exclusions in the FLSA—also hurt many other racial minorities, as well as poor, rural whites. The Wagner Act helped workers in organized industries like steel, rubber, and automobiles, which were heavily dominated by white men. It did little for agricultural laborers, those in the largely unorganized service sector, or most workers in the South—in other words, for most employed white women and racial minorities.

Despite such rampant inequities, the New Deal did more for African Americans than had any past administration since Abraham Lincoln’s. As a result, African Americans switched parties en masse, setting the stage for a broader party realignment in the 1960s and beyond. African American voters put civil rights on the Democratic Party’s agenda after World War II, ultimately leading to a widespread defection by white Southerners. The New Deal drew millions of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe into national politics for the first time, but many of these working-class ethnics eventually became “Reagan Republicans.” The industrial labor movement proved to be what Robert Zieger has called a “fragile juggernaut”: Unions gained members and contract rights through the 1950s, but the CIO’s militancy was quickly curbed and union membership as a percentage of the American workforce fell sharply beginning in the 1970s. 76

While many New Deal programs and institutions were killed off, others—federal deposit insurance, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and the Fair Labor Standards Act, among them—continue to the present day. Social Security gradually expanded to include domestic workers, agricultural laborers, and other excluded groups, making it more nearly universal. All this has left scholars, politicians, and pundits arguing over how to understand the New Deal’s legacy for the 20th century and beyond.

Discussion of the Literature

Few eras in modern American history have been the subject of more sustained scholarship or intense debate among both academics and popular commentators than the New Deal. Most agree that the policies of the Roosevelt administration brought new groups into the political process, laid the foundation for the welfare state, and greatly expanded both the power of the presidency and the reach of the federal government. Beyond this, however, historical judgments have differed markedly. For years, most scholars lauded President Roosevelt and cast the New Deal as a watershed in American history, albeit one consistent with American values and the nation’s reform tradition. Critics on the right and left, however, portrayed Roosevelt as a political opportunist who used the New Deal either to subvert or to preserve the nation’s capitalist system. In recent years, most scholars have acknowledged the New Deal’s achievements, but also stressed its limitations. Many have also deemphasized the role played by Roosevelt, and some have questioned the New Deal’s long-term impact.

Most New Deal scholarship has revolved around a handful of questions: How radical or conservative were Roosevelt’s domestic policies? What or whom did they benefit? When and why did the political “order” created by the New Deal come to an end? And what has been the New Deal’s lasting legacy for American politics, society, and culture? How historians and political scientists have answered these questions has depended on their ideological outlooks, the temper of their times, and their assessment of the possibilities and limits of American political culture. Since the New Deal itself was not always ideologically coherent and it evolved over time, historical assessments have also depended on the aspects of the New Deal that scholars have chosen to emphasize.

The first scholars to offer sustained accounts of the New Deal were those who came of age during the Great Depression. Most were liberals whose political outlooks were shaped by their own experiences during the 1930s and 1940s and by the politics of the Cold War and of McCarthyism that followed. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Frank Freidel, Eric Goldman, and others focused on the commanding figure of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, celebrating the dramatic transformation that he and his New Dealers wrought in both American policies and political culture. 77 These liberals portrayed the New Deal as a moment of democratic renewal, when the federal government intervened in the nation’s political economy to protect the marginal and exploited from powerful and privileged “interests.” Richard Hofstadter considered the New Deal to be “a drastic new departure.” 78 Carl Degler went even further, calling it the “Third American Revolution,” after the War of Independence and the Civil War. 79

Even as these liberal historians emphasized the revolutionary nature of the New Deal, most also rooted it in a tradition of American reform. This was partly to blunt the attack of a handful of conservative commentators and scholars who argued that Roosevelt had weakened “the Constitutional system” and hurt the economy by exercising dictatorial powers on behalf of “Socialistic” and un-American objectives. 80 Such arguments originated with contemporary critics of the New Deal like Raymond Moley, a member of FDR’s “Brain Trust” who eventually broke with the president and became a conservative Republican. 81 For decades, conservative critics of the New Deal were few and far between, but in recent years a new group of right-wing journalists and think-tank scholars have resurrected such arguments. 82

By the late 1960s, the classic “liberal” interpretation of the New Deal was also drawing fire from critics in the “New Left.” Scholars like Barton Bernstein, Paul Conkin, and Howard Zinn argued that the New Deal had not transformed corporate capitalism so much as “conserved and protected” it. Bernstein summarized this viewpoint in a widely read essay subtitled “The Conservative Achievements of Liberal Reform.” He acknowledged that New Deal policies had helped some downtrodden Americans, but argued that Roosevelt and his advisors had spurned more substantive change. They did not question private enterprise or nationalize the banking system. They did not undertake massive public housing construction or use the tax system to fundamentally redistribute income or wealth. They failed to challenge both the southern “race system” and the power of the business class. By co-opting and incorporating the discontented, Bernstein and his allies charged, FDR and his New Dealers had blunted the possibility of more revolutionary change. 83

Reassessing the New Deal in the Face of Conservative Resurgence

Both classic liberals and New Leftists wrote during the decades of Democratic Party dominance; thus, they assumed that “the political era ushered in by the New Deal would go on forever.” 84 By the 1970s, however, that assumption seemed increasingly untenable. Richard Nixon’s election to the presidency in 1968 signaled the fraying of the New Deal coalition. In 1980 , Ronald Reagan swept to victory on the Republican ticket, bringing a Republican House and Senate with him. Reagan’s victory ushered in a period of conservative resurgence, which prompted scholars to conclude that the “New Deal order” had come to an end. 85 This realization helped catalyze a shift in both the dominant tone of New Deal scholarship and in the questions asked by historians. Most scholars writing in recent decades have followed the lead of William Leuchtenburg, who declared in a pioneering 1963 work that the New Deal was only a “half-way Revolution.” 86 Historians have differed primarily on the relative weights they have assigned to the New Deal’s achievements and limitations, and on how they have explained the demise of the “New Deal order.”

No single book better exemplified this shift in tone and emphasis than the 1989 essay collection entitled The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order . As editors Gary Gerstle and Steve Fraser wrote in their introduction, “The witnessing of a political era’s eclipse has imparted to many of these essays a sober and ironic tone, appropriate to political analyses that stress missed opportunities, unintended consequences, and dangerous but inescapable compromises.” 87 Many of those who contributed to the volume developed their arguments further in subsequent books. Steve Fraser and Nelson Lichtenstein, for instance, both argued that labor leaders entered the Depression decade with dreams of institutionalizing industrial or social democracy. They gradually gave up on this public-policy vision, however, settling instead for more generous benefits and greater job security gleaned through contracts negotiated with management. 88 In a similar vein, Alan Brinkley suggested that between 1937 and 1945 , the dominant ideology among New Dealers shifted from an emphasis on regulation in the public interest to a faith in Keynesianism and economic growth as “the surest route to social progress.” The result, he declared, was “the end of reform.” 89

