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New Deal Pt 3 - Roosevelts New Deal
US History (1491 ce)
Jackson College
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The New Deal in Disarray o Roosevelt emerged from the 1936 election at the zenith of his popularity o Within months, however, the New Deal was mired in serious new difficulties-a result of continuing opposition, the president's own political errors, and major economic setbacks o The Court Fight The 1936 mandate, Franklin Roosevelt believed, made it possible for him to do something about the problem of the Supreme Court No program of reform, he had become convinced, could long survive conservative justices, who had already struck down the NRA and the AAA and threatened to invalidate even more legislation Court Packing In February 1937, Roosevelt sent a surprise message to Capitol Hill proposing a general overhaul of the federal court system; included among the many provisions was one to add up to 6 new justices to the Supreme Court, with a new justice added for every sitting justice over the age of seventy The courts were overworked he claimed, and needed additional manpower and younger blood to enable them to cope with their increasing burdens But Roosevelt's real purpose was to give himself the opportunity to appoint new, liberal justices and change the ideological balance of the Court Conservatives were outraged at the Court Packing Plan, and even many Roosevelt supporters were disturbed by what they considered evidence of the president's hunger for power Still, Roosevelt might well have persuaded Congress to appoint at least a compromise measure had not the Supreme Court itself intervened Of the nine justices, three reliably supported the New Deal, and four reliably opposed it Of the remaining two, Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes often sided with the progressives and Associate
Justice Owen J. Roberts usually voted with the conservatives On March 9, 1937, Roberts, Hughes, and three progressive justices voted together to uphold a state minimum wage law-in the case of West Coast Hotel v. Parrish-thus, appearing to reverse a 5-to-4 decision of the previous year invalidating a similar law Two weeks later, again by a 5-to-4 margin, the Court upheld the Wagner Act, and in May it validated the Social Security Act Whether or not for that reason, the Court's newly moderate position made the Court Packing bill seem unnecessary Congress ultimately defeated it On one level, the affair was a significant victory for Franklin Roosevelt The Court was no longer an obstacle to New Deal reforms, particularly after the older justices began to retire, to be replaced by Roosevelt appointees But the Court-Packing episode did lasting political damage to the administration From 1937 on, southern Democrats and other conservatives voted against Roosevelt's measures much more often than they had in the past o Retrenchment and Recession By the summer of 1937, the gross national product, which had dropped from $82 billion in 1929 to $40 billion in 1932, had risen back to nearly $72 billion Other economic indices showed similar advances Roosevelt seized on these improvements as an excuse to try to balance the federal budget, convinced by Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau and many economists that the real danger now was no longer depression but inflation Between January and August 1937, he cut the WPA in half, laying off 1 million relief workers a few weeks later, the fragile boom collapsed Other cuts in spending followed The index of industrial production dropped from 117 in August 1937 to 76 in May 1938
End of the New Deal Despite these achievements, however, by the end of 1938 the New Deal had essentially come to an end Congressional opposition now made it difficult for the president to enact any major new programs But more important, perhaps, the threat of world crisis hung heavy in the political atmosphere, and Roosevelt was gradually growing more concerned with persuading a reluctant nation to prepare for war than with persuading new avenues of reform Limits and Legacies of the New Deal o In the 1930s, Roosevelt's principal critics were conservatives, who accused him of abandoning the Constitution and establishing a menacing, even tyrannical state o In later years, the New Deal's most visible critics attacked it from the left, pointing to the major problems it left unsolved and the important groups it failed to represent o And beginning in the early 21st century, conservative attacks on the New Deal emerged again o A full understanding of the New Deal requires coming to terms with the sources of both critiques, by examining both its achievements and its limits o The Idea of the Broker State In 1933, many New Dealers dreamed of using their new popularity and authority to remake American capitalism-to produce new forms of cooperation and control that would create a genuinely harmonious, ordered economic world By 1939, it was clear that what they had created was in fact something quite different But rather than bemoan the gap between their original intentions and their ultimate achievements, New Deal Liberals, both in 1939 and in later years, chose to accept what they had produced and to celebrate it-to use it as a model for future reform efforts Establishment of the Broker State What they had created was something that in later years would become known as the broker state Instead of forgoing all elements of society into a single, harmonious unit, as some reformers had once hoped to
