ROOSEVELT'S NEW DEAL

On a cold, grey Saturday in March 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt took the oath as President of the United States. For a hundred days, from March 8 to June 16 he sent Congress a flood of proposals for new laws. The American people had asked for action. In the "Hundred Days" Roosevelt gave it to them.

Many of the new laws set up government organizations called "agencies" to help the nation to recover from the Depression. The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) found work for many thousands of young men. The Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) gave individual states government money to help their unemployed and homeless. The Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) set out to raise crop prices by paying farmers to produce less. The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) built a network of dams to make electricity and stop floods in a poor southeastern region of the United States. And the National Recovery Administration (NRA) worked to make sure that businesses paid fair wages and charged fair prices.

The American people knew both these and later New Deal organizations by their initials. Let us look more closely at the work of some of these "alphabet agencies."

Roosevelt believed that his most urgent task was to find people work. He was especially anxious about the young. Thousands were stealing rides on freight trains and wandering about the country searching for jobs. Roosevelt set up the CCC to help them. By August 1933, the CCC had already placed 250,000 young men in camps all over the country. They were hard at work cutting fire-lanes through forests, strengthening river banks against flooding, planting trees in places where the soil was being blown away. The government gave the CCC workers food and shelter and a wage of a dollar a day. Many sent this wage home to help their less fortunate relatives.

A later alphabet agency was the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Roosevelt set up the WPA in 1935. Like the CCC, it aimed to set people to work on jobs that were useful to the community. By 1937 its workers had built thousands of miles of new roads and thousands of schools and hospitals. The WPA even found work for unemployed writers and artists. The writers produced guidebooks to states and cities. The artists painted pictures on the walls of post offices and other public buildings.

Alphabet agencies like the CCC and the WPA put millions of people to work. Between 1935 and 1942 the WPA alone provided eight million jobs. This meant that people were able to support themselves once more. They regained their independence and self respect. This was not all. The money they were paid helped to bring trade back to life. Shops had customers again. Factories became busy once more. Farmers had someone to buy their produce.

This was what Roosevelt had hoped for. He believed that putting money into people's pockets was like pouring fuel into an engine that had stopped to make it start again. The engine could then once more drive the economic machinery that earned the country its living.

Roosevelt helped industrial workers in other ways. In 1935 he persuaded Congress to pass a law to protect their right to join labor unions. He hoped this would give workers a better chance to bargain with employers.

But some big employers - Henry Ford was one - hated labor unions. They dismissed any worker who joined one. Strikes and fighting broke out in industrial areas of the country as unions struggled to win recognition. To stop the trouble another union law was passed. This was called the Wagner Act, after the man who guided it through Congress. The Wagner Act gave every worker the right to join a union, and it set up a body called the National Labor Board to protect this right.

But despite New Deal reforms like these, millions of Americans still lived in fear. What if their jobs disappeared again? Would only a breadline stand between them and starvation once more? "No," Roosevelt told them. In 1935 he brought in a law called the Social Security Act. One part gave government pensions to people unable to provide for themselves - old people, widows and the blind, for example. Another part gave the United States its first system of unemployment insurance. The money to pay for these benefits came from special taxes paid by both workers and employers. The unemployment scheme did not cover all workers at first. But in later years more and more were protected by it.

Not all Americans supported Roosevelt's New Deal policies. Some said that the country could not afford the money that he was spending. Others said that much of the money was being wasted anyway. They feared, too, that Roosevelt's policies would make people idle and stop them standing on their own feet. "You can't make the world all planned and soft," complained one businessman. "The strongest and best survive - that's the law of nature after all."

But such criticisms made little difference to Roosevelt's popularity with the voters. To millions of Americans he was the man who had given them jobs and saved their homes and farms. In 1936 they re-elected him President by the largest majority of votes in the country's history. As one wit put if, "Everyone was against the New Deal but the voters." Thirty years later a New York taxi driver still remembered how many Americans felt about Roosevelt in those years. "Roosevelt?" he said in a television interview. "He was God in this country." Even so, it was not Roosevelt's New Deal that ended unemployment in the United States. The German dictator, Adolf Hitler, did that.

By 1939, despite the New Deal, ten million American workers again had no jobs. Then, in September 1939, Hitler's armies marched into Poland. The Second World War began. The United States quickly became the main supplier of weapons to the countries fighting Hitler - what Roosevelt described as "the arsenal of democracy." American factories began working all day and all night. The number of people without jobs fell. In 1941 the United States joined the war itself and unemployment disappeared. President Roosevelt was now too busy to give attention to further reforms at home. "Old Dr. New Deal has to be replaced by Dr. Win-the-War," he said. His New Deal was over.

Roosevelt's efforts as "Dr. Win-the-War" wore him out. By 1945 he was a sick man. A few weeks before the end of the war, on the morning of April 12, he suffered a stroke. Within hours he was dead. His Vice President, Harry Truman, took over as President of the United States.

By this time nearly all Americans were better off than they had been in the dark days of the Depression. Some argued that this was due mainly to the coming of war. But many thought the main cause was the New Deal. People still argue about this. But there is no argument about the importance of the New Deal in other ways.

The New Deal altered Americans' ideas about the rightful work of their national government. Before the New Deal most thought of the government as a kind of policeman. It was there just to keep order, while factory owners and businessmen got on with making the country richer. The Depression weakened this belief. Roosevelt taught Americans to look to the government to see that everyone had a fair chance to obtain what he called "the good things of life." Many Americans still remember him with respect and affection.

Bryn O'Callaghan: An illustrated history of the USA; Longman, Harlow, 1990/1996, page 100 ff.