The True Motive Behind the New Deal

The True Motive Behind the New Deal

Principia College | History 288

Luiza Vannucci Dias

12/10/2012

Introduction

The early 20th century was a time of great despair, inequality, and uncertainty. The Great Depression hit the United States in 1929, before Franklin Delano Roosevelt assumed presidency in 1933. Roosevelt inherited a leadership role in a government that did not directly help the people of the nation. He strongly believed the government should be of support for when hard times came. Roosevelt proposed various programs under the New Deal that were passed by Congress in the hopes to return the nation to prosperity, as well as to change social and economic structures. The programs benefited diverse groups of individuals throughout the country. Weather Roosevelt's motivation for the New Deal stemmed from political expediency or not is a debatable question due to his initial lack of support towards civil rights. Conversely, this paper argues that Franklin Roosevelt's motivation for the New Deal stemmed from humanitarianism. Throughout his presidency, Franklin expresses his deep concern and support for human welfare through his fight for programs that enhance the living standard of all Americans during the worst depression in American history.

What is the New Deal?

The New Deal was a series of social and economic programs which advocated consumerism as the pathway out of the Depression. The main goal was to create a new strong American society. Given the endemic poverty in the country, especially among much of the southern laboring class, federal planners viewed the South as an obstacle to the creation of this new consumerist society. In 1938, President Roosevelt stated, "the South presents right now the Nation's No.1 economic problem... For we have an economic unbalance in the Nation as a whole, due to this very condition of the South". The Great Depression left millions jobless and homeless with no one to turn to. The FSA believed that the only way to eliminate rural poverty and improve the economy as a whole was to raise the impoverished to an "American" standard of living. The prosperity was to be achieved through policies and programs that promoted economic nationalism. The programs were directed toward specific as well as general problems and affected differently the various geographic areas of the nation.

Roosevelt outlined the New Deal as "three related steps" which all contributed to the "efforts toward the saving and safeguarding of our national life." The first step was relief; the second, recovery; and the third, reform. All steps were in support of the common goal of returning America to prosperity. In one of Roosevelt's Fireside Chats, he advocated a "plan to use land and water resources of this country to the end that the means of livelihood of our citizens may be more adequate to meet their daily needs." Though the purpose of the New Deal was to recover from the Depression its focus was refined to create a society that provided freedom and equal rights to all. The President created numerous programs under the New Deal that helped millions of people survive the economic hardship. Some of the New Deal initiatives included; The Emergency Banking Act/Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), Civil Works Administration (CWA), Civilian Conservative Corps (CCC), National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), Social Security Act, Fair Labor Standards Act, Farm Security Administration (FSA), and the Works Progress Administration (WPA). All these programs' core principles were stemmed from treating everyone as equals. The humanitarianism motive behind the New Deal is expressed in the way Roosevelt presents the people's needs as a major force in changing the economy.

Programs of the New Deal

Once Roosevelt took office, one of the first actions he took towards recovering the economy was to close down all the banks in the United States. In the first two months of 1933, 4,004 banks failed with more than $3.6 billion in lost deposits. On March 9, 1933, five days after Roosevelt's first inauguration, Congress passed the Emergency Banking Act. Banks began to reopen on March 13th as soon as examiners declared they were financially secure. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) was then formed to insure deposits up to $5,000. These measures reestablished American faith in the banking system. Americans began to lose fear that any deposit would be lost in case of a bank failure.

In the early years of the Roosevelt era, the difficulty of promoting civil rights through Congress became painfully clear. It became impossible to pass an anti-lynching law through Congress. More than 3,000 blacks had been lynched since the Civil War. In one of his first public statements via a national radio broadcast, Roosevelt condemned lynching as murder. Despite an initial commitment by the president to anti-lynching legislation, when the Costigan- Wagner anti-lynching bill was submitted to Congress, he "reversed course and decided to pursue a "southern strategy" to keep peace with the white supremacists in Congress who, with each effort to introduce favorable laws for African Americans, threatened to vote against any of the president's bills which were designed to keep the nation from economic collapse during the Great Depression." Roosevelt's cautious decision to not persist anti-lynching law was for the betterment of the country. The President later explained his dilemma to Walter White in the mid-thirties,

"...I've got to get legislation passed by Congress to save America. The southerners by reason of the seniority rule in Congress are chairmen or occupy strategic places on most of the Senate and House committees. If I come out for the anti-lynching bill, they will block every bill I ask congress to pass to keep America from collapsing. I just can't take that risk."

Without a federal law passed by Congress, the U.S. government had no power to intervene against anti-lynching in individual states. Lynching of the African Americans was one issue Eleanor Roosevelt refused to give up. Though Franklin Roosevelt did not advocate an anti-lynching law he allowed Eleanor to represent the more "generous, idealistic side of his own nature, the humanitarian values he himself held but felt unable to act upon in the context of the Southern dominated Congress." Eleanor was also able to build new allies with the blacks who were gaining access to the ballot in urban areas. Roosevelt's desire in support of the rights