New Deal
- Alternate meaning: New Deal (UK)
The New Deal was President Franklin D. Roosevelt's legislative agenda for rescuing the United States from the Great Depression. It was widely believed that the depression was caused by the inherent instability of the market and that government intervention was necessary to rationalize and stabilize the economy.
The origins of the New Deal
The Great Depression and the Importance of the 1932 Elections
On October 29, 1929, the crash of the U.S. stock market—known as "Black Tuesday"—triggered a worldwide financial crisis. In 1929-1933, unemployment in the U.S. soared from 3 percent of the workforce to 25 percent, while manufacturing output collapsed by one-third.
Upon accepting Democratic nomination for president on July 2, 1932, Roosevelt promised "a new deal for the American people," a phrase that has endured as a label for his administration and its many domestic achievements. Meanwhile, other governments worldwide sought economic recovery by adopting restrictive autarchic policies (high tariffs, import quotas, and barter agreements) and by experimenting with new plans for their internal economies. Britain adopted far-reaching measures in the development of a planned national economy. In Nazi Germany economic recovery was pursued through rearmament, conscription, and public works programs. In Mussolini's Italy the economic controls of his corporate state were tightened. Observers throughout the world saw in the massive program of economic planning and state ownership of the Soviet Union what appeared to be a depression-proof economic system and a solution to the crisis in capitalism.
Origins of the New Deal
Unlike many other world leaders in the 1930s, however, Roosevelt entered office with no single ideology or plan for dealing with the depression. This "new deal" would often be contradicting, pragmatic, and experimental. What many considered incoherence of the New Deal's ideology, however, was the presence of several competing ones, based on programs and ideas based on precedents in the U.S. political tradition.
The New Deal drew heavily on the experiences of its leaders; it reflected the ideas of, and was influenced by the programs that Roosevelt and most of his original associates had absorbed in their political youths early in the progressive era, while serving in the Wilson administration, and while holding other offices in the 1920s. The New Dealers borrowed their opposition to monopoly and their move toward government regulation of the economy from ideas of the progressive era, and were influenced by the dispelling of age-old notions that poverty was a personal moral failure rather than a product of impersonal social and economic forces. Their ideas about government mobilization were shaped by the efforts of the Wilson administration to mobilize the economy for the Great War. And from the policy experiments of the 1920s, New Dealers picked up ideas from efforts to harmonize the economy by creating cooperative relationships among its constituent elements.
The New Deal consisted of many different efforts to end the Great Depression and reform the U.S. economy. Most of these failed, but there were enough successes to establish it as the most important episode of the twentieth century in the creation of the modern U.S. state.
The First Hundred Days
The "bank holiday" and the Emergency Banking Act
The desperate economic situation, combined with the substantial Democratic Party victories in the 1932 elections, gave Roosevelt unusual influence over Congress in the first months of his administration. He used his leverage to win rapid passage of a series of measures to prop up the shaky banking system, reform the stock market, aid the unemployed, and induce industrial and agricultural recovery. With the banking crisis looming and with Congress in a desperate mood to do virtually anything the new president suggested, Roosevelt might well have taken bold steps, such as nationalizing the banking system. Instead, he worked to shore up the existing financial institutions and to revive confidence in the economy.
On March 6, two days after taking office, he issued a proclamation closing all U.S. banks for four days until Congress could meet in a special session. Ordinarily, such an action would cause widespread panic. But the action created a general sense of relief. First, many states had already closed down the banks before March 6. Second, Roosevelt astutely and euphemistically described it as a "bank holiday." And third, the action demonstrated that the federal government was stepping in to stop the alarming pattern of bank failures.
Three days later, Roosevelt sent to Congress the Emergency Banking Act, a generally conservative bill, drafted in large part by holdovers from the Hoover administration, designed primarily to protect large banks from being dragged down by the failing smaller ones. The bill provided for Treasury Department inspection of all banks before they would be allowed to reopen, for federal assistance to tottering large institutions, and for a thorough reorganization of those in greatest difficulty. A confused and frightened Congress passed the bill within four hours of its introduction. Three-quarters of the banks in the Federal Reserve System reopened within the next three days, and $1 billion in "hoarded" currency and gold flowed back into them within a month. The immediate banking crisis was over.
