First, there’s Social Security. Until 1936 almost all African Americans (and many whites) shifted from the "Party of Lincoln" to the Democratic Party. BLANCHE WIESEN COOK: Where the Roosevelt — and where the FDR Library is. I pledge myself to a new deal for the American people. [94][95] During its existence, the Federal Theatre Project provided jobs for circus people, musicians, actors, artists and playwrights, together with increasing public appreciation of the arts. Katznelson has asserted that it created mutual acquiescence between the levels of government, while Schlesinger and Patterson have suggested that it provoked contempt for the state governments on the part of the federal government and vice versa, thus exacerbating their relations. Once an ardent supporter of the New Deal, Reagan turned against it, now viewing government as the problem rather than solution and, as president, moved the nation away from the New Deal model of government activism, shifting greater emphasis to the private sector. Whether through intentional methods, like sabotage, or unintentional ones, like simple administrative overload—either way, these problems aggravated the federal government and thus heightened federal-state tensions. Our Daily Digest brings Democracy Now! [161] In its first few weeks of operation, CCC camps in the North were integrated. The goals of the FSA were notoriously liberal and not cohesive with the southern voting elite. Some states were either simply unable to cope with the federal government's demand and thus refused to work with them, or admonished the economic restraints and actively decided to sabotage federal policies. And Marian Anderson and also Mary McLeod Bethune, constantly in the White House, Eleanor —. [210], The initial perception of the New Deal was mixed. The farmers themselves had a voice in the process of using the government to benefit their incomes. So in fighting for those, we fight for peace. But they get married, and they have a romantic relationship, until she — until 1918. The Home Owners' Loan Corporation's purchases and refinancing of troubled mortgages staved off drops in housing prices and home ownership rates at relatively low ex post cost to taxpayers. In 1941, 40% of all American families lived on less than the $1,500 per year defined as necessary by the Works Progress Administration for a modest standard of living. But declaring that WPA workers were unemployed is just silly", "Minimum wage to increase in more than 20 states in 2020", Consumer Price Index AND M2 Money Supply: 1800–2003, "State Capacity and Economic Intervention in the Early New Deal", The Smithsonian American Art Museum's Exhibition "1934: A New Deal for Artists", Art, Culture, and Government: The New Deal at 75. Roosevelt entered office with enormous political capital. There were CCC camps, and then — but there are no young girls in the CCC camps. Ever since, presidents have been judged against Roosevelt for what they accomplished in their first 100 days. What if America doesn’t want us?”. [18], The phrase "New Deal" was coined by an adviser to Roosevelt, Stuart Chase,[19] although the term was originally used by Mark Twain in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. [105], In 1929, federal expenditures accounted for only 3% of GNP. There is consensus on only a few points, with most commentators favorable toward the CCC and hostile toward the NRA. Have you lost any of your rights or liberty or constitutional freedom of action and choice? Nonetheless, Roosevelt turned his attention to the war effort and won reelection in 1940–1944. [218], Stanley Payne, a historian of fascism, examined possible fascist influences in the United States by looking at the KKK and its offshoots and movements led by Father Coughlin and Huey Long. And her children are there when she gets the phone call. 2020 marks the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which guaranteed women the right to vote, and we begin the new decade with a New Year’s Day special about one of the most influential women in U.S. politics: first lady Eleanor Roosevelt. And I majored in all of that. Ambitious reform ideas often failed, she argued, because of the absence of a government bureaucracy with significant strength and expertise to administer them. However, Douglas—rejecting the distinction between a regular and emergency budget—resigned in 1934 and became an outspoken critic of the New Deal. Why don’t you fire him?” And FDR said, “Don’t use that word.” And she says, “Well, he is.” You know, like that. This meant that the states controlled who had access to these funds, which in turn meant many Southern states were able to racially segregate—or in some cases, like a number of counties in Georgia, completely exclude African-Americans—the allocation of federal funds. While both parties have agreed that the federal government expanded and even that states had a degree of control over the allocation of federal funds, they have disputed the consequences of these claims. The New Deal had many programs and new agencies, most of which were universally known by their initials. Not that I know of. ", Conklin, Paul K. "The Myth of New Deal Radicalism" in. BLANCHE WIESEN COOK: Well, the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Colonial Dames — I think Eleanor Roosevelt was a member of both — if you had an ancestor, if you had ancestors who fought in the Revolution, you could be a member of the DAR. All of Eleanor Roosevelt’s friends are lesbians — Esther Lape and Elizabeth Read, Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman. So that was a big part of what she really believed. Although the New Deal had alienated conservatives, including many businessmen, most Americans supported Roosevelt’s programs, and in the 1936 election FDR handily defeated his Republican challenger, Alf Landon, the governor of Kansas, carrying every state except Maine and Vermont. They’re homeless. This cooperation resulted in the government subsidizing business and labor through both direct and indirect methods.