While these historians focused broadly on issues of political economy, scholars of race and gender highlighted the limits of New Deal egalitarianism. Ira Katznelson and Mary Poole showed that many New Deal programs discriminated against African Americans, resulting in what Katznelson dubbed “affirmative action for whites.” 90 The sociologist Cybelle Fox argued that European immigrants received more generous access to social welfare programs than did African Americans, and Mexican immigrants. 91 Linda Gordon, Gwendolyn Mink, Suzanne Mettler, and Alice Kessler-Harris explored what Kessler-Harris called “the gendered limits of social citizenship.” They pointed out that many New Deal programs, including such landmark initiatives as Social Security and the Fair Labor Standards Act, treated men and women quite differently. 92

Still other authors emphasized the contributions of the New Deal, even as they acknowledged its limitations. In his magisterial Freedom from Fear , David M. Kennedy argued that the New Deal not only provided relief and social insurance to many “vulnerable individuals,” but also “erected an institutional scaffolding designed to provide unprecedented stability and predictability” to large segments of the American economy. In doing so, he suggested, the New Deal helped to catalyze postwar prosperity, while giving “countless Americans” a new “sense of security, and with it a sense of having a stake in their country.” 93 Ira Katznelson struck a note of both tragedy and triumph in his monumental 2013 book, Fear Itself . Elaborating on a theme he had explored in earlier works, Katznelson described the way that Southern Democrats in Congress built racial inequality into the very foundation of the New Deal. This “Faustian terrible compromise” on the domestic front was the price that FDR had to pay for what Katznelson saw as the New Deal’s most important achievement: its “demonstration that liberal democracy, a political system with a legislature at its heart, could govern effectively in the face of great danger.” At a time when the Depression was destabilizing societies around the globe—a time when fascists and communists were on the march—the New Deal reinvigorated democratic institutions and redefined the role of government, giving liberal democracy renewed and lasting “legitimacy and prestige” around the world. 94

Katznelson measured the New Deal’s achievements against the successes of fascism and communism abroad. I have suggested that this same context helped to derail the drive for economic justice that animated industrial unionists and their New Deal allies during the 1930s. Alarmed by the chaos of the Depression years and convinced that internal disunity had undermined democracies abroad, Americans with divergent political outlooks and agendas increasingly emphasized Americans’ common ground. Against the backdrop of war and Cold War, businessmen alarmed by what they saw as the New Deal’s class-based resentments sometimes made common cause with liberals eager to contain religious and ethnic hostilities. In an effort to succor social harmony, both groups sought to define a unifying and distinctive “American Way.” They helped to shape a consensus ethos that privileged civility over equality, delegitimized many forms of dissent, and constrained American politics into the 1960s. 95

Most of the authors discussed to this point either imply or explicitly argue that the ultimate demise of the “New Deal order” resulted from flaws in the New Deal’s architecture or from fractures in the Democratic coalition. To paraphrase James T. Kloppenberg, they would say that the New Deal order was not pushed, but rather jumped. 96 Recently, however, several historians have focused on those who sought to speed the New Deal order on its way. Kim Phillips-Fein has shown how right-wing businessmen waged continuous and often covert war on New Deal legislation and values from the 1930s through the ascendancy of Ronald Reagan in 1980 . By funding think tanks and foundations—and recruiting politicians, intellectuals, ministers, and others to their cause—these men worked “to undo the system of labor unions, federal social welfare programs, and government regulation of the economy that came into existence during and after the Great Depression of the 1930s.” 97 In One Nation Under God , Kevin M. Kruse elaborates on the coalition of conservative businessmen and religious leaders who united to oppose the New Deal and who helped to transform both American religious and political culture. 98

The books of both Phillips-Fein and Kruse reflect a shift in the focus of political history since the turn of the 21st century—a renewed interest in the type of conservatives that the first New Deal historians would have considered “fringe.” Both books call into question the power and legacy of postwar liberalism. Recently, Jefferson Cowie has gone even further, questioning the assumption made by most prior historians that the New Deal marked a turning point in American political culture, even if only a “halfway Revolution.” The New Deal was a “triumph of redistributive policy,” Cowie affirms, at least for “the white, male industrial working class.” Its reform of capitalism, however, could not last. Between the 1930s and the 1970s, a rare convergence of historical circumstances—“changes in the state, immigration, culture and race”—briefly enabled “a limited but powerful sense of working-class unity” that triumphed over America’s long-standing ideology of individualism. When those historical factors subsided, however, the nation’s commitment to overcoming economic inequality frayed. The New Deal order, Cowie argues, “marks what might be called a ‘great exception’—a sustained deviation, an extended detour—from some of the main contours of American political practice, economic structure, and cultural outlook.” 99

Primary Sources

Few eras in American history have been as well documented in words and film as the 1930s. Thus the New Deal offers scholars and students a wealth of available published and online primary sources. A number of books capture the human toll taken by the Depression, as well as the response of diverse Americans to the policies proposed by their leaders. In 1933, Harry Hopkins, who headed first the Federal Emergency Relief Administration and then the Works Progress Administration, dispatched the journalist Lorena Hickok to gather information about the day-to-day toll that the Depression was exacting on ordinary citizens. Over the course of two years, Hickok traversed 32 states. The reports she sent back are compiled by Richard Lowitt and Maurine Beasley in One Third of a Nation: Lorena Hickok Reports on the Great Depression . 100 Robert S. McElvaine’s Down and Out in the Great Depression: Letters from the Forgotten Man collects nearly 200 letters written by ordinary men, women, and children to those who occupied or worked in the White House during the Great Depression. The letters show the personal connection many Americans felt with FDR, and they display a wide range of emotions toward both the economic cataclysm and government relief. 101 Between 1938 and 1942, the Federal Writers Project sent writers across the country to interview individuals of diverse backgrounds, occupations, and circumstances. In First Person America , Ann Banks offers eighty of these life stories, including those of a Polish immigrant, a Chicago jazzman, a retired Oregon prospector, a North Carolina tobacco farmer, and a Bahamian midwife living in Florida. 102 Decades after the Depression, the journalist Studs Terkel interviewed dozens of Americans who lived through the 1930s. He recorded their words in Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression . 103

New Dealers had a sense that they were living through and shaping history, and many produced memoirs recording their experiences. One of the first to appear was Harry Hopkins’s Spending to Save . 104 Raymond Moley, an original member of FDR’s Brain Trust who eventually became one of the New Deal’s harshest critics, published After Seven Years . 105 The many other accounts by New Dealers include these by the only two members of Roosevelt’s Cabinet who served throughout his entire presidency: Frances Perkins’s The Roosevelt I Knew and Harold L. Ickes’s The Secret Diary of Harold L. Ickes 106

Many archives have made extensive collections of New Deal materials available online and can be found in “ Links to Digital Materials .” The Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum has digitized major collections of FDR’s papers, selected correspondence of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt; the complete diaries of Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr.; and other New Deal documents deemed particularly significant. The Library also provides links to videos of FDR and to online versions of two documentary films produced by the government and designed to build support for New Deal programs: Pare Lorentz’s The Plow That Broke the Plains and The River . The Library of Congress has also digitized numerous collections relating to the New Deal, including photographs taken by Farm Security Administration photographers; life histories collected by members of the Federal Writers Project; ethnographic materials documenting the lives of migrants living in California work camps run by the FSA; images, posters, and scripts produced by the Federal Theatre Project; and posters designed by graphic artists working for the WPA.