The Economy Act
On the morning after passage of the Emergency Banking Act, Roosevelt sent to Congress the Economy Act, which was designed to convince the public, and moreover the business community, that the federal government was in the hands of no radical. The act proposed to balance the federal budget by cutting the salaries of government employees and reducing pensions to veterans by as much as 15 percent.
Otherwise, Roosevelt warned, the nation faced a $1 billion deficit. The bill revealed clearly what Roosevelt had always maintained: that he was at heart as fiscally conservative as his predecessor. And, like the banking bill, it passed through Congress almost instantly—despite heated protests by some congressional progressives.
At least until after the Second World War, New Dealers never fully recognized the value of government spending as a vehicle for recovery, and their efforts along other lines never succeeded in ending the Depression. Most economists of the era rejected this idea and favored balanced budgets. In fact, in the 1932 presidential election, Franklin D. Roosevelt had blasted Herbert Hoover for running a deficit, and dutifully promised he would balance the budget if elected.
The Agricultural Adjustment Act
The celebrated first Hundred Days of the new administration also produced a federal program to protect U.S. farmers from the uncertainties of the market through subsides and production controls, the Agricultural Adjustment Act, creating the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), which Congress passed in May 1933. The AAA reflected the desires of leaders of various farm organizations and Roosevelt's secretary of agriculture, Henry A. Wallace.
Relative farm incomes had been falling for decades. The AAA included reworkings of many long-touted programs for agrarian relief, which had been demanded for decades. The most important provision of the AAA was the provision for crop reductions—the "domestic allotment" system of the act, which was intended to raise prices for farm commodities. Under this system, producers of seven basic commodities (corn, cotton, dairy products, hogs, rice, tobacco, and wheat) would decide on production limits for their crops. The government would then, through the AAA, tell individual farmers how much they should plant and would pay them subsides for leaving some of their land idle. A tax on food processing would provide the funds for the new payments. Farm prices were to be subsidized up to the point of parity.
The most controversial component of the anti-deflationary domestic allotment system was the large-scale destruction of existing crops and livestock to reduce surpluses. At a time in which many families were suffering from malnutrition and downright starvation, it was a difficult measure. However, gross farm incomes increased by half in the first three years of the New Deal and the relative position of farmers improved significantly for the first time in twenty years.
The AAA was the first program on such a scale on behalf of the troubled agricultural economy, and it established an important and long-lasting federal role in the planning on the entire agricultural sector of the economy.
Other initiatives
The First Hundred Days also saw the creation of a new federal regulatory agency to oversee the stock market, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), a reform of the banking system that included a system of insurance for deposits. But the most successful in alleviating the miseries of the Great Depression were a series of relief measures to aid some of the 15 million unemployed Americans, among them the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), the Civil Works Administration (CWA), and the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA). The early New Deal also began the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), an unprecedented experiment in flood control, public electric power, and regional planning.
Roosevelt also moved in his first days in office to put to rest one of the divisive cultural issues of the 1920s, supporting and then signing a bill to legalize the manufacture and sale of beer—an interim measure pending the repeal of prohibition, for which a constitutional amendment (the Twenty-first) was already in process. The amendment was ratified later in 1933.
The National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA)
Business, labor, and government cooperation
Roosevelt realized that these initial actions taken during the "first hundred days" were nothing but stopgaps, that more comprehensive government programs would be necessary. In the roughly three years between the Great Crash and Roosevelt's First Hundred Days, the industrial economy had been suffering from a vicious cycle of deflation. Since 1931, the Chamber of Commerce, then and now the voice of the nation's organized business, had been urging the Hoover administration to adopt an anti-deflationary scheme that would permit trade associations to cooperate in stabilizing prices within their industries. While existing antitrust laws clearly forbade such practices, organized business found a receptive ear in the Roosevelt administration.
