The First New Deal

Note to students: The best preparation for taking the reading quiz is to pay close attention to the key terms as you read. Each question in the question banks is directly linked to these key terms and phrases.

Chapter Focus Question:

How did FDR respond to the Great Depression?

Section Focus Question:

What were five of the programs that FDR immediately implemented, and what was the general intention of the programs we call the First New Deal?

Key Terms:

• Issues that could undermine democracy
• FDR and radio addresses
• FDR's administration personnel
• FDR and the promise in his 1932 Democratic Convention speech

When Franklin Delano Roosevelt was inaugurated in March 1933, following his landslide electoral victory in 1932, his privileged background combined with his extraordinary political talent gave him the confidence to think creatively and to take risks. The distant cousin of former President Theodore Roosevelt, FDR was born into great wealth, but nevertheless sensed how economic panic and suffering could undo democracy. "True individual freedom," he said, "cannot exist without economic security and independence. People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made."

FDR was heading toward a hugely successful political career at a young age when he contracted polio. His partial recovery — he could never walk on his own — and his powerful connections helped him return to politics, against all predictions. Paralyzed from the waist down, with the help of assistants he was able to keep most Americans ignorant of his disability.

Elected governor of New York in 1928, he drew on that experience when he became president in 1933. As governor, FDR had already advocated pensions for the elderly, unemployment insurance, aid to farmers, regulation of utilities, and development of hydroelectric power. But during the campaign he offered no major proposals, and won the presidency mainly because of popular disgust with Hoover. In fact, the largest source of enthusiasm for FDR at the Democratic Convention of 1932 was his promise to repeal Prohibition!

Roosevelt was a master of communication. He invited and received an unprecedented quantity of mail — 450,000 letters in the first week of his presidency and an average of 8,000 a day after that (compared to Herbert Hoover's average of 600 a day). He was also the first to use radio to communicate with his constituents. His radio speeches (dubbed "Fireside Chats" by a reporter), were extremely popular.

The moment he took office, FDR inaugurated a series of programs that would come to be called the "New Deal." Its accomplishments were made possible not only by the sense of emergency, but also because Roosevelt surrounded himself with activists and, in some cases, unconventional advisors. He appointed several African Americans, including a woman, Mary MacLeod Bethune, to high positions; they constituted an informal "black cabinet."

Section Focus Question:

How did women and African Americans fare in the relief programs of the New Deal?

Key Terms:

• FDR and the gold standard
• Relief payment vs relief jobs
• Golden Gate Bridge and public works
• Name republicans gave FDR's New Deal
• FDR's hiring of political supporters
• Discriminatory relief programs
• Agencies created during FDR's first 100 days
• Goals of the Works Progress Administration
• Consumer protection legislation
• Regions that administered public works programs controlled by racism
• Significance of FDR's first 100 days
• Minorities and New Deal legislation
• Legislation passed during FDR's first 100 days
• Relief programs and discrimination against women

He appointed the first female cabinet member, Frances Perkins, as Secretary of Labor, and she expanded the number of women in policy positions, constituting an informal "female cabinet." He appointed the progressives Harold Ickes as Secretary of the Interior and Henry A. Wallace as Secretary of Agriculture, and the Jewish Henry Morgenthau as Secretary of the Treasury. Equally innovatively, FDR hired not only political supporters but also energetic academic experts eager to use and display their knowledge and theories.

Historians have branded the early part of the Roosevelt administration "the 100 days" because it did so much so quickly. FDR understood the demoralizing effect of fear ("We have nothing to fear but fear itself," he insisted), and that decisive action could restore some confidence.

In 100 days he ended Prohibition, rescued banks, stopped foreclosures on home mortgages, created the massive TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority) electrification and flood control project, and pushed through a series of laws to save farms from bankruptcy and foreclosure. He began a nationwide rural electrification project. At the time, less than 11 percent of American farms had electricity — by contrast, in Germany and France almost 90 percent did.

He regulated banking and securities exchanges to stop cheating and insure savings deposits. The gold standard was suspended. The Federal Communications Commission investigated Western Electric and found that its monopolistic practices enabled it to overcharge its customers — the first time the federal government acted to protect consumers.