Links to Digital Materials

Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum —This link offers access to the digitized collections of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum.

The American Presidency Project —This searchable document archive contains the addresses, proclamations, news conferences, executive orders, and fireside chats of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, as well as those of the presidents who preceded and followed him.

The Living New Deal —The Living New Deal, developed in part by the Department of Geography at the University of California at Berkeley, is a national database of thousands of documents, photographs, and personal stories about public works made possible by the New Deal. The site contains a map, continually under construction, indicating thousands of projects undertaken by the Civilian Conservation Corps, Public Works Administration, Works Progress Administration, Tennessee Valley Authority, and other New Deal agencies. Projects are searchable by location, New Deal agency, category and artist.

The Library of Congress hosts numerous collections of primary sources related to the New Deal, including:

The New Deal Stage: Selections from the Federal Theatre Project, 1935–1939 —This collection contains more than 13,000 images of stage and costume designs, still photographs, posters, scripts for productions, and other materials from the Federal Theatre Project.

Works Progress Administration Posters —This collection consists of 907 digitized posters created from 1936 to 1943 by various branches of the WPA. The posters were designed to publicize health and safety programs, art exhibitions, theatrical and musical performances, travel and tourism, and educational programs in seventeen states and the District of Columbia. The states most frequently represented in the collection are California, Illinois, New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.

Documenting America, 1935–1943: The Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Photo Collection —This site contains two videos introducing users to the vast collection of images taken by photographers for the FSA (and later the Office of War Information). Many of these pictures—taken by such photographers as Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Arthur Rothstein, and Gordon Parks—are some of the most iconic images of the Depression Era. The Website also includes links to collections of these photographs digitized by the Library of Congress and to other relevant materials.

American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936–1940 —This collection of life histories consists of about 2,900 documents compiled by some three hundred employees of the Federal Writers’ Project working in twenty-four states. The documents include narratives, dialogues, reports, and case histories. Those interviewed recounted immigrating, undertaking grueling factory work, farming tobacco, and journeying west, among other things. The documents also include tales of meeting Billy the Kid and surviving the 1871 Chicago fire.

Voices from the Dust Bowl: The Charles L. Todd and Robert Sonkin Migrant Worker Collection, 1940 to 1941 —This Website presents materials from an ethnographic field collection documenting the everyday life of residents of ten Farm Security Administration migrant work camps in central California in 1940 and 1941. Charles Todd and Robert Sonkin documented dance tunes, cowboy songs, traditional ballads, play party and square dance calls, camp council meetings, camp court proceedings, conversations, storytelling sessions, and personal experience narratives of the Dust Bowl refugees who inhabited the camps. The digitized collection includes audio recordings, graphic images, and print materials.

Further Reading

• Badger, Anthony J. The New Deal: The Depression Years, 1933–40. New York: Hill and Wang, 1989.
• Bernstein, Barton J. “The New Deal: The Conservative Achievements of Liberal Reform.” In Towards a New Past: Dissenting Essays in American History . Edited by Barton J. Bernstein , 263–288. New York: Pantheon Books, 1968.
• Borgwardt, Elizabeth . A New Deal for the World: America’s Vision for Human Rights . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005.
• Brinkley, Alan . The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War. New York: Knopf, 1995.
• Cohen, Lizabeth . Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
• Cowie, Jefferson , and Nick Salvatore . “The Long Exception: Rethinking the Place of the New Deal in American History.” International Labor and Working-Class History 74 (Fall 2008): 3–32.
• Denning, Michael . The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture. New York: Verso, 1997.
• Fraser, Steve , and Gary Gerstle , eds. The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989.
• Hawley, Ellis W. The New Deal and the Problem of Monopoly: A Study in Economic Ambivalence . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966.
• Jacobs, Meg . Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in Twentieth Century America . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.
• Katznelson, Ira . Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time. New York: Liveright, 2013.
• Kennedy, David M. Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
• Kessler-Harris, Alice . “In the Nation’s Image: The Gendered Limits of Social Citizenship in the Depression Era.” Journal of American History 86 (December 1999): 1251–1279.
• Leff, Mark . The Limits of Symbolic Reform: The New Deal and Taxation, 1933–1939. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
• Leuchtenburg, William E. Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932–1940. New York: Harper & Row, 1963.
• Maher, Neil M. Nature’s New Deal: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Roots of the American Environmental Movement. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
• Mettler, Suzanne . Dividing Citizens: Gender and Federalism in New Deal Public Policy . Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998.
• Patel, Kiran Klaus . The New Deal: A Global History . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016.
• Phillips, Sarah T. This Land, This Nation: Conservation, Rural America, and the New Deal . New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
• Phillips-Fein, Kim . Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan . New York: W. W. Norton, 2009.
• Poole, Mary . The Segregated Origins of Social Security: African Americans and the Welfare State. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.
• Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr. The Age of Roosevelt . 3 vols. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957–1960.
• Wall, Wendy . Inventing the “American Way”: The Politics of Consensus from the New Deal to the Civil Rights Movement . New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
• Zieger, Robert H. The CIO, 1935–1955. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995.

1. Franklin D. Roosevelt , “Address Accepting the Presidential Nomination at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago,” July 2, 1932; available online at The American Presidency Project , hosted by John T. Woolley and Gerhard Peters.

2. William H. Chafe , ed., The Achievement of American Liberalism: The New Deal and Its Legacies (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), xiii.

3. Robert Westbrook , “Tragic Deal,” Reviews in American History 43 (March 2015): 1.

4. David M. Kennedy , Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 87 , 133, 162–163. For the global causes and reach of the Great Depression, see Eric Hobsbawm , The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991 (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 85–108 and Kiran Klaus Patel , The New Deal: A Global History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 10–44.

5. Franklin D. Roosevelt , “ Address at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, Georgia ,” May 22, 1932; available online at The American Presidency Project .

6. Roosevelt famously articulated this “ 3R ” formula in his fireside chat of June 28, 1934, available online at The American Presidency Project .

7. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear , 363.

8. Glenn C. Altschuler and Stuart M. Blumin , The GI Bill: A New Deal for Veterans (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009) . Altschuler and Blumin argue, for instance, that the GI Bill’s provision extending low-interest home loans to veterans was built on New Deal policies that restructured the home mortgage market.

9. Ira Katznelson , Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (New York: Liveright, 2013), 4–5.

10. Elizabeth Borgwardt , A New Deal for the World: America’s Vision for Human Rights (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2005), 7–8.

11. Patel, The New Deal , 274.

12. Sarah T. Phillips , This Land, This Nation: Conservation, Rural America, and the New Deal (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 18 , 242–283.

13. Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle , “Introduction,” in Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle , eds., The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), ix–xxv , xi.

14. The Twentieth Amendment to the Constitution, which took effect in 1937, moved the presidential inauguration to January 20 of the year following the election.

