United State History, Since 1877
Rosen
 Born in 1882, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was raised to
strive for the high-minded doctrines of public service
and Christian duty to help the poor and weak.
 After a two-year stint in the New York legislature, he
ascended to national office when Woodrow Wilson
appointed him assistant secretary of the navy.
 During the summer of 1921, Roosevelt was infected
with the polio virus, paralyzing both his legs.
 While visiting a polio therapy facility in Warm Springs,
Georgia, Roosevelt courted southern Democrats and
became a rare political creature: a New Yorker from the
Democratic Party's urban and immigrant wing with
whom whites from the Democratic Party's entrenched
southern wing felt comfortable.
 Roosevelt won New York's 1928 gubernatorial election
and used his position to showcase his leadership and
his suitability for a presidential bid.
 Roosevelt believed government should intervene to
protect citizens from economic hardships, rather than
wait for the laws of supply and demand to improve the
economy.
 In 1931, Roosevelt created the Temporary Emergency
Relief Administration ( TERA ), the highlight of
Roosevelt's efforts to relieve the economic hardships of
New Yorkers.
 To his supporters, Roosevelt seemed to be a leader
determined to use the resources of the government to
attack the economic crisis without deviating from
democracy or from capitalism.
 Democrats convened in Chicago in July 1932 to
nominate their presidential candidate; opposition to
Republicans and hunger for office united Democrats,
but the party remained divided by religion, region,
culture, and commitment to the status quo.
 When Roosevelt accepted the Democratic nomination,
he stated his determination to govern decisively and
pledged himself to “a new deal for the American
people,” but few details about what Roosevelt meant
by a “new deal” emerged in the presidential campaign.
 Roosevelt won in a historic landslide; his victory
represented the emergence of what came to be known
as the New Deal coalition, attracting support from
farmers, factory workers, immigrants, city folk, African
Americans, women, and progressive intellectuals.
 In order to design and implement the New Deal,
Roosevelt needed ideas and people; Harry Hopkins
and Frances Perkins, both activists from the social
gospel tradition and veterans of Roosevelt's New York
governorship, became two of the most important new
cabinet members.
 No New Dealer was more important than the
president himself and his wife, Eleanor, who became
the New Deal's unofficial ambassador.
 Many Americans benefited from Roosevelt 's programs
either directly through jobs and relief or indirectly
from economic improvements.
 As Roosevelt and his advisers developed plans to meet
the economic emergency, their watchwords were
action, experiment, and improvise.
 The New Dealers' experimentation and improvisation
was driven by four underlying ideas.
 First, Roosevelt and his advisers sought capitalist
solutions to the economic crisis.
 Second, Roosevelt was persuaded that the greatest
flaw of America 's capitalist economy,
underconsumption, was the root cause of the current
economic paralysis.
 Third, New Dealers believed that the immense size
and economic power of American corporations needed
to be counterbalanced by government and by
organization among workers and small producers.
 Fourth, New Dealers felt that the government must
somehow moderate the imbalance of wealth created
by American capitalism so that working people could
share more fully in the fruits of the economy.
 New Dealers first tackled the nation's failing banking
system, declaring a four-day bank holiday, working
around the clock to draft the Emergency Banking Act,
which released funds from the Reconstruction Finance
Corporation in order to bolster bank assets.
 In his “fireside chats,” Roosevelt addressed the millions
of Americans over the radio to explain the first of the
New Deal initiatives and to reassure Americans about
the safety of their money in banks.
 The banking legislation and fireside chats worked;
most of the nation's banks reopened and remained
solvent under federal regulation and oversight.
 To prevent fraud, corruption, insider trading, and
other abuses that had tainted Wall Street and
contributed to the crash of 1929, Roosevelt pressed
Congress to regulate the stock market, leading to the
creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission
(SEC).
 Since its founding, the federal government had not
assumed responsibility for needy people except during
natural disasters or emergencies such as the Civil War.
 To persuade Americans that the depression
necessitated unprecedented federal relief efforts,
Harry Hopkins, a New Dealer in Roosevelt's
administration, dispatched investigators throughout
the nation to describe the plight of impoverished
Americans.
 Reports of families living in desperate poverty
galvanized support for the Federal Emergency Relief
Administration (FERA), which provided $500 million
to feed the hungry and create jobs.
