New Deal

:Alternative meaning: New Deal (United Kingdom)

The New Deal during Roosevelt's second term

Legislative successes and failures

In the spring of 1935, responding to the setbacks in the Court, a new skepticism in Congress, and the growing popular clamor for more dramatic action, the administration proposed or endorsed several important new initiatives. The National Labor Relations Act (July 5), also known as the Wagner Act, revived and strengthened the protections of collective bargaining contained in the original (and now invalidated) NIRA. New relief programs, of which the most prominent was the Works Progress Administration (WPA), created hundreds of thousands of jobs for the unemployed. But the most important achievement of 1935, and perhaps the New Deal as a whole, was the Social Security Act (August 14), which established a system of old-age pensions, unemployment insurance, and welfare benefits for such protected groups as dependent children and the handicapped, establishing a framework for today's U.S. welfare system.

Related Topics:
1935 - National Labor Relations Act - July 5 - Works Progress Administration - Social Security Act - August 14 - Unemployment

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Roosevelt, however, emboldened by the triumphs of his first term, set out in 1937 to consolidate authority within the government in ways that provoked powerful opposition. Early in the year, he asked Congress to expand the number of justices on the Supreme Court so as to allow him to appoint members sympathetic to his ideas and hence tip the ideological balance of the Court. In one sense the proposal succeeded; Justice Owen Roberts, almost certainly in response to the threat, switched positions and began voting to uphold New Deal measures, effectively creating a liberal majority in West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish and National Labor Relations Board v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation. Journalists called this change the "switch in time that saved nine." But the "court packing plan," as it was known, did lasting political damage to Roosevelt and was finally rejected by Congress in July. At about the same time, the administration proposed a plan to reorganize the executive branch in ways that would significantly increase the president's control over the bureaucracy. Like the Court-packing plan, executive reorganization garnered opposition from those who feared a "Roosevelt dictatorship" and failed in Congress; a watered-down version of the bill finally won passage in 1939.

Related Topics:
1937 - Owen Roberts - West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish - National Labor Relations Board v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation

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Historical assessment

Historians on the right and left have generally been disappointed with Roosevelt's second term. On the right, there have been charges of an FDR "executive dictatorship" since the 1930s. Historian John T. Flynn, for example, denounced FDR as a socialistic radical and a despot in The Roosevelt Myth (1956). However, while some historians have denounced the "revolutionary" nature of the New Deal, others have denounced the New Deal as a conservative, and even reactionary, phenomenon.

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At the time, some of the New Deal policies were recognised by supporters as being at least somewhat unconstitutional, but as important or necessary for the health of the country. In 1931, the U.S. ambassador to Germany William Dodd gave a speech in Berlin in which he described the New Deal programs in the following way: "It was not revolution as men are prone to say. It was a popular expansion of governmental powers beyond all constitutional grants; and nearly all men everywhere hope the President may succeed." Many later historians have based their analysis of the New Deal on their opinions of the appropriateness of such actions.

Related Topics:
1931 - Germany - William Dodd - Berlin

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Since the 1960s, "New Left" historians have been among the New Deal's harshest critics. (For a list of relevant works, see the list of suggested readings appearing toward the bottom of the article.) Barton J. Bernstein, in a 1968 essay, compiled a chronicle of missed opportunities and inadequate responses to problems. The New Deal may have saved capitalism from itself, Bernstein charged, but it had failed to help—and in many cases actually harmed—those groups most in need of assistance. Paul K. Conkin in The New Deal (1967) similarly chastised the government of the 1930s for its policies toward marginal farmers, for its failure to institute sufficiently progressive tax reform, and its excessive generosity toward select business interests. Howard Zinn, in an essay in 1966, criticized the New Deal for working actively to actually preserve the worst evils of capitalism.

Related Topics:
1960s - New Left - Howard Zinn

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Yet, much of the more recent work on the New Deal has been less interested in the question of whether the New Deal was a "conservative" or "revolutionary" phenomenon than in the question of constraints within which it was operating. Political sociologist Theda Skocpol, in an influential series of articles, has emphasized the issue of "state capacity" as an often-crippling constraint. Ambitious reform ideas often failed, she argued because of the absence of a government bureaucracy with significant strength and expertise to administer them. Other more recent works have stressed the political constraints that the New Deal encountered. Both in Congress and among certain segments of the population conservative inhibitions about government remained strong; thus some scholars have stressed that the New Deal was not just a product of its liberal backers, but also a product of the pressures of its conservative opponents.

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