15. For brief summaries of this ongoing debate from different perspectives, see William E. Leuchtenburg , Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932–1940 (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 162–163 ; Morton Keller , “The New Deal: A New Look,” Polity 31.4 (1999): 657–663 ; Kennedy, Freedom from Fear , 248, n 54.

16. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear , 365.

17. Ibid. , 132–133.

18. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. , The Coming of the New Deal , vol. 2 in The Age of Roosevelt (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1958), 5.

19. Franklin D. Roosevelt , “ Fireside Chat on Banking ,” March 12, 1933. Available online at The American Presidency Project .

20. Raymond Moley , After Seven Years (New York: Harper, 1939), 155.

21. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal , 60; Milton Friedman and Anna Jacobson Schwartz , From New Deal Banking Reform to World War II Inflation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 21.

22. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal , 50–51; Eric Rauchway , The Great Depression and The New Deal: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 60–63.

23. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear , 163–164.

24. The best account of the CCC to date is Neil M. Maher’s Nature’s New Deal: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Roots of the American Environmental Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

25. James T. Patterson , America’s Struggle Against Poverty in the 20th Century , enlarged ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 56–58.

26. Franklin D. Roosevelt , “ Annual Message to Congress ,” January 4, 1935. Available online at The American Presidency Project .

27. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear , 253–255.

28. Anthony J. Badger , The New Deal: The Depression Years, 1933–40 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989), 212.

29. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear , 253–254.

30. Harry L. Hopkins , Spending to Save: The Complete Story of Relief (New York: W. W. Norton, 1936), 114.

31. During World War I, crop production fell in many of the warring European powers. U.S. farmers dramatically expanded production to meet this demand, often borrowing to buy more land and equipment. When the war ended and the demand for exported crops declined, farm production outran demand, pushing prices down.

32. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear , 141.

33. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal , 23; “Milk Is Dumped in Rochester War,” New York Times , March 30, 1933. John Steinbeck famously decried the burning of oranges and other crops when migrant families went hungry, see the reissue edition of The Grapes of Wrath (New York: Penguin Classics, 2006), 348–349.

34. Senate seats are allocated on a state-by-state basis, a method that overrepresents rural areas. Moreover, as Eric Rauchway has noted, Congress failed to adopt a redistricting scheme after the 1920 Census, the first census to show a majority of Americans living in urban areas. Rauchway, The Great Depression and the New Deal , 74–75.

35. Janet Poppendieck , Breadlines Knee-Deep in Wheat: Food Assistance in the Great Depression , updated and expanded ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 112.

36. Richard Lowitt and Maurine Beasley , eds., One Third of a Nation: Lorena Hickok Reports on the Great Depression , (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981), 54 , 106.

37. Schlesinger, The Coming of the New Deal , 65–66.

38. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal , 52.

39. Kennedy , Freedom from Fear , 207.

40. Jess Gilbert , “Agrarian Intellectuals in an Industrializing State,” in The Countryside in the Age of the Modern State: Political Histories of Rural America , edited by Catherine McNicol Stock and Robert D. Johnston , 213–239, 231 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001).

41. Badger, The New Deal , 184.

42. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal , 140.

43. John M. Barry , Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), 357.

44. Donald Worster , Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s , 25th anniversary ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 13.

45. Sarah Philips, This Land, This Nation .

46. For an exploration of these issues focused on the South, see Bruce J. Schulman , From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economic Development and the Transformation of the South, 1938–1980 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

47. Badger, The New Deal , 175–176.

48. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal , 157–158.

49. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear , 150–151.

50. Moley, After Seven Years , 190.

51. Badger, The New Deal , 73.

52. Ibid. , 90.

53. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal , 133.

54. Ibid. , 131.

55. Kenneth S. Davis , FDR: The New Deal Years, 1933–1937 (New York: Random House, 1986), 437.

56. Schlesinger , The Coming of the New Deal , 315.

57. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear , 260.

58. Schlesinger, The Coming of the New Deal , 308–309.

59. Ibid. , 138–140.

60. Lizabeth Cohen , Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

61. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear , 297.

62. Lewis initially founded the Committee for Industrial Organizations within the much older American Federation of Labor. Within a year, however, ideological differences split the two groups and the CIO unions soon formed the Congress of Industrial Organizations. The two labor federations remained bitter rivals until the 1950s. They finally merged in 1955 as the AFL-CIO.

63. Melvyn Dubofsky , The State and Labor in Modern America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 137.

64. Nelson Lichtenstein , State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 34.

65. Jefferson Cowie , The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 109.

66. Leuchtenburg, Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal , 231–239.

67. Alan Brinkley , The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York: Knopf, 1995), 19 , 28–29.

68. Although the Bureau of Labor Statistics collected some data on employment in the 1930s, the federal government did not track the unemployment rate as it does today. As a result, scholars have had to reconstruct unemployment rates retrospectively, a process that has been the subject of both methodological and political debate. For a brief introduction to the issues involved, see Eric Rauchway , “New Deal Denialism,” Dissent (Winter 2010): 68–72.

69. Brinkley, The End of Reform , 141.

70. Christina D. Romer , “What Ended the Great Depression?” Journal of Economic History 52 (December 1992): 757.

71. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear , 372.

72. Cohen, Making a New Deal , 252–289.

73. Linda Gordon , “The New Deal Was a Good Idea, We Should Try It This Time,” Dissent (Fall 2009): 33.

74. Because the white South had been “solidly” Democratic since the Civil War and most blacks were disenfranchised, the region’s Democratic politicians had little competition. As a result, they achieved a seniority that gave them powerful control over many House and Senate committees. Ira Katznelson explores the racial repercussions of this Southern committee control on New Deal policy at length in When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in 20th-Century America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), and in Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time .

75. Alice Kessler-Harris , “In the Nation’s Image: The Gendered Limits of Social Citizenship in the Depression Era,” Journal of American History 86 (December 1999): 1262 ; Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White , 43.

76. Robert H. Zieger , The CIO, 1935–1955 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 1.

77. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. , The Age of Roosevelt , 3 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957–1960) ; Frank Freidel , Franklin D. Roosevelt , 4 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1952–1973) ; Eric Frederick Goldman , Rendezvous with Destiny: A History of Modern American Reform (New York: Knopf, 1952).

78. Richard Hofstadter , The Age of Reform: From Bryan to FDR (New York: Knopf, 1955), 303.

79. Carl Degler , Out of Our Past: The Forces That Shaped Modern America (New York: Harper, 1959), 379.

80. Edgar E. Robinson , The Roosevelt Leadership, 1933–1945 (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1955), 14 , 263, 374, 404. See also John T. Flynn , The Roosevelt Myth (New York: Devin Adair, 1948).

81. Moley, After Seven Years .

82. The best recent example is journalist Amity Shlaes’s bestseller, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression (New York: HarperCollins, 2007) . Shlaes argues that the policies of both Hoover and Roosevelt prolonged the Depression and that even World War II did not lead to economic recovery. Whereas most historians use the nation’s gross domestic product as a measure of the economy, Shlaes bases her case on the lackluster performance of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. For a powerful critique of Shlaes’s argument, see Eric Rauchway, “New Deal Denialism,” 68–72.

