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FDR and the New Deal -" FDR and the New Deal: The Foundation of a New Political Tradition I ALONZO L. HAMBY Franklin Roosevelt swept to power in 1932, carrying every state but six in the electoral college and gathering 23 million popular votes in contrast to Hoover's 16 million. It was a bitter defeat for the Republicans. But the election was even more disappointing for Norman Thomas and William Z. Foster, candidates for the Socialist and Communist parties, respectively. In this year of distress, with some 16 million people unemployed, Thomas collected 882,000 votes and Foster only 103,000. Roosevelt was perhaps the most controversial president the United'States ever had. For millions of Americans, he was a folk hero: a courageous statesman who saved a crip- pled nation from almost certain collapse and whose New Deal salvaged the best features of democratic capitalism while establishing unprecedented welfare programs for the nation. For others, he was a tyrant, a demagogue who used the Depression to consolidate his po- litical power, whereupon he dragged the country zealously down the road to socialism. In spite of his immense popular appeal, Roosevelt became the hated enemy of much of the nation's business and political community. Conservatives denounced him as a Commu- nist. Liberals said he was too conservative. Communists castigated him as a tool of Wall Street. And Socialists dismissed him as a reactionary. "He caught hell from all sides," recorded one observer, because few knew how to classify his political philosophy or his ap- i proach to reform. Where, after all, did he fit ideologically? Was he for capitalism or against it? Was his New Deal revolutionary or reactionary? Was it "creeping socialism" or a bulwark against socialism? Did it lift the country out of the Depression, or did it make the disaster worse?. 211 In the next selection, Alonzo L. Hamby argues that the key to understanding Roo- sevelt is the Progressive tradition in which he grew up and participated. Roosevelt came to office, Hamby believes, with an ideological commitment to Progressive reform. Yet there were two brands of progressivism. The New Nationalism of Theodore Roosevelt and Herbert Croly, offered to the American electorate in 1912, had accepted business consolidation — monopolies and trusts—but had insisted that the federal government should regulate and control them. The New Freedom of Woodrow Wilson and Louis Brandeis, put forth in the same election, had held that competition must be preserved and that the best approach to monopolies was to destroy them by federal action (by his second year in office, however, Wilson had abandoned the New Freedom and embraced TR's New Nationalism). Both brands of progressivism had emerged in a period of over- all prosperity in the United States; hence neither provided guidelines for dealing with an economic calamity such as the Great Depression. Franklin Roosevelt, says Hamby, pre- ferred the ideas of the New Nationalism but found little in its doctrines to guide him in handling "the worst crisis of capitalism in American history." Therefore, flexible politi- cian that he was, Roosevelt opted for a strategy of action: he borrowed what he could - : from Progressive doctrines, added some experimentation, tossed in some Keynesian eco- nomics (government spending to "prime" the stricken economy), and packaged his New Deal as a liberal reform program that appealed to many interest groups. How successful was the New Deal? Hamby gives it a mixed score. Like many other scholars, he believes that it probably saved capitalism in America, although most corpo- rate bosses hated Roosevelt with a passion. And while it provided relief for millions of Americans, protected the organization and bargaining rights of American labor, and saved the average farmer through a system _ of price supports and acreage allotments, the' New Deal failed to end the Depression— World War II would finally do that. The problem lay with the inability of the New Dealers to devise a coherent strategy for deal- ing with the structure of the American economy and particularly with restoring consumer purchasing power— the key to successful recovery. Hamby attributes this to the influence- of progressivism, which had "sought humanitarian social programs, advocated a more eq- uitable distribution of American abundance for all social groups, decried unregulated cor- porate power, and possessed some impulses toward social engineering." The New Deal- ers tried to realize these old aspirations, but because none of them addressed-an economic disaster, the efforts of the New Dealers often impeded recovery. Hamby also argues that Roosevelt's increasingly hostile rhetoric against the business elite, however understand- able, "probably did more to prolong the Depression than to