 The most popular relief program was the Civilian
Conservation Corps, which offered unemployed young
men a chance to earn wages while working to conserve
natural resources; women were excluded until Eleanor
Roosevelt demanded that a token number of them be
hired.
 The New Deal also sought to harness natural resources
for hydroelectric power.
 The New Deal's most ambitious and controversial
natural resources development project was the
Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), created in 1933 to
build dams along the Tennessee River in an effort to
supply cheap electricity to impoverished rural
communities.
 New sources of hydroelectric power helped the New
Deal bring the wonder of electricity to the country
folk, fulfilling an old progressive dream.
 New Dealers diagnosed farmers' economic plight as a
classic case of overproduction and underconsumption.
 They sought to cut agricultural production, thereby
raising crop prices and farmers' income; the New
Deal's Agricultural Adjustment Act ( AAA )
accomplished this by paying farmers not to grow some
crops.
 With the formation of the Commodity Credit
Corporation, the federal government allowed farmers
to hold their harvested crops off the market and wait
for higher prices; the Farm Credit Act (FCA) provided
long-term credit on mortgaged farm property and
allowed debt-ridden farmers to avoid foreclosure.
 Crop allotments, commodity loans, and mortgage
credit made farmers major beneficiaries of New Deal
policies.
 In the South, landlords controlled the distribution of
New Deal agricultural benefits and shamelessly
rewarded themselves while denying funds to
sharecroppers and tenant farmers, whose privation
worsened.
 Unlike farmers, industrialists cut production with the
onset of the depression, a strategy that created major
economic and social problems for Roosevelt and his
advisers, because declining industrial production
meant that millions of working people lost their jobs
and, in turn, their ability to buy consumer goods.
 The New Deal's National Industrial Recovery Act
(NIRA) opted for a government-sponsored form of
industrial self-government and established the
National Recovery Administration (NRA) in June 1933.
 NRA codes encouraged employers to define fair
working conditions, set prices, and minimize
competition in order to stabilize existing industries
and maintain their workforces; in exchange for
relaxing federal antitrust regulations, the NRA made
participating businesses promise that they would
recognize workers' rights to organize and to engage in
collective bargaining.
 New Dealers hoped that the NRA codes would
encourage businesses with a social conscience to enact
fair treatment for workers and consumers and promote
the general economic welfare; instead, NRA codes
tended to strengthen conventional business practices.
 New Deal programs rescued capitalism, but did not
prevent business leaders from criticizing Roosevelt,
despite the fact that their economic prospects
improved more than those of most other Americans
during the depression.
 By 1935, two major business organizations, the
National Association of Manufacturers and the
Chamber of Commerce, had become openly anti–New
Deal.
 Economic planners who favored rational planning in
the public interest and labor leaders who sought to
influence wages and working conditions by organizing
unions attacked the New Deal from the left.
 In May 1935, the Supreme Court stepped into the
crossfire of criticism and declared that the NRA
unconstitutionally granted powers reserved to
Congress on an administrative agency staffed by
government appointees.
 The Agricultural Adjustment Act ( AAA ) also
weathered harsh criticism from opponents but
managed to outlast the NRA.
 Agricultural processors criticized the AAA because the
tax on processed crops funded the programs that aided
farmers while disadvantaging processors; the Supreme
Court struck down the tax and the AAA rebounded,
getting funding instead from general government
funds.
 Protests stirred among those who did not qualify for
allotments, arguing that the act enriched large
farmers, rather than small farmers, especially
sharecroppers in the South, who rented rather than
owned land.
 Roosevelt's political dependence on southern
Democrats caused him to avoid confronting such
economic and racial inequities in the South's
entrenched order.
 With few other options, displaced tenants often joined
the army of migrant workers that straggled across rural
America during the 1930s.
 Politically, the New Deal's staunchest opponents were
part of the Republican Party—organized, well-heeled,
mainstream, and determined to challenge Roosevelt at
every turn.
 Socialists and Communists accused the New Deal of
being an instrument of business elites, rescuing
capitalism from its self-inflicted crisis.
 Many intellectuals and artists decided that the time
was ripe to advance the cause of more radical change;
they joined left-wing organizations, including the
American Communist Party, which reached the height
of its influence in the United States in the 1930s.