83. Barton J. Bernstein , “The New Deal: The Conservative Achievements of Liberal Reform,” in Towards a New Past: Dissenting Essays in American History , edited by Barton J. Bernstein , 263–288 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1968) ,. See also Howard Zinn , ed., New Deal Thought (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966) , and Paul K. Conkin , The New Deal (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968).

84. Fraser and Gerstle, eds., The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order , ix.

86. Leuchtenberg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal , 347.

87. Fraser and Gerstle, eds., The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order , ix–x.

88. While they agreed on much, Fraser and Lichtenstein differed on whether the 1930s or the 1940s were the key conservatizing decade. In addition to Fraser and Lichtenstein’s contributions to The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order , see Steve Fraser , Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor (New York: Free Press, 1991) ; Nelson Lichtenstein , The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor (New York: Basic Books, 1995) ; and Nelson Lichtenstein , State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002).

89. Alan Brinkley , “The New Deal and the Idea of the State,” in The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order: 1930–1980 , edited by Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle , 85–121 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989) . See also Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War .

90. Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White ; Mary Poole , The Segregated Origins of Social Security: African Americans and the Welfare State (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).

91. Cybelle Fox , Three Worlds of Relief: Race, Immigration and the American Welfare State from the Progressive Era to the New Deal (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012).

92. Alice Kessler-Harris , “In the Nation’s Image: The Gendered Limits of Social Citizenship in the Depression Era” ; Linda Gordon , Pitied but Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare, 1890–1935 (New York: Free Press, 1994) ; Gwendolyn Mink , The Wages of Motherhood: Inequality in the Welfare State, 1917–1942 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995) ; Suzanne Mettler , Dividing Citizens: Gender and Federalism in New Deal Public Policy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998) ; Alice Kessler-Harris , In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).

93. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear , 365, 376, 379.

94. Katznelson, Fear Itself , 486, 6–7.

95. Wendy L. Wall , Inventing the “American Way”: The Politics of Consensus from the New Deal to the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

96. James T. Kloppenberg , “Who’s Afraid of the Welfare State,” Reviews in American History 18 (1990): 398.

97. Kim Phillips-Fein , Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009), xi–xii.

98. Kevin Kruse , One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (New York: Basic Books, 2015).

99. Jefferson Cowie , The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 15 , 24–25, 9. This book expands on an argument that Cowie and Nick Salvatore first made in “The Long Exception: Rethinking the Place of the New Deal in American History,” International Labor and Working-Class History 74 (Fall 2008): 3–32.

100. Richard Lowitt and Maurine Beasley , eds., One Third of a Nation: Lorena Hickok Reports on the Great Depression (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981).

101. Robert S. McElvaine , Down and Out in the Great Depression: Letters from the Forgotten Man , 25th anniversary ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008).

102. Ann Banks , First Person America (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991).

103. Studs Terkel , Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression (New York: The New Press, 2005).

104. Harry Hopkins , Spending to Save (New York: Norton, 1936).

105. Raymond Moley , After Seven Years (New York: Harper, 1939).

106. Frances Perkins , The Roosevelt I Knew (New York: Viking, 1946) ; and Harold L. Ickes , The Secret Diary of Harold L. Ickes , 2 vols. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1953–1954).

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Primary Source Set The New Deal

The resources in this primary source set are intended for classroom use. If your use will be beyond a single classroom, please review the copyright and fair use guidelines.

Teacher’s Guide

To help your students analyze these primary sources, get a graphic organizer and guides: Analysis Tool and Guides

In July of 1932, in the midst of the greatest economic crisis in U.S. history, Franklin D. Roosevelt accepted the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, promising “a new deal for the American people.” That promise became a series of relief, recovery, and reform programs designed to provide assistance to the unemployed and poor, revive the economy, and change the financial system to prevent another depression.

Historical Background

The timeline below shows some major events related to the New Deal, beginning with its antecedents in the four years before Roosevelt’s inauguration:

In October, the stock market crashes, marking the beginning of the Great Depression.

Unemployment grows from almost 4 million in January to 7 million in December.

President Herbert Hoover appoints the President’s Emergency Committee for Employment to stimulate state and local relief (no funding for relief was provided by the committee).

Congress authorizes release of government surplus wheat and cotton for relief purposes.

Emergency Relief and Construction Act is passed. The Act provides funding to help state and local governments with their relief efforts.

Franklin D. Roosevelt is elected president in November.

In the first two months of 1933, 4,004 banks fail. Unemployment reaches approximately 14 million (about 25 percent). FDR is inaugurated on March 4. The following day, he proclaims a four-day bank holiday. He calls a special session of Congress to begin March 9.

On the first day of its special session, Congress passes the Emergency Banking Act, which gives the president power over the banks. Within a few days, many banks reopen, lifting national spirits. Over the next 100 days, Congress enacts a number of laws creating New Deal programs.

These include:

• The Reforestation Relief Act, establishing jobs for 250,000 young men in the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). By the program’s end in 1941, 2 million people will have worked on CCC projects.
• The Federal Emergency Relief Act, which provides funds to states for relief.
• The Agricultural Adjustment Act, establishing prices for farm products and paying subsidies to farmers, and the Farm Credit Act, providing agricultural loans.
• Tennessee Valley Authority Act, which creates the TVA to build dams and power plants.
• Federal Securities Act, which gives the executive branch the authority to regulate stocks and bonds.
• Home Owners Refinancing Act, providing aid to homeowners in danger of losing their homes.
• National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), which establishes the Public Works Administration (PWA) and the National Recovery Administration (NRA). The PWA provides employment in the building of roads and public buildings. The NRA regulates trade to stimulate competition.
• Banking Act of 1933, creating the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to protect depositors’ funds.
• Roosevelt establishes the National Labor Board (NLB) to protect workers’ rights to join unions to bargain collectively with employers.

Congress continues to pass relief and reform legislation, including the Securities Exchange Act, which establishes the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to regulate sale of securities, and the National Housing Act, which establishes the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) to provide insurance for loans needed to build or repair homes.

Congress passes the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act, which funds the Works Progress Administration (WPA) to provide employment on “useful projects.” Through June 1943, when the WPA ends, the program will provide jobs for 8.5 million Americans with 30 million dependents.

The Supreme Court rules the NIRA unconstitutional.

Congress passes National Labor Relations Act, Social Security Act, Bank Act, Public Utilities Act, and Revenue Act. These acts provide a safety net for the elderly and disabled, authorize greater government regulation of banks and utility companies, and increase taxes on wealthier Americans.

Supreme Court rules the Agricultural Adjustment Act unconstitutional. Roosevelt is reelected.

Roosevelt is inaugurated in January.

Thwarted by Supreme Court decisions, Roosevelt develops a plan to change the Court’s composition. His proposal would add a judge for every justice who does not retire at age 70. The plan is not well received, even among Roosevelt supporters. Supreme Court upholds National Labor Relations Act and Social Security Act.