The Roosevelt administration, packed with reformers aspiring to forge all elements of society into a cooperative unit (a reaction to the worldwide specter of "class struggle"), was fairly amenable to the idea of cooperation among producers. Desperate for salvation, many businesspeople even demanded that the government enforce such trade associate agreements on pricing and production. But the administration insisted on additional provisions that would deal with other economic problems as well. Many, after all, remembered that in the 1920s wages increased at a rate that was a fraction of the rate at which productivity increased, remembering that production costs were falling while wages were rising slowly and prices remained constant.
The Roosevelt administration, under increasing pressure to do more to alleviate unemployment, and alarmed at the increasing militancy of the trade union movement and the political pressures of radical, dissident challenges as Huey Long, Father Charles E. Coughlin, and even the Communist Party, insisted that business would have to ensure that the incomes of workers would rise along with their prices. Against this backdrop, the product of all these impulses and pressures the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), the most important undertaking of the first Hundred Days, which Congress passed in June 1933.
It guaranteed to workers of the right of collective bargaining and helped spur major union organizing drives in major industries. And responding to business clamor for anti-deflationary trade associate agreements, the NIRA established the most important, but ultimately least successful provision: a new federal agency known as the National Recovery Administration (NRA), which attempted to stabilize prices and wages though cooperative "code authorities" involving government, business, and labor.
In case consumer buying power lagged behind—thereby defeating the administration's initiatives—the NIRA created the Public Works Administration (PWA), a major program of public works spending designed to alleviate unemployment, and moreover to pump needed funds into the economy.
The new program was hailed at its inception as a miracle. Indeed, it had something for everyone. Just as business leaders hailed it as the beginning of a new era of cooperation between government and industry, labor leaders hailed it as a "Magna Carta" for trade unions.
The NRA "Blue Eagle" campaign
At the center of the NIRA was the National Recovery Administration (NRA), headed by the flamboyant former general and businessman Hugh S. Johnson, who sought to generate public enthusiasm for the NRA. He called on every business establishment in the nation to accept a stopgap blanket code: a minimum wage of between 20 and 40 cents an hour, a maximum workweek of 35 to 40 hours, and the abolition of child labor. Johnson and Roosevelt contended that the "blanket code" would raise consumer purchasing power and increase employment. Social reformers were won over by the elimination of notorious, exploitative sweatshops and the abolition of child labor. To generate enthusiasm for the blanket code, Johnson devised a symbol—the "NRA Blue Eagle," to be proudly displayed in commercial establishments by employers who accepted the provisions of the blanket code. Blue Eagle flags, posters, and stickers, with the slogan "We Do Our Part," rapidly became visible in every part of the country.
The massive mobilization behind the NRA had practical motivations: Johnson needed extraordinary public and corporate support for enough bargaining strength to negotiate the codes with business and labor. As the campaign was going on, Johnson had to negotiate specific sets of codes with leaders of the nation's major industries; the most significant of which were anti-deflationary floors below which no company would lower prices or wages and agreements on maintaining employment and production. However, cooperation was a great burden; a firm could, after all, violate such codes in search for a competitive advantage. In the short run, enough support among key sectors of society was generated. Thus, in a remarkably short time, Johnson won agreements from almost every major industry in the nation.
These and other early initiatives created broad popular support for the Roosevelt administration and halted the rapid unraveling of the financial system. They did not, however, end, or even significantly abate, the Great Depression.
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 know 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. It established a framework that shaped the U.S. welfare system through the remainder of the country.
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; two of the existing justices, almost certainly in response to the threat, switched positions and began voting to uphold New Deal measures (West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish, 300 U.S. 379, March 29, 1937; National Labor Relations Board v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation, 301 U.S. 1, April 12, 1937) , effectively creating a liberal majority. 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.
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.
Since the 1960s, "New Left" historians have been among the New Deal's harsh 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, complied 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.
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 was not just a product of its liberal backers, but also a product of the pressures of its conservative opponents.
