How successful was the 'New Deal'?

 Historians seem to be divided on the exact intentions and achievements of these ideas. Radosh contends that the process had been initiated by Herbert Hoover in the first instance anyway. He goes onto to say that the New deal’s public works were of a limited nature and did not interfere with private business prerogatives. In the area in which public-works development was most needed, housing, the new deal program was hardly successful and many ways a total failure. Even liberals, traditionally supporters of Roosevelt, are prepared to admit that as a means of getting the country out of depression, the Public works program was never funded on the scale that was needed. In 1934, Roosevelt proposed that the government buy the buildings of foundered banks throughout the nation and use them for post-office rather than to construct new buildings. This is how far he was from visualising huge public works expenditures as a means of boosting the country out of the depression. As a result of this fundamental fiscal conservatism, unemployment in 1939 (before the outbreak of World war II) stood at around 9,000,000 (10%). It was an improvement, but 10% unemployment in a leading industrialised nation indicates, then and now, a serious state of depression. As a result, Roosevelt’s employment policies can hardly be termed a success. William Appleman Williams, a leading radical in American history wrote that ‘The New deal saved the system. It did not change it’

        Roosevelt had again set out, in his 1932 campaigning, to provide for the relief of the endemic poverty that had resulted from the great depression. None of the existing agencies of American society could cope with burdens of releif. In 1932, Fortune magazine noted that

‘the result was the picture now presented in city  after city… heterogeneous groups of official and unofficial releif agencies struggling under the earnest and untrained leadership of the local mean of affairs against an inertia of misery and suffering and want they are powerless to overcome’

The main way in which he sought to combat the problem was through social security. Roosevelt considered the provision to be “the cornerstone of his administration”.  However, it is with social security and its funding that new deal historians have been able to pick the most holes. Leutchenberg provides what it is in many ways the consensus of opinion on the social security act. He writes that the act “was an astonishingly inept and conservative piece of legislation . In no other welfare system did the state shirk all responsibility for old-age indigency and insist that funds be taken out of the current earnings of workers”. Essentially, social security was funded by a tax still in use today in the U.S., the payroll tax. It was and still is a classically regressive tax, letting the rich off more cheaply than the wage earners. The rate was set at a high enough level for the old age insurance tax to collect 10% of all federal revenue at the time . Essentially, through using the payroll tax to fund social security, Roosevelt was taking money away from people who most needed it and giving it back to them. A kind of ‘viscous circle’ was in operation. It seems sensible to suggest that the social security act, though establishing that every person has ‘social rights’, was not the success that it could have been as a means of redistributing wealth as Roosevelt was not prepared, as with many other elements of the ‘new deal’, to commit to either higher taxation for the rich or deficit spending that would be needed in order to make the measure successful. Leff notes that the problems created by Roosevelt’s social security system still plague the U.S. today, which still includes elements of the initial system.

        In 1933, Roosevelt introduced the Agricultural Adjustment Act, with which he hoped to counter the deep malaise that American agriculture had fallen into as a result of the great depression. It proposed price benefits to the farmer in return for acreage and production controls on the major staple crops of wheat, cotton, hogs and tobacco.  Effectively, it was an effort to adjust farm prices and production and to establish relative balance between agriculture and the rest of the national economy. Underlying this seemingly progressive set of policies lay provisions that were, in the same way as the social security provisions, fundamentally conservative. The AAA and federal rural programmes aided landowners more than tenants, traditional lending agencies more than borrowers, the same way that the free market system had before. Leonard J. Arrington wrote that

‘New deal loans and expenditures [from agricultural agencies] …  were not, at least in their dollar impact, reform-orientated or equalty-orientated. The prime goal would seem to have been the restoration of income for individual farmers rather than the achievement of a greater equality’