Congress passes the Fair Labor Standards Act, which sets a minimum wage for workers and a maximum number of work hours. This is the last significant New Deal legislation.

Historians still debate whether the New Deal succeeded. Those who say it succeeded point out that economic indicators, while they did not return to pre-Depression levels, did bounce back significantly, and also point to the infrastructure created by WPA workers as a long-term benefit.

Critics point out that, while unemployment fell after 1933, it remained high. They argue that the New Deal did not provide long-term solutions and only the war ended the Depression. Furthermore, many critics feel the New Deal made changes in the government’s role that were not a benefit to the nation.

Suggestions for Teachers

This primary source set features a variety of documents produced by several New Deal agencies. The documents illustrate a variety of kinds of work funded by the agencies, as well as the types of social and economic problems that the programs either addressed or documented.

• Divide students into five groups. Ask each group to analyze three of the documents in this primary source set. What can they infer from the items and accompanying bibliographic information about the problem(s) facing the country during the Great Depression? What can they infer about the work of the New Deal agencies represented by these items? Ask each group to share what they learned, either orally or by adding to a list of agencies displayed in the classroom.
• Explore the relationship between New Deal programs and some of the individuals that the programs were created to assist. Identify specific individuals who are supported through New Deal programs in the primary source set. Look for evidence of how successful the New Deal program was to that individual. How was a program likely perceived by that individual in the primary source?
• The colorful posters created by WPA artists provide insight into many aspects of American life in the 1930s. Ask each student to choose one of the posters in the primary source set and analyze it in detail, and then Drought-stricken farmer http://www.loc.gov/item/90714876/ identify its purpose, its audience, and any problem and proposed solution addressed. Extend the activity by asking students to write a headline that gets across the message they think the poster provides. Optionally, students can design a poster that addresses a similar issue today, employing a graphic element from the original WPA poster.
• Students may not be familiar with the way the word relief was used in the 1930s. Without defining the term, explain to students that relief was one goal of the New Deal. Assign students to use the documents in the primary source set to find out what relief meant in the 1930s, what forms it took, and how people responded to it.

Additional Resources

American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936 to 1940

Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black and White Negatives

Posters: WPA Posters

Florida Folklife from the WPA Collections, 1937 to 1942

Essay: The New Deal

The election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 resulted in the New Deal he proposed, a fundamental shift in the American political economy and a new conception of the relationship between the government and the governed.

Though less overtly critical of the Constitution than the early progressives, FDR largely ignored it, saying only that it was “so simple and practical that it is possible always to meet extraordinary needs by change in emphasis and arrangement without loss of essential form” (Franklin D. Roosevelt, “First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1932).

The New Deal redefined the purpose of government. No longer was it enough for the government to protect the rights of individuals. The Founders’ regime of limited government, Roosevelt believed, had created a new class of industrial titans, “malefactors of great wealth,” who had acquired tyrannical power over farmers, small businessmen, consumers, and workers. It was now necessary for the government to redress this imbalance of power, to redistribute income and wealth, and to provide economic security for the victims of the old system. In the 1932 campaign he called for “an economic declaration of rights,” a new Bill of Rights that would provide citizens with such goods as jobs, housing, education, recreation, and health care.

In the 1932 campaign Franklin D. Roosevelt called for “an economic declaration of rights,” a new Bill of Rights that would provide citizens with such goods as jobs, housing, education, recreation, and health care.

Roosevelt’s initial strategy was to promote a system of industrial and agricultural cartels created by government.

The Agricultural Adjustment Act would enable farmers to limit crop production in order to increase the prices they got, with government subsidies if those prices were not reached, paid for by taxes on processors of farm commodities. The National Industrial Recovery Act invited industries to devise “codes of fair competition”—to limit production, raise prices, and agree to bargain with labor unions. The New Dealers hoped that these schemes would produce reliable profits for businessmen and farmers, who would then increase their own spending and hiring, and thus facilitate economic recovery. They had, however, clearly failed by the time the Supreme Court declared them unconstitutional in 1935 and 1936.

The administration did not abandon its initial strategy. A “second New Deal” followed further Democratic victories in 1934 and adjusted to the Court’s constitutional objections—for example, by providing benefits to farmers from general revenue and promoting crop reduction as “soil conservation.” It enacted more specific price- and production-fixing measures for particular industries like coal, oil, and motor transportation. It promoted labor unions with the National Labor Relations (Wagner) Act, which compelled employers to bargain exclusively with whatever organization a majority of its workers chose to represent them. It regulated capital markets by the Securities and Exchange Commission and passed legislation strengthening the power of the Federal Reserve Board. It also embarked on massive public works spending and government employment programs, adopting and gradually applying the economic philosophy of John Maynard Keynes that government spending was the cure for depression and unemployment. Congress also provided long-term policies for old-age pensions, unemployment insurance, and insurance for widows and orphans in the Social Security Act of 1935. This was said to be insurance paid for by one’s earnings, rather than a welfare payment.

Large Democratic majorities in Congress accepted the proposals of the president, but the Supreme Court remained an obstacle. Roosevelt said nothing about the Court when he ran for re-election in 1936, winning a landslide victory that increased Democratic congressional majorities still further. A month after his second inauguration, he asked Congress to increase the size of the Supreme Court so that he could appoint six new justices. This “Court-packing plan” shocked the country, split the Democratic party, and went down to defeat. Except for the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which established a national minimum wage and abolished child labor, Congress did not enact any further New Deal legislation. But the Court responded to the threat by abandoning its objections to New Deal programs, so Roosevelt was able to claim that he had “lost the battle but won the war.”

Upholding the Wagner Act and Social Security Act, as well as state economic regulations, the Court no longer used the due process clause of the Fourteenth and Fifth Amendments or the dual federalism of the Tenth Amendment, to protect property rights.

Charles Evans Hughes was Chief Justice of the Supreme Court from 1930-1941

After 1937, the Court stepped aside when it came to economic regulations. The states were free to exercise their police powers to legislate for the safety, health, welfare and morals of the people, unrestrained by the Fourteenth Amendment, the due process clause of which had been held to protect fundamental economic freedoms such as the “liberty of contract.” Congress could do [virtually anything] under the interstate commerce power and its power to tax and spend. The Court declared in the 1938 case of  U.S. v. Carolene Products  that it would apply a stricter standard of constitutional protection to non-economic rights and the rights of minority groups especially.

The Second World War had many of the same effects as the First, establishing a wartime economy in which the government controlled prices and rationed scarce goods in the Office of Price Administration, one of many new agencies. Government control of the wartime economy included extraordinarily high rates of taxation, inflation, the promotion of labor unions, wage and price controls, and outright rationing. The Second World War, like the First, produced a public reaction against these economic controls after the war ended. But the most important New Deal programs survived the postwar readjustment and many of them, like Social Security, expanded. Liberals were disappointed that they were unable to bring the New Deal to completion, as President Harry Truman proposed in his “Fair Deal” campaign. Conservatives were disappointed that the Republican Eisenhower administration did not roll back the New Deal. Labor unions continued to grow, but their powers were limited by the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, whose most important provision permitted states to prohibit agreements that compelled workers to join unions. Over time, more capital would be invested and economic growth would occur in these “right to work” states of the South and West.

