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Course: US history > Unit 7
- The presidency of Herbert Hoover
- The Great Depression
- FDR and the Great Depression
The New Deal
- The New Deal was a set of domestic policies enacted under President Franklin D. Roosevelt that dramatically expanded the federal government’s role in the economy in response to the Great Depression.
- Historians commonly speak of a First New Deal (1933-1934), with the “alphabet soup” of relief, recovery, and reform agencies it created, and a Second New Deal (1935-1938) that offered further legislative reforms and created the groundwork for today’s modern social welfare system.
- It was the massive military expenditures of World War II , not the New Deal, that eventually pulled the United States out of the Great Depression.
Origins of the New Deal
- relief (for the unemployed)
- recovery (of the economy through federal spending and job creation), and
- reform (of capitalism, by means of regulatory legislation and the creation of new social welfare programs). 2
The First New Deal (1933-1934)
The second new deal (1935-1938), the legacy of the new deal, what do you think.
- Franklin Roosevelt, " Address Accepting the Presidential Nomination at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago ," July 2, 1932. Full text courtesy The American Presidency Project, University of California, Santa Barbara.
- See David M. Kennedy and Lizabeth Cohen, The American Pageant: A History of the American People , 15th ed. (Boston: Wadsworth, 2013), 754-277.
- Eric Foner, Give Me Liberty: An American History (New York: Norton, 2005), 829. Emphasis added.
- On industrial output, see Akira Iriye, American Foreign Policy Relations (1913), 119.
- On Keynes, see Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes: 1883–1946: Economist, Philosopher, Statesman (New York: MacMillan, 2003.)
- On Roosevelt's court-packing plan, see Burt Solomon, FDR v. The Constitution: The Court-Packing Fight and the Triumph of Democracy (New York: Walker & Co., 2003).
- See David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 131-287.
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The First New Deal began in a whirlwind of legislative action called “The First Hundred Days.”From March through June 1933, at Roosevelt’s behest, Congress passed legislation aimed at addressing the banking crisis, unemployment, and weak industrial performance, among other problems, through an “alphabet soup” of new laws and agencies.