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A New DealRoosevelt's task in the fall campaign was a relatively simple one: avoid doing anything to alarm the electorate while allowing Hoover's enormous unpopularity to drive voters to the Democrats. He traveled extensively giving speeches filled with sunny generalities; he was perpetually genial; and he continued to criticize Hoover for failing to balance the budget and for expanding the bureaucracy. But he only occasionally gave indications of his own increasingly progressive agenda. On one such occasion, at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, he outlined in general terms a new set of government responsibilities: for an "enlightened administration" to help the economy revive, to distribute "wealth and products more equitably," and to provide "everyone an avenue to possess himself of a portion of that plenty sufficient for his needs, through his own work."
The presidential campaign brought together people who had guided Roosevelt's career in the past and people who would shape his presidency thereafter. Howe and Farley remained his principal political strategists, Eleanor Roosevelt continued to serve as a surrogate for her husband, and Marguerite "Missy" LeHand, Roosevelt's personal secretary since 1920, remained the one constant, daily presence in his life. The 1932 campaign also brought him into contact with new aides and advisers, perhaps most notably a group of academic advisers dubbed the "brain trust" by reporters. Chief among them were three Columbia University professors, Raymond Moley, Adolf A. Berle, Jr., and Rexford G. Tugwell, who helped write his campaign speeches, including the Commonwealth Club address, and, more important, began developing ideas for his presidency.
Roosevelt won handily with 57 percent of the popular vote to Hoover's 40 and with 472 electoral votes to Hoover's 59. Democrats also won solid control of both houses of Congress. Most observers interpreted the results less as a mandate for Roosevelt, whose plans remained largely unknown to the public, than as a repudiation of Hoover. Many skeptics still shared Walter Lippmann's famously dismissive view of Roosevelt as "a pleasant man who, without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be president."
In the four months between his victory and his inauguration, Roosevelt did little to dispel those doubts. The depression worsened considerably, with more than 25 percent of the workforce unemployed, and early in 1933 a series of bank failures deepened the crisis. President Hoover, conservative Democrats, and leading business figures all urged the president-elect to restore confidence by pledging himself to fiscal and monetary conservatism. Roosevelt refused while offering few clues to his own plans. The most dramatic event of his "interregnum" was an attempted assassination in Miami in February, in which Roosevelt was not injured but the mayor of Chicago was killed. The president-elect responded to the incident with the same unruffled, genial calm he had displayed since the election.
Assuming the Presidency (1933)Roosevelt assumed the presidency at a moment of great crisis for the nation. Millions were unemployed or underemployed, the agricultural economy was nearly in chaos, industrial production had fallen dramatically, new capital investment had almost ceased, and the banking system had become paralyzed as a widening panic drained banks of their deposits. The governor of Michigan had ordered all the banks in his state closed in mid-February, and by the beginning of March almost every state in the nation had placed some restrictions on banking activity.
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The "Hundred Days"The New Deal soon departed from these conservative beginnings. Over the next three months, known then and later as the "Hundred Days," Roosevelt won passage of a series of bills that began to transform the role of the federal government in the workings of the nation's economy. The result was not a "revolution" as some liked to claim, but it was a significant turning point in the evolution of the American state. Roosevelt drew heavily from the progressive traditions with which he had grown up and in which his principal advisers had been schooled, and he also responded to genuinely new ideas born of the unprecedented problems of the Great Depression. In the end, the New Deal was an amalgam of many different ideologies with no single, consistent rationale. Roosevelt's only solid commitments were to what he called "bold, practical experimentation" and, of course, to his own political survival.