The New Deal and the "broker state"
Government, labor, and business arbitration
Despite the dismal record in aiding marginal farmers and African Americans, among others—contrasted with its often frequent generosity toward certain business interests—the effect of the New Deal was to elevate and strengthen new interest groups so as to allow them to compete more effectively for the interests by having the federal government evolve into an arbitrator in competition among all elements and classes of society, acting as a force that could mediate when necessary to help some groups and limit the power of others. By the end of the 1930s, U.S. business found itself competing for influence with an increasingly powerful labor movement, one that was engaged in mass mobilization and sometimes militant action; with an organized agricultural economy, due to decades of agrarian organization and agitation dating back to the farmers associations and formation of the Populist Party in the late nineteenth century; and with aroused consumers. The New Deal accomplished this by creating a series of state institutions that greatly, and permanently, expanded the role of the federal government in U.S. life. The government was now committed to providing at least minimal assistance to the poor and unemployed; to protecting the rights of labor unions; to stabilizing the banking system; to building low-income housing; to regulating financial markets; to subsidizing agricultural production; and to doing many other things that had not previously been federal responsibilities.
Thus, perhaps the strongest legacy of the New Deal, in other words, was to make the federal government a protector of interest groups and a supervisor of competition among them. As a result of the New Deal, U.S. political and economic life became much more competitive than before, with workers, farmers, consumers, and others now able to press their demands upon the government in ways that in the past had been available only to the corporate world. Hence the frequent description of the government the New Deal created as the "broker state," a state brokering the competing claims of numerous groups.
The liberal assumptions that the New Deal acted as the foe of private business interests have been challenged. After all, in many cases New Deal efforts were intended to enhance the position of private entrepreneurs—especially their concerns over inflation—even, at times, at the cost of some of the liberal reform goals that some administration officials espoused. The New Deal also did enhance the positions of some previously disadvantaged groups, but did little or nothing for many others, especially blacks, sharecroppers, and the urban poor.
Thus, it did not transform American capitalism in any genuinely radical way. Except in the field of labor relations, corporate power remained nearly as free from government regulation or control in 1945 as it had been in 1933. But the New Deal did create the rudiments of the American welfare state, through its many relief programs and above all through the Social Security system. The conservative inhibitions New Dealers brought to this task ensured that the welfare system was limited. Even the most progressive New Dealers were somewhat suspicious about federal power, expansive welfare benefits, and large-scale government expenditures.
The "broker state" and marginalized interests
The New Deal "broker state" would offer much less influence to those groups either too weak to demand assistance or not visible enough to arouse widespread public support.
The most notable group to receive much less influence than others in the broker state was African Americans. The Roosevelt administration did not see American blacks as a potent interest group capable of seriously challenging the discriminatory forces against them. While the Roosevelt administration, unlike that of the previous Democratic president—Woodrow Wilson —did not move to increase government discrimination against African Americans, it did relatively little to help lift the social standing of African Americans.
To the administration's credit, Roosevelt appointed an unprecedented number of African Americans to second-level positions in his administration, perhaps due to the influence of his wife, Eleanor, a vocal advocate of easing discrimination. And African Americans did benefit in significant though limited ways from New Deal relief programs, due, in large measure, to the efforts of Harold L. Ickes, who sought to ensure that such programs did not exclude blacks. As a result, by 1936 more the vast majority were voting Democratic; this was a stark change from 1932, just four years earlier, when the vast majority of African Americans were voting Republican. The New Deal thus established a political alliance between African Americans and the Democratic Party that survives to this day.
However, Roosevelt, not viewing African Americans as a critical interest group, believed that other matters were far more pressing than racial discrimination. Never willing to lose the support of Southern Democrats, he declined to support legislation making lynching illegal while—perhaps hypocritically—denouncing lynching in speeches. He declined to advocate banning the poll tax. Aside from this measure he refused to use the relief agencies to challenge local patterns of discrimination; the NRA tolerated widespread practices of paying blacks less than whites; blacks were largely excluded from employment at the TVA; the FHA refused to provide mortgages to blacks moving into white neighborhoods; and the AAA was ineffectual in protecting the interests of black sharecroppers and tenant farmers.
However, the New Deal did lay the ground work for the "broker state" to be expanded a generation later, mostly through the work of the next wave of liberal reform—the civil rights movement and the Great Society—to embrace groups marginalized in the New Deal coalition, especially racial and ethnic minorities.