[106]. It oversaw about 1,000 productions that were mounted in four years in 40 states, often presented free to the public. [87] The Works Progress Administration (WPA) was created to return the unemployed to the workforce. distinguished professor of history and women’s studies at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. And Joe was a good son, so anything that Eleanor Roosevelt said, Joe wrote, and anything she said she didn’t want dealt with, he didn’t deal with. On Monday Roosevelt officially closed all banks. [49] These standards were reintroduced by the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. And can you describe what that relationship was all about more fully? We’ve got to have — Eleanor Roosevelt didn’t use the word “democratic socialist,” but she was a democratic socialist. [32], New Dealers never accepted the Keynesian argument for government spending as a vehicle for recovery. I’m Amy Goodman, as we continue our conversation with historian Blanche Wiesen Cook, author of the definitive three-part biography of the former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s emissary and closest personal adviser during World War II. And they get married. Factories hired everyone they could find regardless of their lack of skills—they simplified work tasks and trained the workers, with the federal government paying all the costs. [188], Replying to DeLong et al. AMY GOODMAN: Are you going to be the one to reveal it to us? In the 1960s, Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society used the New Deal as inspiration for a dramatic expansion of liberal programs, which Republican Richard Nixon generally retained. Prices fell by 20%, causing deflation that made repaying debts much harder. After feeling like solitary individuals suffering from the failures of capitalism, many American intellectuals and middle-class professionals were attracted to American Communist Party, which they saw as a community of like-minded souls. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, an influential adviser to many New Dealers, argued that "bigness" (referring, presumably, to corporations) was a negative economic force, producing waste and inefficiency. The term was taken from Roosevelt’s speech accepting the Democratic … And Hick is on tour for the New Deal, and she writes to Eleanor Roosevelt, “If you want to see the worst place in the United States, where miners who are out of work, coal miners who are out of work, are living in hovels, or they’re living next to the mines, they’re living in the most dreadful conditions, come join me in this area, Logan County, West Virginia.”. But this is years before. Her list of what her priorities would be if she took the job illustrates: "a forty-hour workweek, a minimum wage, worker's compensation, unemployment compensation, a federal law banning child labor, direct federal aid for unemployment relief, Social Security, a revitalized public employment service and health insurance".[26]. AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Blanche Wiesen Cook, who is really the definitive scholar on Eleanor Roosevelt, has written three volumes on the first lady, before and after. He concluded that "the various populist, nativist, and rightist movements in the United States during the 1920s and 1930s fell distinctly short of fascism". Even liberal Democrats at the time regarded balanced budgets as essential to economic stability in the long run, although they were more willing to accept short-term deficits. Let freedom ring! [103] Military Keynesianism brought full employment and federal contracts were cost-plus. [30] The ratio of these numbers, times the number of jobs in 1932, means there was a need for 938,000 more jobs in 1937, to maintain the same employment level. AMY GOODMAN: She builds Arthurdale. I mean, I — you know, but the question: Why did he not fire Breckinridge Long, who was the man in charge of delay and denial, the man who sent people back? And one of the ways that it got bigger was a lot of things were classified. Major federal programs and agencies included the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), the Civil Works Administration (CWA), the Farm Security Administration (FSA), the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 (NIRA) and the Social Security Administration (SSA). These science quizzes will test your knowledge of everything in between. [155] An NRA study found that the NIRA put 500,000 African Americans out of work. It was Morgenthau who insisted on excluding farm workers and domestic servants from Social Security because workers outside industry would not be paying their way. delivered to your inbox every day? They are traditionally and typically known to Americans by their alphabetical initials. They absolutely insist, “We don’t want