The crisis of the farm economy spurred the first of the innovative New Deal reforms, a comprehensive farm bill, the Agricultural Adjustment Act. Signed in May 1933, the new law reflected the longstanding demands of many of the leading farm organizations for government support for farm prices. The Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), which the legislation created, helped farmers limit production of basic commodities; over production, farm experts agreed, was one of the principal reasons for tumbling agricultural prices. The AAA also created subsidies for farmers who left land idle. Much of the administration of the program fell into the hands of the American Farm Bureau Federation, which represented mostly commercial farmers. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the AAA tended to favor larger producers and weaken smaller ones. While farm income rose by almost 50 percent in the next three years, the dispossession of small farmers, tenants, and sharecroppers continued and even accelerated. Subsequently the New Deal experimented with a series of programs designed to help these marginal farmers, including the Resettlement Administration, established in 1935, and the Farm Security Administration, created in 1937, but the movement of the agricultural economy toward large-scale commercial farming continued inexorably. In 1936 the Supreme Court invalidated the original Agricultural Adjustment Act, declaring that Congress had no authority to compel individual farmers to reduce their acreage. The administration preserved the bill's major provisions in slightly altered form through the Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act of 1936 and the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938, and federal support for farmers continued, in much the same form the New Deal created, through the rest of the century.
Another major concern during the Hundred Days was the health of the industrial economy. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Gerard Swope of General Electric, and other leading businessmen and industrialists urged the government to suspend the antitrust laws and allow corporations to work together to stabilize prices and production, forming a cooperative "associationalism" policed in some modest way by the government. In June 1933 the New Deal responded to these appeals and the demands of other constituencies with the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), one of the largest and most complicated pieces of legislation in American history to that point. Roosevelt called it "the most important and far-reaching legislation ever enacted by the American Congress."
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The Second New DealBy the middle of 1934 the New Deal, for which many had had great hopes in 1933, was experiencing serious difficulties. The economy was not improving fast enough to meet public expectations, resulting in the growth of popular and radical protest movements accompanied by one of the largest waves of strikes in the nation's history. These developments were jeopardizing the president's political future, and beginning in the spring of 1935 Roosevelt responded with a series of new proposals that historians have sometimes called the "Second New Deal." Dominating it were two landmark pieces of legislation that remain among the New Deal's principal legacies.
The Social Security Act of 1935 created the framework for the nation's first national system of social insurance and public assistance. More specifically, it created an old-age pension system funded by contributions from workers and employers, a system of unemployment insurance funded by employers alone, and several programs of social welfare supported by ordinary public funds for such particularly needy groups as single mothers with children in the home, the elderly poor, and the disabled. In operation it provided the framework for America's version of the modern welfare state.
Second Term as PresidentThe Second New Deal did not end the depression, but it did provide crucial short-term and long-term protections to large groups of Americans. In addition, it revived Roosevelt's political fortunes. In the 1936 presidential election, he faced the Republican governor of Kansas, Alf Landon, a moderate conservative with a dull public presence, and a third-party challenge from Congressman William Lemke of North Dakota, the hapless candidate of the short-lived Union party. Roosevelt campaigned energetically and effectively, and he won by an unprecedented landslide: 61 percent of the popular vote, the electoral votes of every state except Maine and Vermont, and increased Democratic majorities in both Houses of Congress. The election displayed clearly the fundamental political realignment the New Deal had created. The Democratic party now had the support of a broad coalition of southern and western farmers, the urban working class, the poor and unemployed, the black communities of northern cities, traditional progressives, and committed new liberals. This "New Deal coalition" would dominate American politics for a generation.
Few could have imagined in the glow of the November election how quickly the Roosevelt administration would move from its triumph into a quagmire of frustration and defeat. In February 1937, emboldened by his apparent mandate, Roosevelt introduced a Court "reform" plan designed to give him the authority to appoint additional, sympathetic justices to the Supreme Court, which he feared would otherwise invalidate virtually all of the legislative achievements of his first term. The "Court-packing" bill, as it quickly became known, was intensely controversial and energized the president's conservative opposition. Congress defeated it, humiliating the president in the process. But the Court itself, in the face of this assault, prudently moved toward the center and became more amenable to New Deal programs. At about the same time, Roosevelt also supported an ambitious proposal to reorganize the executive branch of the federal government, which his opponents charged was an attempt to consolidate still more power in the hands of the president. They defeated the original proposal in Congress and forced him to settle for a much more modest bill in 1939.
The Recession (1937)
Most damaging of all to the administration was a serious recession that began suddenly in August 1937 and quickly wiped out most of the painfully won economic gains of the previous four years. The collapse was especially traumatic to New Dealers because it came at a point when they had begun to believe that the depression was over. Now, confronted with the hollowness of those claims, the president joined in an agonizing reappraisal of his policies and eventually launched two important new initiatives.
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