By Patrick Allitt, Emory University
The Great Depression brought the 1920s boom to an end, and President Herbert Hoover was unable to cope with the scale of the disaster. However, his artful successor, Franklin Roosevelt, inaugurated a period of bold political experimentation. The most dramatic time of the New Deal was its very beginning, the first 100 days after his inauguration in the spring of 1933.
Political Innovations
Roosevelt’s efforts to prevent cutthroat competition among businesses, and his creation of federal agencies to oversee a wide variety of relief and regulatory tasks, marked a dramatic shift of power out of the states, and into the federal government.
Many of his early innovations were nullified by the Supreme Court in 1935 and 1936, which found them unconstitutional, but they created a favorable impression on much of the nation, even though unemployment figures were slow to go down.
Roosevelt, reelected in 1936, tried to safeguard his political innovations by enlarging the Supreme Court with pro-New Deal justices, but widespread resistance to the plan showed that for all his popularity, he’d overstepped his mandate.
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Political Background
Roosevelt himself had led a distinguished career in the Democratic Party in the early years of the 20th century. Even though he was a Democrat, he was related to the Republican president, Theodore Roosevelt, who’d been president at the beginning of the century, and he’d enjoyed a highly privileged childhood. He married his fifth cousin, Eleanor, who was also a cousin of Theodore Roosevelt.
He rose to the post of assistant secretary of the Navy under Woodrow Wilson, and he was the Democrats’ vice-presidential candidate in 1920, so he seemed all set for a golden career in politics already by 1920. Then, however, he was afflicted with polio.
It took him a long time to overcome the disease, but even though he was partially paralyzed from then on, he was determined that it wouldn’t bring an end to his political life, and, in fact, he was able to stage a political recovery and become the governor of New York.
A Good Politician
Historians who’ve studied his life believed that overcoming adversity, overcoming the suffering he faced in polio, made him a better politician. It made him more patient, more shrewd, more determined, perfecting gifts he’d shown earlier, which earlier had been marred by impatience, and sometimes by unnecessary risk-taking.
As the Democrats’ candidate for president in 1932, he was better able to unite the disparate parts of the Democratic Electoral Coalition than Al Smith had been. For the Democrats to win an election, they needed to get the solid white South. This is at a time when most black voters in the South were still disenfranchised. They needed to get the white South and the ethnic working-class groups of the North, particularly the ethnic Irish, Jewish, Polish, Hungarian, and Bohemian working-class people in the big industrial cities.
That’s something that Roosevelt was able to do, even though he came from an extraordinarily privileged family, because he’d grown up in Hyde Park, New York, and had some familiarity with farm life and the rural life. When he was campaigning in the South, he’d make out that he was a hayseed as well, that he understood the problems of farmers.
Practical Approaches
Nothing in Roosevelt’s past augured the kind of steps he took in beginning the New Deal. It was an astonishing departure in policy, and something that his own campaigns had not led citizens to anticipate. America faced emergency circumstances by early 1933, though, when desperate remedies seemed, to nearly everyone, vital.
Roosevelt was pragmatic. He was willing to try new schemes, and he was uncommitted to any ideological principles. In an age of great ideologues like Mussolini and Hitler and Stalin, he was a supreme pragmatist who was willing to try one experiment, and if it didn’t work out, to try a quite different one. He was more flexible than Hoover, certainly, but he too, like Hoover, was very unwilling to pay direct relief from the government to hungry citizens. He said, “To dole out relief is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit. The federal government must, and shall, quit the business of relief.”
The New Deal
The first 100 days of his administration, the first 100 days of what he called the New Deal, was one of the most creative periods in all of American political history, whose echoes continue to resound right down to the present.
The Democratic majority in Congress, with which he’d been elected, was cowed by the extent of the crisis, and gave him an exceptional opportunity to act decisively in a wide range of areas. Normally, legislation moves through Congress very slowly. There are a series of committee stages. Careful consideration, horse-trading, the balancing of various interests, is quite typical.
Now, suddenly, there were emergency conditions where Congress moved fast. A great array of legislation and a great array of new federal administrations was created during this period.
Common Questions about Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal
Roosevelt’s efforts to prevent cutthroat competition among businesses, and his creation of federal agencies to oversee a wide variety of relief and regulatory tasks, marked a dramatic shift of power out of the states, and into the federal government.
Historians who’ve studied Roosevelt’s life believed that overcoming adversity, overcoming the suffering he faced in polio, made him a better politician. It made him more patient, more shrewd, more determined, perfecting gifts he’d shown earlier, which earlier had been marred by impatience, and sometimes by unnecessary risk-taking.
Roosevelt was unwilling to pay direct relief from the government to hungry citizens. He said, “To dole out relief is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit. The federal government must, and shall, quit the business of relief.”