So far, it seems that we have considered the policies of the New deal and their relative conservatism. However, it is important to consider that the New Deal’s greatest asset and perhaps it greatest success was one man, Franklin D. Roosevelt himself. As a figurehead to galvanise the country out the deep pessimism that had overcome it, Roosevelt could hardly have been bettered. Leutchenberg notes that under Roosevelt, the presidency became much more powerful than it reasonably established. He established the tradition of deep presidential involvement in the legislative process, characterised by recent presidents like Lyndon B. Johnson. Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt had broken new ground in sending actual drafts of bills to congress and in using devices like caucus to win enactment of measures they favoured. By the end of Roosevelt’s tenure in the White house, Congress looked automatically to the executive for guidance; and it expected the administration to have a ‘program’ to present for consideration. The establishment of the executive office of the president (created by executive order 8248) had the effect, according to Rossiter, of ‘converting the Presidency into an instrument of twentieth century government … Executive order 8248 may yet be judged to have saved the presidency from paralysis and the constituion from radical amendment’. It seems that this, more than many of his measures, can be judged to be a success of the New Deal.

        A last major ‘foundation’ of the new deal lay in the legislation passed dealing with minorities and women. It is probably true to say that both Roosevelt, and his wife Eleanor, paid more attention to African Americans, Native Americans and women than had any other.  It seems that a lot of the support that came forward from Black Americans came from the fact that they got something from the government, which in previous times had almost totally ignored them. Charles Matthews, who became one of the first black democratic ward chairman in Newark, said that “discrimination or not, we were participating… we were part of the economic and social fabric of the community [for the first time] we started working”. It is true that actual economic assistance was far more limited than it was for whites, and discrimination was rife. The Tenessee Valley authority made sure that homes for white workers  on projects were substantial, while blacks lived in substandard temporary barracks. Skilled jobs went first to whites and labour crews were segregated. TVA, it appeared wanted to maintain the status quo and as a result, blacks were 11% of the working force, receiving only 9% of the payroll. The reform of Native American policy, under John Collier. He hoped to bring some of the benefits of the new deal while re-establishing tribal self government, which had been removed in 1887. He hit problems with the Indians commitment to their tribes, their links have ing disintegrated  after almost a century of uprooting. Though  the social units still existed, the political structures that had previously governed them were no longer there. Colliers efforts, while admirable, were doomed to failure as a result. It was left to a new generation of Indians to  define themselves. We can see that Roosevelt’s efforts to deal with minorities were unprecedented in their motivations, but similar to other areas of the new deal, it was the magnetism of Roosevelt and the ideology rather than practical gain of the era that can be shown to be the success here.

It seems sensible at this point to reach some sort of conclusion. Economically, Roosevelt’s, initiatives did bring about improvement, but they cannot really be termed as a ‘complete’ success, as the situation the economy was in on the eve of World War II was still dire. Socially, Roosevelt’s basic fiscal conservatism prevented his programs from being as successful as they could have been. He use of a regressive tax to fund a social security system seems particularly conservative and it shows system, still used today, as fundamentally contradictory. Similarly, in terms of agriculture, The New deal again  was basically conservative, it benefited those who didn’t really need aid (the landowners) and not the tenants (who were in dire need). Indeed, various federal agencies introducing new technology actually put more people into unemployment and forced others to become migrant workers. It seems sensive to say, then, that the success of the New deal lay in Roosevelt himself and not in his policies. He was a leader greatly admired because  it seemed he was working directly to ease the suffering of the American people. Black Americans adored him, and many were overjoyed to be given any kind of employment at all. This restoration of confidence was one his greatest achievements, and a definite improvement over when he came to office in 1933. After we considering all the above, Roosevelt emerges as basically conservative, not the radical man of people depicted in post-ear interpretations of the new deal. If his aim was to keep the status quo, while encouraging a modicum of recovery, then it seems that the new deal can be judged a success. If the new deal was intended to a radical, ambitious and solve all the problems that it could, then success was, at best, limited.

Biblography

David E. Hamilton, Problems in American civilisation: The New deal (Houghton Mifflin: Boston, 1999)

John Major, The New Deal, (Longmans: London, 1974)

Harvard Sitkoff, Fifty years later: The New deal evaluated (McGraw-Hill Inc: New Hampshire, 1985)

Arthur A. Ekirch, Ideologies and Utopias: The Impact of the New Deal on American Thought (Quadrangle Books: Chicago, 1969)

        

        

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