The New Deal and economic relief
The New Deal and Keynesian economics
In the early 1930s, before Keynes wrote The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, he was advocating public works programs and deficits as a way to get the British economy out of the Depression. Although Keynes never mentioned fiscal policy in The General Theory, and instead advocates the need to socialize investments, Keynes ushered in more of a theoretical revolution than a policy one. In order to keep people fully employed, governments would have to run deficits when the economy was slowing because the private sector would not invest enough, according to Keynes.
Keynes's visit to the White House in 1934 to urge Roosevelt to do more deficit spending was a debacle. A dazed, overwhelmed Roosevelt complained to Labor Secretary Frances Perkins, "He left a whole rigmarole of figures ... he must be a mathematician rather than a political economist." Keynes, equally frustrated with the encounter, later told Secretary Perkins that he had "supposed the President was more literate, economically speaking."
As the Depression wore on, Roosevelt tried public works, farm subsidies and other devices to restart the economy, but he never completely gave up trying to balance the budget. As a result, unemployment remained high throughout the New Deal years.
The recession of 1937 and recovery
The Roosevelt administration came under new assault during his second term, which played host to a new dip in the Great Depression, starting in May of 1937 and continuing through June of 1938, causing unemployment, at 14.3% for 1937, to rise to 19.0% for 1938 (in the United States, monthly jobless figures were not compiled prior to 1948). It was, in the largest measure, a result of a premature effort by the administration to balance the budget by reducing federal spending. The administration reacted by launching a rhetorical campaign against monopoly power, which was cast as the cause of the new dip. The president appointed an aggressive new direction of the antirust division of the Justice Department, but this effort lost its effectiveness once World War II, a far more pressing concern, began.
The administration's other response to the deepening of the Great Depression in 1937 had more tangible results. Ignoring the vitriolic pleas of the Treasury Department and responding to the urgings of the converts to Keynesian economics and others in his administration, Roosevelt embarked on an antidote to the depression, reluctantly abandoning his efforts to balance the budget and launching a $5 billion spending program in the spring of 1938, an effort to increase mass purchasing power. In 1938 Roosevelt thus embraced the only new idea he had not yet tried—the program put forward to him by that bewildering British "mathematician."
Although few Americans were much aware yet of the ideas of John Maynard Keynes, the economist whose theories would soon transform economic thought throughout much of the world, they were gradually seeing that the spending program of 1938 was yielding results. Roosevelt explained his program in a fireside chat in which he finally acknowledged that it was therefore up to the government to "create an economic upturn" by making "additions to the purchasing power of the nation." This shift in administration policy was a huge milestone helping to legitimize Keynesian economics. Although the New Dealers themselves did not realize it at the time, the administration helped establish the basis for new forms of federal fiscal policy, which would in the postwar years give the government a series of important tools for promoting and regulating economic growth.
World War II and the end of the Great Depression
It was not until the U.S. entered World War II, however, did Roosevelt try Keynes' idea on a scale necessary to pull the nation out of the Great Depression; Roosevelt, of course, had little choice now. Even granted the special circumstances of war mobilization, it seemed to work exactly as Keynes predicted, winning over even many Republicans. When the Great Depression was brought to an end by the Second World War, business had been reinforced by government expenditures. In 1929 federal expenditures accounted for only 3 percent of GNP. Between 1933 and 1939, federal expenditure tripled, and Roosevelt's critics charged that he was turning America into a socialist state. However, spending on the New Deal was far smaller than on the war effort. In the first peacetime year of 1946, federal spending still amounted to $62 billion, or 30 percent of GNP. The big surprise was just how productive the U.S had become: spending financially cured the depression. Between 1939 and 1944 (the peak of wartime production), the nation's output almost doubled. Consequently, unemployment plummeted—from 14 percent in 1940 to less than 2 percent in 1943 as the labor force grew by ten million. The war economy was not so much a triumph of free enterprise as the result of government/business sectionalism, of government bankrolling business.