 More powerful challenges to the New Deal sprouted
from homegrown roots.
 Charles Coughlin, a Catholic priest in Detroit , spoke
to, and for, many worried Americans in his weekly
radio broadcasts that reached a nationwide audience
of 40 million and espoused virulent anti-Semitism.
 Dr. Francis Townsend proposed the creation of an Old
Age Revolving Pension that would pay every American
over the age of sixty a pension of $200 a month that
had to be spent within thirty days, thereby stimulating
the economy.
 Caughlin and Townsend merged forces in the Union
Party in time for the 1936 election.
 A more formidable challenge to the New Deal came
from the Southern wing of the Democratic Party.
 Louisiana senator Huey Long introduced a sweeping
“soak the rich” tax bill to outlaw personal incomes of
more than $1 million and inheritances of more than $5
million; when the Senate rejected his proposal, Long
decided to run for president on a platform that
promised to “Share Our Wealth,” but was assassinated
in 1935.
 Challenges to the New Deal from Republicans as well
as more radical groups stirred Democrats to solidify
their winning coalition and in the midterm elections
of 1934, New Dealers won a landslide victory.
 By 1935, 8 million people were jobless; Roosevelt and
his advisers launched a massive work relief program,
creating the Works Progress Administration (WPA).
 By 1936, WPA funds provided jobs for 7 percent of the
nation's labor force, discriminating in favor of men
against women and racial minorities.
 About three out of four WPA jobs involved
construction and renovation of the nation's physical
infrastructure; other WPA jobs employed artists,
musicians, actors, journalists, poets, and novelists.
 Depression-era factory workers who managed to keep
their jobs saw their wages and working hours cut and
worried constantly about being laid off.
 With legislation and political support, the New Deal
encouraged an unprecedented wave of union
organizing among the nation's working people.
 Battles on the nation's streets and docks showed the
determination of militant labor leaders to organize
unions that would protect jobs as well as wages.
 The 1935 Wagner Act, which created the National
Labor Relations Board and guaranteed workers the
right to organize unions, along with renewed labor
militancy, made great strides for labor unions during
the New Deal era.
 Most of the new union members were factory workers
or unskilled laborers; many were also immigrants and
African Americans.
 In 1935, under the leadership of John L. Lewis and
Sidney Hillman, a coalition of unskilled workers
formed the Committee for Industrial Organization
(CIO), which mobilized organizing drives in major
industries.
 The bloody struggle by the CIO -affiliated United Auto
Workers (UAW) to organize workers at General Motors
climaxed in January 1937 when striking workers
occupied the main assembly plant in Flint, Michigan.
 After the “sit-down” strike slashed the plant's
production of 15,000 cars a week to a mere 150, the
automaker capitulated, recognizing the UAW as the
sole bargaining agent for all the company's workers
and agreeing to refrain from interfering with union
activity.
 CIO organizers hoped to ride their success in auto
plants to victory in the steel mills, but they
encountered fanatic opposition from small steel mills.
 The single most important feature of the New Deal's
emerging welfare state was Social Security.
 The political struggle for Social Security highlighted
class differences among Americans.
 The large majority of New Dealers carried the Social
Security Act through Congress in August, 1935; the act
provided pensions for the elderly funded by workers
and their employers, and unemployment insurance
funded by employers' contributions.
 The Social Security Act excluded domestic and
agricultural workers, thereby making about half of
African Americans and half of all employed women
ineligible for benefits.
 Social Security also issued multi-million-dollar grants
to the states to use to support dependent children,
public health services, and the blind.
 Strong objections to federal involvement in matters,
traditionally left to individuals and to local charities,
persuaded the framers of the Social Security Act to
strike an awkward balance among federal, state, and
personal responsibility.
 Fervent opposition to Social Security struck New
Dealers as evidence that the rich had learned little
from the depression.
 While the WPA and other work relief programs aided
working people, the average unemployment rate
during the 1930s remained high at 17 percent, about
one of every six workers.
 Many working people, including domestic workers—
mostly women—and agricultural workers—African,
Hispanic, or Asian Americans—remained largely
untouched by New Deal benefits.
 Millions of women, children, old folks, the
unorganized, unskilled, uneducated, and unemployed,
often fell through the New Deal safety net, but the
New Deal neglected few citizens more than it did
African Americans.