The New Deal and the war had produced a myriad of administrative agencies that combining legislative, executive and judicial functions.

These powers were largely confirmed in the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946, which attempt to guarantee due process to persons and companies who were accused to violating administrative regulations. As the Cold War settled in, especially with the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, many elements of the wartime economy in both world wars, such as conscription, continued after World War II. President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned about an excessively militarized economy—what he called the “military-industrial complex”—in his 1961 farewell address (Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Farewell Address,” January 17, 1961). At the height of the Cold War the U.S. spent 10 percent of its gross domestic product on defense.

The twenty years following World War II were prosperous. Economic growth was slow but widely shared; this period saw less income inequality (measured by the share of national income going to the top and bottom quintiles of the population) than any before or since.

American producers were temporarily ahead of foreign competition, and American workers similarly benefited from laws that severely limited immigration until 1965. These were the years of the “big-unit economy,” in which a small number of firms dominated their markets, and the country valued stability and equality above entrepreneurial risk-taking. Policymakers believed that modern, Keynesian economics, by which government fiscal powers could prevent depressions and inflation, now enabled the government to ensure growth and full employment without excessive inflation. In the generation after the Second World War, the American people had great confidence in the government. This fed another great expansion of progressivism, now called liberalism, in the “Great Society” of the 1960s.

Related Content

The New Deal

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal Essay

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FDR (Franklin D. Roosevelt) engaged in a program that was referred to as the New Deal. According to the program, the federal government would take more roles so as to improve the citizen’s economic welfare. The economic system was exceptionally poor when Roosevelt became the president in 1933.

A majority of the state governments had taken a banking holiday, which aimed at preventing depositors from destroying the banking institutions. The banks would be ruined if depositors withdrew all their cash. Roosevelt gave all banking institutions four days for holiday. Consequently, Roosevelt pressured the Congress and obtained a legislation for reopening the banks.

The federal government certified that all banks were sound for reopening. Afterwards, there were several banking reforms. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation allowed deposits to be insured.

According to the New Deal, a larger percent of the federal government funds would be used to pay all needy citizens. Grants, as opposed to loans, would be given to the needy citizens. A number of novel agencies were initiated to ensure that the unemployed benefitted from government- sponsored jobs.

The WPA (Works Progress Administration) initiated special projects, which offered jobs to the unskilled and skilled citizens. People trained as musicians, actors, artists, and writers benefitted from such employment. The PWA (Public Works Administration) initiated projects such as construction of dams, sports centers, and highways. The young men benefitted from conservation projects since they were employed by the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps).

In my opinion, photographs and paintings are not simply a recording of the past. On the contrary, they are fashioned and composed descriptions, which detail the past. Dorothea Lange’s photos were constructed to give different stories. The photographs advocated for sympathy for all poor people.

Dorothea was a renowned documentary photographer in America. Particularly, she was extremely popular for the Great Depression chronicles and the photographs involving migratory farm employees. She created photographs for the FSA (Farm Security Administration), which were assessing the farm worker’s living conditions in California. A majority of the laborers had migrated to the west as an escape strategy from the Dust Bowl.

Dorothea took photographs, which depicted the depression in human lives. In 1934, Dorothea had the first show. It exhibited various issues, which were facing the government. These included breadline recipients, labor leaders, strike rallies, and political demonstrations. After presenting her photographs during the show, Dorothea got a job with the New Deal Administration.

The photographs were utilized as symbols of the White Angel Breadline migrant, which occurred in 1933 in San Francisco. Dorothea communicated the urgent need for government action to help the destitute Americans. 1939 was declared the year of a novel start.

The Florence Owens Thompson sequence of photographs had a picture of a migrant mother. Moreover, the series showed an underprivileged Californian pea picker. In another photograph, there was a migratory cotton picker from Mexico who was aged ten years. In the picture, the boy was working on the family car and was unable to attend school.

According to him, the father never allowed him to go to school since he was supposed to pick cotton. The boy picked approximately twenty five pounds of cotton every day. In my opinion, this was child labor. In essence, Dorothea’s photos and Roosevelt New Deal had a common goal; fighting for the rights of the underprivileged Americans.

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The New Deal: an Analysis of Its Impact on American Society

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Did New Deal Programs Help End the Great Depression?

By: Brian Dunleavy

Updated: September 10, 2018 | Original: August 13, 2018

Since the late 1930s, conventional wisdom has held that President Franklin D. Roosevelt ’s “ New Deal ” helped bring about the end of the Great Depression . The series of social and government spending programs did get millions of Americans back to work on hundreds of public projects across the country.

But in the 80 years since the Great Depression was formally declared over in June of 1938, historians and economists have continued to debate the true merits of the New Deal and whether, in fact, the radical government spending programs brought about the end of the biggest economic downturn in history.

Many New Deal programs established critical economic safeguards.

“The reforms put in place by New Deal, including encouraging the beginning of the labor movement , which fostered wage growth and sustained the purchasing power of millions of Americans, the establishment of Social Security and the federal regulations imposed on the financial industry, as imperfect as they were, essentially ensured there wouldn’t be another Great Depression after the 1930s,” says Nelson Lichtenstein , professor of history and director of the Center for the Study of Work, Labor and Democracy at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

“And there hasn’t been. We’ve had a few close calls, but nothing like the Great Depression,” he says.

But, just because the United States hasn’t repeated the economic catastrophe of the Great Depression doesn’t mean the programs of the New Deal can take all the credit. Other factors were also at play—including the onset of a major world war. “It really could be argued World War II , which ultimately lowered unemployment and increased GNP through weapons production really played a much bigger role,” Lichtenstein says.

Still, as Dr. Lichtenstein notes, several programs created through the New Deal did have a lasting positive impact on the U.S. economy which was flagging throughout the 1930s, among them the Social Security Act , which provided income for the elderly, disabled and children of poor families. The Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 established the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation , which effectively insured the savings of Americans in the event of a bank failure, which was all too common at the time.

The modern labor movement was born out of New Deal initiatives.

In addition, Lichtenstein notes, the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 was enacted to foster “fair competition” through the fixing of prices and wages and the establishment of production quotas, among other measures.

The subsequent National Labor Relations Act of 1935 allowed for collective bargaining and essentially led to the development of the labor movement in the United States, which protected workers’ rights and wages.

Why the Tennessee Valley Authority was the New Deal’s Most Ambitious—and Controversial—Program

The TVA was a model for rural electrification in the South, but it displaced thousands and attracted a slew of lawsuits.

How a New Deal Housing Program Enforced Segregation

In the 1930s, the FHA refused to insure houses for Black families, or even insure houses in white neighborhoods that were too close to Black ones.

Artists of the New Deal

President Franklin Roosevelt creates a series of programs designed to help America cope with, and recover from the Great Depression.

But New Deal programs alone weren’t enough to end the Great Depression.

According to Linda Gordon , professor of history at New York University, the Works Progress Administration , created in 1935, also had a positive impact by employing more than 8 million Americans in building projects ranging from bridges and airports to parks and schools.

