Democracy and the New Deal

DEMOCRACY AND THE NEW DEAL

Progressivism Resurgent

In the 1932 presidential election Hoover was easily defeated by the Democratic governor of New York, Franklin D. Roosevelt. Roosevelt's political program called for a vastly expanded role for the federal government. Under this "New Deal" a broad array of modern liberal reforms—from government regulation of industries to social security for the elderly, young, and handicapped—were implemented. The ideas of these and other like-minded reforms was not wholly new to the American political landscape. The New Deal was the politics of progressivism resurgent. From 1900 until 1917 political progressivism had galvanized American politics. Progressivism had its heyday in 1912, when, under the banner of Franklin Roosevelt's distant cousin Theodore Roosevelt, the Progressive Party had placed second in the presidential election—behind Woodrow Wilson and the Democrats but ahead of incumbent president William Howard Taft and the Republicans. The Progressive Party platform had called for "a system of social insurance" to be used "against the hazards of sickness, irregular employment and old age." It had also called for "a strong National regulation of inter-State State corporations," for the prohibition of child labor, for progressive taxation, and for greater protection for unions. These and many other goals of the progressives were instantiated in the legislative framework of the New Deal. Indeed, it would not be unfair to say that Franklin Roosevelt's policies brought to completion the political project his cousin had begun a quarter century before.

AFRICAN AMERICANS AND THE NEW DEAL

In 1932 most African Americans who were able to vote cast their ballots for Republicans, as they had since the Civil War. Blacks voted for the Republican Party because, as the party of Abraham Lincoln, it had freed them from slavery and supported them during the Reconstruction period. By 1936, however, more than 90 percent were voting the Democratic ticket. President Roosevelt and the New Deal had won their allegiance. (About the same percentage of African Americans vote Democratic in the 1990s.)

Though Roosevelt's support of civil rights for African Americans was weak and halting, they appreciated what he had done. Roosevelt appointed African Americans to important positions within his administration, and one group of African American men and women—led by Mary McLeod Bethune, William Hastie, and Robert Weaver—became known as the "Black Cabinet.* The African American community also benefited from the New Deal relief programs and from the Social Security Act. One historian has estimated that about one-third of blacks received governmental assistance. For a group that was used to being "the bottom rai" in society, such support was welcomed, even if clearly inadequate.

Roosevelt had to be cautious, however, in helping blacks because he also needed the votes of the white racists in the South and elsewhere in the nation. Catering to the white vote, Roosevelt did not support a federal antilynching law aimed at stopping the murders of blacks by racist whites. The Roosevelt administration's federal farm policies offered almost no assistance to poor sharecroppers (black and white alike), many of whom were evicted from the land they worked by its owners. Furthermore, the Works Progress Administration and other New Deal programs almost invariably gave blacks the lowest-paying jobs. It is a telling measure of the intensity of racism in the 1930s that despite all these problems African Americans rushed to support the Democrats.

Source:

David E. Kyvig, cd., FDR's America (Saint Charles, Mo.: Forum Press, 1976).

"The Brain Trust."

Intellectuals have contributed mightily to the creation of the national political agenda throughout the twentieth century, but their power was nowhere more impressive than during the New Deal. In the months prior to the 1932 election, Roosevelt repeatedly consulted three Columbia University professors: Raymond Moley, Rexford G. Tugwell, and Adolf Berle. Roosevelt came to rely on their proposals for solving the nation's economic and social ills. Taking note of Roosevelt's frequent meetings with these three men, a reporter for The New York Times labeled the professors the "brains trust" (later, "brain trust"). The leading member of the group was Raymond Moley, a professor of government and public law at Columbia. Moley had assisted Roosevelt as early as 1928 in preparing political speeches, and he had served on several of Governor Roosevelt's commissions in New York State. It was Moley who incorporated the phrase New Deal into Roosevelt's acceptance speech at the 1932 Democratic National Convention and earlier collaborated with Roosevelt on the April 1932 radio speech asserting that the government must think in terms of "the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic totem pole"—sounding a theme that reverberated throughout the campaign. Moley also deserves much credit for steering Roosevelt toward increasing the role of the federal government in the economy and a lion's share of the credit for promoting massive government deficit spending in "an emergency budget." Moley's emergency-spending plan, which included direct federal payments to destitute Americans, came to fruition in the Federal Emergency Relief Administration and other New Deal agencies. An economist, Tugwell headed the planning of the Roosevelt administration's farm policy and served for a time in the U.S. Department of Agriculture. His radical call for the nation to forsake capitalism for an economy planned by the government never took root. Adolf A. Berle Jr., a law professor at Columbia, regarded Tugwell's notions of a planned economy as untenable, though he did sympathize with the need to regulate business by governmental action. Berle was a major architect in the expansion of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation and in the development of federal farm and home owners' mortgage programs. In fact, the brain trust shaped much of the legislation that President Roosevelt sent to Congress during his first hundred days in office. By late 1933 Roosevelt had many new advisers, and thereafter the labels brain trust or brains trust began to be applied to all presidential advisers.