 Disfranchisement prevented southern blacks from
protesting their plight at the ballot box; other forms of
protest risked retaliation from local whites and, after
years of decline, lynching increased during the 1930s.
 Roosevelt responded to criticism cautiously, because
New Deal reforms required the political support of
powerful conservative, segregationist, southern
Democrats who would be alienated by programs that
aided blacks.
 Nonetheless, Roosevelt's overtures to African
Americans prompted northern black voters to shift in
the 1934 elections from the Republican to the
Democratic Party, helping elect New Deal Democrats.
 Eleanor Roosevelt sponsored the appointment of Mary
McLeod Bethune—the energetic cofounder of the
National Council on Negro Women—as head of the
Division of Negro Affairs in the National Youth
Administration, where she used her position to guide a
small number of black professionals and civil rights
activists to posts within New Deal agencies.
 Despite making a few gains, by 1940 African
Americans still suffered severe disadvantages, as did
Hispanic Americans and Asian Americans.
 Native Americans also suffered neglect from New Deal
agencies, but the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934
did restore the Indians' right to own land communally,
to have greater control over their own affairs, and
provided an important foundation for Indians'
economic, cultural, and political resurgence a
generation later.
 Roosevelt believed that the presidential election of
1936 would test his leadership and progressive ideals.
 Republicans turned to the Kansas heartland and
selected as their presidential nominee Governor Alfred
Landon, who stressed mainstream Republican
proposals to achieve a balanced federal budget.
 Roosevelt put his faith in the growing coalition of New
Deal supporters, who he believed shared his
conviction that the New Deal was the nation's
liberator from a long era of privilege and wealth for a
few and “economic slavery” for the rest.
 Roosevelt triumphed spectacularly in the election,
winning 60.8 percent of the popular vote, pledging to
use his mandate to help all citizens achieve a decent
standard of living.
 After winning the election, Roosevelt focused on
removing the remaining obstacles to New Deal
reforms.
 He decided to target the Supreme Court, laden with
Republican-appointed conservative justices, which
had invalidated eleven New Deal measures as
unconstitutional interferences with free enterprise.
 Roosevelt proposed a plan that would allow him to
appoint to the Court up to six New Dealers, who could
outvote the elderly, conservative, Republican justices.
 The president had not reckoned with Americans'
deeply rooted deference to the independent authority
of the Supreme Court and the court-packing bill
failed.
 Ultimately, the Supreme Court justices got Roosevelt 's
message and upheld New Deal legislation in
subsequent cases.
 Emboldened by their defeat of the court-packing plan,
Republicans and southern Democrats rallied around
their common conservatism to obstruct additional
reforms.
 Roosevelt himself favored slowing the pace of the New
Deal and believed that additional deficit spending by
the federal government was no longer necessary.
 Roosevelt's retrenchment soon backfired, as national
income and production slipped steeply backward.
 The economic reversal hurt the New Deal politically;
conservatives argued That New Deal measures
produced only an illusion of progress, and staunch
New Dealers felt that Roosevelt should revive federal
spending.
 The New Deal's ad hoc methods received support from
new economic ideas advanced by the brilliant British
economist John Maynard Keynes.
 The recession scare of 1938 taught Roosevelt the
Keynesian lesson that economic growth had to be
carefully nurtured.
 Roosevelt gained new influence over the bureaucracy
in 1938 when Congress passed the Administrative
Reorganization Act, but resistance to further reform
was on the rise and the New Deal was beginning to
lose momentum.
 The last burst of New Deal reforms included farm
reforms in 1937 that led to the creation of the Farm
Security Administration (FSA), which tried to help
tenant farmers become independent; further reforms
in 1938 led to a second Agricultural Adjustment Act,
which moderated price swings by regulating supply.
 Advocates for the urban poor also made modest gains
after decades of neglect; the 1937 National Housing
Act represented the federal government's first effort to
provide affordable housing in urban areas.
 The last major piece of New Deal legislation, the Fair
Labor Standards Act of June 1938, reiterated the New
Deal pledge to provide workers with a decent standard
of living through the regulation of wages and hours,
standards that also curbed child labor.
 The final New Deal reform effort failed to make much
headway against the hidebound system of racial
segregation and by the end of 1938 the New Deal had
lost steam and was encountering stiff opposition.