By far the most popular program was emergency relief, headed by the decisive social worker Harry Hopkins. In his first two hours on the job, he spent $5.3 million ($93 million in 2012 dollars). By the time he left work that night, he had hired a staff, offered relief funds to all 48 governors, and sent relief checks to eight of them.

Roosevelt's Republican opponents were irate about the "giveaways." Many charged that the poor and unemployed were lazy and/or degenerate, so Hopkins had to fight these victim-blaming interpretations of the depression. "Three or four million heads of households don't turn into tramps and cheats overnight, nor do they lose the habits and standards of a lifetime... They don't drink any more than the rest of us, they don't lie any more, they're no lazier than the rest of us." When critics complained that he was acting rashly and that things would improve in the long run, Hopkins replied, "People don't eat in the long run. They eat every day."

Soon emergency "relief," as government aid was called, took the form of government-created jobs, predominantly in construction. The largest of these projects, the Works Progress Administration (WPA), built more than 40,000 courthouses, firehouses, hospitals, schools and post offices, 1,800 public swimming pools, and 40,000 miles of new roads.

The WPA contributed to conservation and public health by reforesting 20,000 acres, planting 20,000,000 trees and bushes, building 500 water treatment plants and 1500 sewage treatment plants, and laying 24,000 miles of sewers. (The largest structures, such as the great dams, tunnels, and bridges — the Golden Gate and Triborough Bridges, the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, the Grand Coulee and Bonneville dams — were built by another, necessarily more slow-moving public works agency, the Public Works Administration.)

In 1938 when disastrous floods hit the Northeast, washing out railroad bridges, highways, and power lines, Hopkins sent 50,000 WPA employees to work around the clock evacuating endangered people, diking the waters, providing temporary water and power, and then cleaning the mud that clogged the streets and buildings — a federal helping hand never before possible. Public jobs not only put wages into the economy, but the materials, tools, energy, and transport that the jobs required put yet more people back to work.

Everyone preferred relief jobs to simple relief payments. Government officials preferred jobs even though they were more expensive than simple relief — due to overhead — because of the traditional conservative fear of making recipients lazy. That fear was belied by the fact that relief recipients also preferred to work, because it made them feel useful, respected, and active.

Unfortunately, the whole relief program was systematically discriminatory. Women did not get a fair share of jobs or money because they were labeled dependents who were supported by husbands, which left women who lacked husbands or had husbands that didn't support them out in the cold. The programs did not prioritize the kinds of jobs that were traditionally female, although the country had a great need for teachers, social workers, librarians, for example.

Neither did people of color get a fair share of relief or jobs, for a different reason. The programs were administered by the states and in the regions where most people of color lived — the southeast and southwest of the US — racist white state governments maneuvered to exclude African Americans, Latinos, and others not considered white.

Section Focus Question:

What was the effect on government expenditures of the New Deal programs?

Key Terms:

• Size and impact of stimulus package
• Correlation between government spending and unemployment
• Public works funding vs. WWII funding
• Impact of the first 100 days legislation
• End of Great Depression through WWII
• FDR and increase of federal power over states

The administration's experts hoped the Depression emergency would end within a year or two, but it didn't. In fact, the New Deal never ended the Depression. The unemployment relief and the other programs that constituted an economic stimulus, and were intended to jump-start the economy, were too small to do the job. The New Deal did not do enough. For example, in 1930 the average house was worth $7,100; in 1939 it was worth only $3,800, leaving the average family much poorer.

What finally ended the Depression was the enormous public spending on World War II — $288 billion. It is characteristic of American politics that war will evoke unanimous support for spending, while pulling the country out of economic depression will not.

Nevertheless, these emergency relief programs began to transform American politics and political culture. FDR's first 100 days began a great expansion of both federal power over state power and presidential over congressional power. There were two reasons. First, only the federal government had the tax revenues and fiscal control to meet the crisis. Two, the Depression emergency generated such fears that Congress deferred to presidential initiative.