The Great Depression and the New Deal

 

Theme: Franklin Roosevelt promised the American people a “New Deal” to attack the Great Depression with massive federal programs designed to bring about relief, recovery and reform.

 

1. Roosevelt believed that he had an urgent mandate from the American people to cope with the depression. The first “100 Days”, a frantic legislative and executive frenzy, lifted the spirits of the American people but did not solve the problems, immediately.

 

2. Roosevelt’s programs put millions of the unemployed back on the job through federal action. The early New Deal (especially the NIRA) developed sweeping programs to reorganize and reform American industry, labor and agriculture.

 

3. Roosevelt’s New Deal was challenged on all sides. Popular demagogues like Huey Long and Father Charles Coughlin appealed to the suffering masses. While conservatives furiously denounced the New Deal as an attack on democracy and the free enterprise system.

 

4. Roosevelt helped the Democratic Party to form a powerful political coalition of urbanites, organized labor, “new immigrants”, blacks, and the South sweeping the 1936 election and forming the power base of the Democratic Party for the next 40 years.

 

5. The New Deal is filled with contradictions. In its goals to maintain the faith of the American people in the ability of democratic government to meet the needs of the people, the New Deal was “moderate” when compared with more extremist movements and ideas that triumphed elsewhere such as fascism, communism, militarism, and socialism. Yet it is also controversial because of the departure from old-time American traditions of limited government and “rugged individualism”.