It was the deficit spending of World War II, not the New Deal, that finally ended the crisis. Nor did the New Deal substantially alter the distribution of power within U.S. capitalism; and it had only a small impact on the distribution of wealth among the population.
The legacies of the New Deal
Although the New Deal did not end the depression, all in all it helped to prevent the economy from decaying further by increasing the regulatory functions of the federal government in ways that helped stabilize previous trouble areas of the economy: the stock market, the banking system, and others. It also produced a new political coalition that sustained the Democratic Party as the majority party in national politics for more than a generation after its own end.
Also laying the foundations for the postwar era, Roosevelt and the New Deal helped enhance the power of the federal government as a whole. Roosevelt also established the presidency as the preeminent center of authority within the federal government. By creating a large array of protections for various groups of citizens—workers, farmers, and others—who suffered from the crisis, enabling them to challenge the powers of the corporations, the Roosevelt administration generated a set of political ideas—known to later generations as New Deal liberalism—that remained a source of inspiration and controversy for decades and that help shape the next great experiments in liberal reform, the civil rights movement and Great Society of the 1960s.
A list of New Deal programs
The New Deal was composed of countless programs, labeled an "alphabet soup" by its detractors. Among the New Deal acts were the following, most of them passed within the first 100 days of FDR's administration:
- United States bank holiday, 1933: closed all banks until they became certified by federal reviewers
- Abandonment of gold standard, 1933: allowed more money to be put in circulation to create a mild inflation
- Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), 1933: employed young adults to perform unskilled work for the federal government
- Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), 1933: a government program that ran a series of dams built on the Tennessee River
- Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), 1933: provided breadlines and other aid to the unemployed
- Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA), 1933: paid farmers to not grow crops
- National Recovery Act (NRA), 1933: created fair standards in favor of labor unions
- Civil Works Administration
- Public Works Administration (PWA), 1933: employeed middle-aged skilled workers to work on public projects, cost $4 billion
- Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) / Glass-Steagall Act: insures deposits in banks in order to restore public confidence in banks
- Securities Act of 1933, created the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), 1933: codified standards for sale and purchase of stock, required risk of investments to be acccurately disclosed
- Indian Reorganization Act, 1934
- Social Security Act (SSA), 1935: provided financial assistance to: elderly, handicapped, delinquent, unemployed; paid for by employee and employer payroll contributions
- Works Progress Administration (WPA), 1935: a reiteration of the PWA, created useful work for skilled workers
- National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) / Wagner Act, 1935: granted right of labor unions to exist
- Judiciary Act 1937: FDR requested power to appoint a new Supreme Court judge for every judge 70 years or older; failed to pass
- Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), 1938: established a maximum normal work week of 40 hours, and a minimum pay of 40 cents/hour
See also
Further reading
- Bernstein, Barton J. "The New Deal: The Conservative Achievements of Liberal Reform." In Barton J. Bernstein, ed., Towards a New Past: Dissenting Essays in American History, pp. 263-88. (New York: Knopf, 1968).
- Irving Bernstein Turbulent Years (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970).
- Brinkley, Alan
- Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression. (New York: Knopf, 1982).
- "The New Deal and Southern Politics." In James C. Cobb and Michael V. Namarato, eds., The New Deal and the South, pp. 97-116. (Oxford: University of Mississippi Press, 1984).
- "The New Deal and the Idea of the State." In Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, eds., The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, pp. 85-121. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989).
- Conkin, Paul K. The New Deal. (Arlington Heights, Ill.: AHM, 1967).
- Hofstadter, Richard. The Age of Reform: From Bryan to FDR. New York: Knoft, 1955.
- Leuchtenberg, William E. Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932-1940. (Harper & Row: New York, 1963).
- Sitkoff, Harvard. A New Deal for Blacks: The Emergence of Civil Rights as a National Issue-The Depression Decade. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978).
- Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr., The Age of Roosevelt, 2 vols, (1957-1960).
- Skocpol, Theda, and Kenneth Finegold. "State Capacity and Economic Intervention in the Early New Deal." Political Science Quarterly 97 (1982): 255-78.
- Zinn, Howard, ed. New Deal Thought. (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966).