any part of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” They walk away from it. [40] This banking reform offered unprecedented stability as while throughout the 1920s more than five hundred banks failed per year, it was less than ten banks per year after 1933. Raj Patel and Jim Goodman, "The Long New Deal", Rachel Louise Moran, "Consuming Relief: Food Stamps and the New Welfare of the New Deal,", Alan Bjerga & Derek Wallbank, "Food Stamps Loom Over Negotiations to Pass Farm Bill", Price V. Fishback, Michael R. Haines, and Shawn Kantor, "Births, Deaths, and New Deal relief during the Great Depression." Historians debating the New Deal have generally been divided between liberals who support it, conservatives who oppose it, and some New Left historians who complain it was too favorable to capitalism and did too little for minorities. The Federal Housing Administration (FHA) created national standards for home construction.[76]. It reduced federal expenditures by $500 million, to be achieved by reducing veterans' payments and federal salaries. And I bring up Mary Harriman Rumsey here because she was one of the closest friends of Eleanor — I mean, they were the five of hearts at one point, and Mary Harriman Rumsey, Frances Perkins and other people, two other people, were very close. [182] Economist Milton Friedman after 1960 attacked Social Security from a free market view stating that it had created welfare dependency. And let me just go a little slowly. The 1932 election represented a dramatic shift in the political alignment of the U.S. Not only did FDR receive more than 57 percent of the popular vote and 472 electoral votes, compared with about 40 percent of the popular vote and 59 electoral votes for Republican incumbent Herbert Hoover, but substantial Democratic majorities were elected in both houses of Congress. Conservative Republicans and Democrats in Congress joined the informal conservative coalition. The New Deal (1933–39) aimed to provide immediate economic relief and to bring about reforms to stabilize the U.S. economy during the Great Depression. [55], The idea was to give farmers a "fair exchange value" for their products in relation to the general economy ("parity level"). It gave the president power to negotiate bilateral, reciprocal trade agreements with other countries. The Puerto Rico Reconstruction Administration was directed by Juan Pablo Montoya Sr. from 1935 to 1937. BLANCHE WIESEN COOK: Frances Perkins, secretary of labor, the first woman in a political cabinet. And Eleanor Roosevelt is devastated. [132], In 1964, Barry Goldwater, an unreconstructed anti-New Dealer, was the Republican presidential candidate on a platform that attacked the New Deal. The American people were generally extremely dissatisfied with the crumbling economy, mass unemployment, declining wages and profits and especially Herbert Hoover's policies such as the Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act and the Revenue Act of 1932. David M. Kennedy, Freedom From Fear, The American People in Depression and War 1929–1945, Oxford University Press, 1999, Irving Bernstein, "The Growth of American Unions,", Lorraine Brown, "Federal Theatre: Melodrama, Social Protest, and Genius,". [175], In a survey of economic historians conducted by Robert Whaples, Professor of Economics at Wake Forest University, anonymous questionnaires were sent to members of the Economic History Association. Those were the two most prominent. And we need to pause. And at this point, she’s making rather a significant amount of money. HOLC set uniform national appraisal methods and simplified the mortgage process. The model for the NRA was Woodrow Wilson's War Industries Board, in which Johnson had been involved too. I think she would be entirely horrified by — well, first of all, we’ve never had a fascist in the White House before. That changed in the 1960s when New Left historians began a revisionist critique calling the New Deal a bandaid for a patient that needed radical surgery to reform capitalism, put private property in its place and lift up workers, women and minorities. Their letters are full of politics and love and longing. The New Deal’s first objective was to alleviate the suffering of the huge number of unemployed workers. The Act also established the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to facilitate wage agreements and to suppress the repeated labor disturbances. Under the WPA Federal Art Project, a range of creative, educational, research, and service projects was organized to preserve the skills of professional artists in mural, easel, sculpture, and graphic art divisions, of commercial artists in the poster and Index of American Design divisions, and of the less experienced in art education and technical jobs. She gets a standing ovation, 10 December, 1948. By 1938 he had directed the spending of more than $8.5 billion for unemployment relief, aiding some 15 million people. By August 1933, blacks called the NRA the "Negro Removal Act". Jane Mayer on Trump’s Desperate Bid to Stay in Power & Avoid Prosecution, Juan González: Mainstream Media Has Missed the Real Story About Latinx Voter Turnout, Louisville Police Concealed 738,000 Records of Sexual Abuse by Officers. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation's loans to banks and railroads appear to have had little positive impact, although the banks were aided when the RFC took ownership stakes.