Such programs certainly helped end the Great Depression, “but were insufficient [because] the amount of government funds for stimulus wasn’t large enough,” she notes. “Only World War II, with its demands for massive war production, which created lots of jobs, ended the Depression.”

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Trent Williams Agrees to a New Deal with the 49ers

Grant cohn | 2 hours ago.

• San Francisco 49ers

Good news for the 49ers.

Trent Williams reportedly has ended his hold-out and agreed to a new contract. He has reported to the team in Santa Clara and should be on the field for the home opener Monday night against the New York Jets. It remains to be seen if he will practice today.

The terms of Williams' new deal have not yet been reported. He presumably received a sizable raise as well some guaranteed money. He previously had zero guarantees left on his deal. Now he should have some security beyond this season.

It should come as no surprise that the 49ers were able to work something out with Williams. All offseason, the 49ers have made it clear that they will do whatever it takes to keep this team together for one more year. Seemingly every player who requested an extension or a new deal got one. Even right tackle Colton McKivitz got an extension.

What's strange is why the 49ers chose to wait until a week before the regular season opener to make their final offer to Williams. Just a few days ago, it was reported that Williams was unhappy with the negotiations and was threatening to sit out games. Clearly, the 49ers upped their offer at the last minute. Which is fine. But it would have been better to finalize things with Williams weeks ago so he could have participated in training camp and been 100 percent ready for the season.

Now, it's unclear just how ready he'll be.

Grant Cohn has covered the San Francisco 49ers daily since 2011. He spent the first nine years of his career with the Santa Rosa Press Democrat where he wrote the Inside the 49ers blog and covered famous coaches and athletes such as Jim Harbaugh, Colin Kaepernick and Patrick Willis. In 2012, Inside the 49ers won Sports Blog of the Year from the Peninsula Press Club. In 2020, Cohn joined FanNation and began writing All49ers. In addition, he created a YouTube channel which has become the go-to place on YouTube to consume 49ers content. Cohn's channel typically generates roughly 3.5 million viewers per month, while the 49ers' official YouTube channel generates roughly 1.5 million viewers per month. Cohn live streams almost every day and posts videos hourly during the football season. Cohn is committed to asking the questions that 49ers fans want answered, and providing the most honest and interactive coverage in the country. His loyalty is to the reader and the viewer, not the team or any player or coach. Cohn is a new-age multimedia journalist with an old-school mentality, because his father is Lowell Cohn, the legendary sports columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle from 1979 to 1993. The two have a live podcast every Tuesday. Grant Cohn grew up in Oakland and studied English Literature at UCLA from 2006 to 2010. He currently lives in Oakland with his wife.

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Edwidge Danticat's new collection of essays says 'We're Alone'

Ari Shapiro

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Jordan-Marie Smith

NPR's Ari Shapiro talks with author Edwidge Dandicat about her new essay collection, We're Alone .

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As Israel’s Rifts Widen, Netanyahu Remains Defiant

In strikes and protests, many Israelis are pushing their government to prioritize the release of hostages above the immediate defeat of Hamas. But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has refused to change course.

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By Patrick Kingsley

Reporting from Jerusalem

When Israel’s largest union began a strike on Monday, building on the largest anti-government protests since the start of the war in Gaza, the group hoped to persuade the government to swiftly agree to a cease-fire.

Within hours, its effort fizzled as the union — which represents 800,000 Israelis — complied with a court order to end the strike. And the day ended with a defiant speech from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in which he refused to compromise in the negotiations with Hamas and implicitly rebuked the protesters for straining Israel’s social cohesion.

Despite one of the biggest displays of wartime dissent in Israel’s history, an emotionally potent moment failed to evolve into a political turning point.

“Politically, it could have been much worse for Netanyahu,” said Ariel Kahana, a commentator for Israel Hayom, a leading right-wing newspaper. “It looks like the opposition has lost,” Mr. Kahana added.

While the strike slowed or suspended services at thousands of schools and several municipalities, transport networks and hospitals, some sectors were only partly affected. Many municipal authorities and institutions declined to take part.

Unlike in March 2023, when a general strike and mass protests prompted Mr. Netanyahu to suspend a contentious plan to overhaul the judiciary, this time his right-wing party maintained the public unity it has displayed throughout the war. Only Yoav Gallant, the defense minister, voted against a recent cabinet motion to restrict the circumstances in which Israel could agree to a cease-fire, and few, if any, other senior officials from his party, Likud, have broken ranks in public.

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Trent Williams finalizing a new deal with the 49ers, ends contract holdout | The Facility

Emmanuel acho, lesean mccoy, james jones and chase daniel react to trent williams finalizing a new deal with the san francisco 49ers and if this puts their concerns to rest..

What is on the line for Lamar Jackson vs. Chiefs? | The Facility

Draisaitl signs 8-year, $112 million contract with Oilers

Forward entering final season of current deal, helped Edmonton to Game 7 of 2024 Stanley Cup Final

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Leon Draisaitl signed an eight-year, $112 million contract with the Edmonton Oilers on Tuesday. It has an average annual value of $14 million and begins next season.

The 28-year-old forward is entering the final season of an eight-year, $68 million contract he signed with the Oilers on Aug. 16, 2017, and could have become an unrestricted free agent after the season. His 106 points (41 goals, 65 assists) in 81 regular-season games ranked seventh in the NHL last season, and he was third in the Stanley Cup Playoffs with 31 points (10 goals, 21 assists) in 25 games to help Edmonton advance to the Stanley Cup Final, a seven-game loss to the Florida Panthers.

"This is a historic day for the Edmonton Oilers," general manager Stan Bowman said. "Leon's commitment to our team, our city and Oilers fans everywhere cannot be overstated. His desire to help bring a Stanley Cup title home to Edmonton is central to everything he does both on and off the ice."

Draisaitl, the No. 3 pick in the 2014 NHL Draft, has 850 points (347 goals, 503 assists) in 719 regular-season games and 108 points (41 goals, 67 assists) in 74 playoff games. His NHL-leading 110 points in 2019-20 earned him the Art Ross Trophy, Hart Trophy (most valuable player) and Ted Lindsay Award (most outstanding player as voted by the NHLPA).

"Obviously I love being an Oiler more than anything," Draisaitl said a few days after the Oilers season ended." ... It's going to take a little bit of time for me to figure out an answer or what we want to do and I am well aware of what's going on but I haven't spent much time thinking about what really are the facts and what I want to do. We'll figure it out when we get there."

Since 2018-19, Draisaitl ranks second in the NHL in points (643) behind teammate Connor McDavid (726), and second in goals (272) behind Auston Matthews of the Toronto Maple Leafs (294).

Draisaitl has helped the Oilers qualify for the playoffs in five straight seasons and six of his 10 with the team. Prior to his first season in 2014-15, Edmonton had not made the playoffs in eight seasons.

He is third in points behind McDavid (982) and Nikita Kucherov of the Tampa Bay Lightning (855) since entering the NHL and second in power-play goals (146) behind Alex Ovechkin of the Washington Capitals.

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