solve it." Yet Hamby gives FDR high marks for balancing the conflicting groups of labor, agri- culture, and business and for establishing big government as the arbiter. In the process, FDR created "a political economy of counter-veiling powers," which, with the institu- 212 tion of welfare measures, guarded against future depressions and helped maintain the prosperity of the postwar_ years. But Roosevelt's "final legacy" to the United States, Hamby believes, was his creation of a new political tradition, which defined American politics as pluralistic, liberal, and international and to which the majority of Americans subscribed. GLOSSARY followers, who advocated government programs for budgeting and for issuing currency in order to AGRICULTURAL ADJUSTMENT maintain employment. ADMINISTRATION (AAA) New Deal agency designed to relieve Depression-wracked fanners, McADOO, WILLIAM GIBBS Wilson's secretary who suffered from falling prices and mounting crop of the treasury who batded Alfred E. Smith for the surpluses; the AAA, established in 1933, subsidized Democratic presidential nomination in 1928; farm prices until they reached a point of "parity" McAdoo's chief support came from the Democratic and sought to reduce farm surpluses by telling party's rural, prohibitionist wing. farmers how much to plant (acreage allotments) and paying them for what they did not raise. Declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1935, the MARXISM Economic-political doctrine, AAA was superseded by the Soil Conservation and espoused by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, that Domestic Allotment Act, which authorized the holds that the structural weaknesses and federal government to pay farmers to reduce their contradictions of capitalism doom it to failure, that crop production to prevent erosion and "preserve ultimately the working class (proletariat) will revolt soil." against the capitalist class and take control of the means of production, and that the result will be a BRAINS TRUST FDR's special group of advisers classless society in which "rational economic led by eminent political economists Raymond cooperation" replaces "the coercive statev" Moley, Rexford G. Tugwell, and Adolph A. Berle Jr. NATIONAL RECOVERY ADMINISTRATION (NRA) New Deal agency established in 1933 to HOPKINS, HARRY FDR's close friend and promote industrial recovery and end unemployment adviser who headed the Civil Works by devising and»promoting hundreds of "industrial Administration, 1933-1934, and the Works Progress fair practice codes"; in practice, it often impeded Administration, 1935-1938; he was secretary of competition by sanctioning production quotas and commerce, 1938-1940. price fixing; in 1935, the Supreme Court invalidated the act that had chartered the NRA. JOHNSON, HUGH Director of the National Recovery Administration who devised voluntary codes of fair competition and used public relations PERKINS, FRANCES The first woman to serve and propaganda to persuade employers to adhere to in a presidential cabinet, she was FDR's secretary of them. labor, 1933-1945; she mediated bitter labor disputes and helped write the Social Security Act of 1935, KEYNESIAN ECONOMICS Propounded by the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, and other British economist John Maynard Keynes and his important New Deal legislation. 213 LONG DARK NIGHT OF THE DEPRESSION 17 RESETTLEMENT ADMINISTRATION (1935) overnor Roosevelt, wrote the eminent tinctivel-v AND FARM SECURITY ADMINISTRATION columnist Walter Lippmann in January mains (1937) Offered marginal farmers short- and long- 1932, was not to be taken seriously: "An Lik . term loans so that they could relocate on better land. G amiable man with many philanthropic impulses, but Roosevelt RURAL ELECTRIFICATION . not the dangerous enemy of anything ... no cru- past, spec ADMINISTRATION (1935) Established utility sader ... no tribune of the people ... no enemy of Roosevell cooperatives that provided electrical power to entrenched privilege ... a pleasant man who, with- the optin farmers. out any important qualifications for the office, would Roosevel of what h SMITH, ALFRED E. .Democratic nominee for very much like to be President." Lippmann's evalua- abstract c president, 1928; the first Roman Catholic to be tion was to become the most frequently quoted ex- chosen as a party candidate for the presidency. ample of the perils of punditry in the history of added to American journalism. But when it appeared it was economic SOCIAL SECURITY ACT (1935) Provided just another expression of a widely held assessment federal welfare assistance (up to $15 per month) for destitute elderly Americans and established a pension of Franklin D. Roosevelt, written at a time when it system for those working; the program, however, was still
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