do, the real achievement of the New Deal was to elevate and strengthen new interest groups so as to allow them to compete more effectively in the national marketplace the New Deal made the federal gov'ts a mediator in that continuous competition-a force that could intervene when necessary to help some groups and limit the power of others In 1933, there had been only one great interest group with genuine power in the national economy; the corporate world By the end of the 1930s, American business found itself competing for influence with an increasingly powerful labor movement, an organized agricultural economy, and aroused consumers In later years, the broker state idea would expand to embrace other groups as well: racial, ethnic, and religious minorities; women; and many others Thus, one of the enduring legacies of the New Deal was to make the federal gov't a protector of interest groups and a supervisor of the competition among them, rather than an instrument attempting to create an universal harmony of interest The experience of the New Deal suggest that such assistance goes largely to those groups able to exercise enough political or economic power to demand it Thus in the 1930s, farmers-after decades of organization and agitation-and workers-as the result of militant action and mass mobilization-won from the gov't new and important protections Other groups, less well organized, perhaps, but politically important because so numerous and visible, won limited assistance as well: imperiled homeowners, the unemployed, the elderly By the same token, the interest group democracy that the New Deal came to represent offered much less to those groups either too weak to demand assistance or not visible enough to arouse widespread public support And yet those same groups were often the ones most in need of help from their gov't
As late as 1932, most African Americans were voting Republican, as they had since the Civil War By 1936, more than 90% of them were voting Democratic-the beginnings of a political alliance that would endure for decades African Americans supported Franklin Roosevelt because they knew he was not their enemy But they had few illusions that the New Deal represented a major turning point in American race relations For example, the president was never willing to risk losing the backing of southern Democrats by supporting legislation to make lynching a federal crime Nor would he endorse efforts in Congress to ban the poll tax, one of the most potent tools by which southerners kept blacks from voting Existing Discrimination Reinforced New Deal relief agencies did not challenge, and indeed reinforced, existing patterns of discrimination The Civilian Conservative Corps established separate black camps The NRA codes tolerated paying blacks less than whites doing the same jobs African Americans were largely excluded from employment in the TVA The Federal Housing Administration refused to provide mortgages to African Americans moving into white neighborhoods, and the first public housing projects financed by the federal gov't were racially segregated The WPA routinely relegated black, Hispanic, and Asian workers to the least skilled and lowest paying jobs, or excluded them altogether; when funding ebbed, nonwhites, like women, were among the first to be dismissed The New Deal was not hostile to African Americans, and it did much to help them advance But it refused to make the issue of race a significant part of its agenda o The New Deal and the Indian Problem
In many respects, gov't policies toward the Indian tribes in the 1930s were simply continuation of the long established effort to encourage Native Americans to assimilate into the larger society and culture John Collier But the principal elements of federal policy in the New Deal years worked to advance a very different goal, largely because of the efforts of the extraordinary commissioner of Indian affairs in those years, John Collier Collier was a former social worker who had become committed to the cause of the Indians after exposure to tribal cultures in New Mexico in the 1920s More important, he was greatly influenced by the work of 20th century anthropologists who promoted the idea of cultural relativism, which challenged the three centuries old assumption among white Americans that Indians were savages and that white society was inherently superior and more civilized Indian Reorganization Act Collier promoted legislation that would, he hoped, reverse the pressures on Native Americans to assimilate and would allow them the right to live in traditional Indian ways Not all tribal leaders agreed with Collier; indeed, his belief in the importance of preserving Indian culture would not find its broadest support among the tribes until the 1960s Nevertheless, Collier effectively promoted legislation- which became the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934- that restored to the tribes right to own land collectively It reversed allotment policy adopted in 1887, which encouraged the breaking up of tribal lands into individually owned plots-a policy that had led to the loss of over 90 million acres of tribal lands to white speculators and others In the 13 years after passage of the 1934 bill, tribal land increased by nearly 4 million acres, and Indian
New Deal Pt 3 - Roosevelts New Deal
Course: US History (1491 ce)
University: Jackson College