The First Hundred Days

By spring 1933 the country had been immersed in a terrible Depression for more than three years. Calm assurance had been widely replaced by anxiety, uncertainty, and despair. Roosevelt's charismatic personality helped change the mood of the nation almost overnight. With his election in November 1932, the country became hopeful. In his first inaugural address, on 4 March 1933, Roosevelt declared: "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself," and he proclaimed to the American people that he was asking Congress for "broad Executive power to wage a war against the emergency." In this speech, and in the frequent "fireside chats" he broadcast to the nation over the radio, the new president's strong, reassuring voice exuded confidence and heartened millions. His steady and encouraging words meant as much to some as the policies he promoted.

ROOSEVELT'S POPULARITY

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a member of one of the wealthiest families in the nation, one that could trace its American heritage back to a Dutch farmer who settled in New Netherlands in 1644, not long before it was ceded to the British and became New York. Aristocratic, handsome, and well educated, he might have been a snob, but he was not. His charismatic charm and reassuring, patrician fatherliness made him remarkably popular with the American people throughout his presidency. One measure of the people's affection for Roosevelt was the large number of portraits of him that ordinary Americans hung on the walls of their homes. Another was the enormous amount of mail he received.

On average about five thousand Americans in all walks of life wrote to President Roosevelt each day. In the week after his first inauguration alone, almost half a million Americans wrote to their president. The volume of mail he received dwarfed that which even the most popular presidents had received before him. In previous administrations one person had generally been employed to open and sort the president's mail. Fifty people were needed to sort Roosevelt's, and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt received a large amount of mail as well.

Among the most moving letters to the president were the simple, sometimes inarticulate letters from poor and working-class Americans who were reaching out for understanding, consolation, or help One such letter, dated 10 April 1934, came from a man with five children in Middletown, New York:

Mr. President:

I am badly in need of your help. I have a home but I have a mortgage and they have hand me notice that they are goint to close said mortgage because I am not able to pay.… Now, Mr. President, we are in a land of plenty but I see that good many of us are starving. I am a world war veteran. Mr, President try to Help me in this thing if you can. I do not ask this for me but for my children. Thank you.

In another letter—written on 24 October 1934 from Columbus, Georgia—an unemployed cotton-mill worker outlined the economic hardships he and his family were undergoing and asked, "wont you try to help us wont you appeal, 'for us all,' to the real estate people and the factories." Its author concluded, simply, Tve always thought of F.D.R. as my personal friend."

Still another letter—written in spring 1936 from Oliver Spring, Tennessee, and signed simply "J.B."—said, "All of the working men are for you. For you sure have been good to the Poor and help us out, and we sure do aprishate your kindness."

Source:

Robert S. McElvaine, Down and Out in the Depression: Letters from the "Forgotten Man' (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983).

Experimentalism

Roosevelt always remained the consummate practical politician, first and foremost a pragmatist. His call for "bold, persistent experimentation" captures the core of this approach. In 1933 he sent the Agricultural Adjustment Act to Congress with the words "I tell you frankly, that it is a new and untrod path. But I tell you with equal frankness that an unprecedented condition calls for the trial of new means to rescue agriculture." The president's "take-charge" approach was nowhere more evident than on Capitol Hill. During its first hundred days the Roosevelt administration proposed fifteen major legislative reforms, and all were enacted.

An Alphabet Soup of Agencies

During the 1930s many economists argued that one of the ailing nation's primary needs was an infusion of money into the economy to check the downward spiral of unemployment. The Roosevelt administration responded with such a wide array of agencies, administrations, and acts—most of which were referred to by acronyms formed from the initial letters in their names—that some glibly referred to them as an "Alphabet Soup of Acts and Agencies."

A BOWL FULL OF DUST

Caroline Henderson lived on a farming home stead in Oklahoma in the 1930s with her husband and children. The dust storms of the 1930s struck terror into the hearts of many who had worked so hard to cultivate the semiarid earth. In 1935 she wrote:

There are days when for hours at a time we cannot see the windmill fifty feet from the kitchen door. There are days when for briefer periods one cannot distinguish the windows from the solid wall because of the solid blackness of the raging storm. Only in some Infemo-like dream could anyone visualize the terrifying lurid red light overspreading the sky when portions of Texas "are on the air."

Source:

T. H. Wat kins, The Great Depression (Boston: Little, Brown. 1993).

Sources:

Paul K. Conkin, F.D.R. and the Origin of the Welfare State (New York: Crowell, 1967); republished as The New Deal (New York: Crowell, 1969);

Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, eds., The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989);

Raymond Moley, The First New Deal (New York, Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966);

Rcxford G. Tugwell, The Brains Trust (New York: Viking, 1968).