guys this is professor larma here to talk to you about uh franklin delano roosevelt and the new deal so a few things for us to keep in mind as we're going through today's lecture we have four questions the first how did fdr's new deal attempt to use government power to provide relief to the poor stimulate recovery and reform the american economy what were liberal and conservative criticisms of the new deal and how did fdr's administration respond to these criticisms thirdly what was the new deal coalition and how did fdr alter the american political party alignment so we'll see this is the point when things change and then lastly what were what was the long-term political social and economic legacy of the new deal and how did the new deal permanently alter the role of the federal government all right so let's take a step back because i want us to think back to 1928 when hoover was elected president and you can see that he won overwhelmingly he said we in america today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land oh how wrong he is going to be because during his time in office we have the stock market crash we have the bank failures we have unemployment rising to 25 percent people are getting out of kicked out of their homes farms are foreclosing everything is going to start to fall apart so much so that in 1932 when hoover is challenged by the democrat theodore excuse me franklin delano roosevelt who was a distant relative to theodore roosevelt um roosevelt is going to win overwhelmingly so we're talking about pretty much a complete flip he wins 472 to 59 in the electoral college and democrats are also going to win um seats in the house and the senate so they have a democratically controlled congress with a democratic president so we are going to see legislative action be called by the president and enacted by congress so the first thing to understand is that fdr did not go it alone he had what we call a brain trust people who are around him who are going to help determine what the next step should be and they included professors economic experts these were people of all different walks of life we had african-americans we had jewish americans we had catholic americans we even had women including francis perkins who is going to become the very first female cabinet member as the secretary of labor so when we talk about the new deal as he advertised it during the election he spoke about three goals relief recovery reform the three r's relief for the unemployed recovery for the economy and reform to prevent another depression so you need to know these three r's relief recovery reform relief recovery reform now when we're talking about relief he wants to give direct payments to individuals when we're talking about recovery he wants to help businesses re-establish themselves and when he's talking about reform he wants to put in legislation that will prevent companies from having business practices that could lead to another depression all right so when he takes office he immediately uh closes the banks and he doesn't want to make it sound alarming so he says look we're gonna have bank holidays everyone loves holidays we're gonna have the banks close down for a little bit we're gonna have um some people come in and look and set up some regulations banks that have good business practices will be able to reopen in a week or two and those that weren't so great will not reopen and this time we're gonna get the glass-steagall act passed and eventually that's going to create the federal deposit insurance corporation or the fdic we have the fdic today basically it says look if you put money in this bank your money is insured so if that bank goes to put you're gonna get your money back and it started out as a hundred thousand dollars which if you think about it how many people have a hundred thousand dollars in a single bank account so it seemed like okay no matter what your money is going to be protected but some people are wealthy so they upped it to 250 000 um i think a couple of decades ago but still the idea is your money is going to be returned to you if that particular bank has poor business practices and and goes out of business you're not just going to lose your money the way that many americans did prior to um 1929. all right the the other thing is that he's going to push for another amendment to our constitution because the depression got worse from the time he was elected in november to the time that he took office in march and so that period what we call the lame duck period where presidents really can't do anything he wanted that to be shortened so the 20th amendment moves inauguration to january 20th and not in march so no longer are we going to have to wait for our president um until march to take over the president takes over on january 20th another thing he is going to push is an organization that will oversee um the stock market and make sure that businesses are kind of on the up and up when it comes to how much money they're reporting to their stockholders and this is called the security and exchange commissions the sec i'll give you an example okay here's the thing it it's not fair for people who are within the business to know if things are going really well or really bad that information should be available to all because if only the people inside the company now then they could know when to buy or sell stock this is called insider information and if you're buying or selling stock with that information that others don't know it's called insider trading um some of you may remember a few years ago um martha stewart went to prison and she went to prison for insider trading because she knew that her mind was not doing well so she ordered her brokers to sell off stock in um the stores where her lines were being sold and that is having insider information and that is called insider trading and it's highly illegal and it's regulated and monitored by the sec the sec also said you cannot buy stocks on credit or on margin as it was you have to pay the full price up front so if you can't afford the full price of the stock then you can't buy it another thing we did in the first hundred days is we abandoned the gold standard we said nope we are taking our money off of that and if you're wondering what our money is backed on now is it silver no is it copper no it's in fact nothing our money has value because we say it has value so that's kind of a little you know it can be a little scary but now we don't have to keep bold reserves um we have our monetary policy based upon what we feel is happening in the economy to loosen or tighten the money supply so that was a good thing the 21st amendment is also going to be proposed and that was to basically end prohibition the old 18th amendment and this was through the beer wine revenue act and it's going to be one of the fastest past amendments and alcohol will be back in the american lives additionally we are going to see some regulation for farming including the creation of the aaa or the agricultural adjustment act which gave money to farmers to uh stop production because the idea was we have too much supply the prices are plummeting farmers need to be able to live their lives and so they need to kind of have a little bit of a guaranteed income in that sense or else they're just going to want to keep growing products with the hope that they can sell them so the idea is hey we're going to give you money that you would normally get if you sold your products but we don't actually want you to grow this season you know we need to control the supply so farmers today are paid not to farm or ranch when it comes to animals it's interesting now we're going to see uh through the nira um union rights increase we are going to see regional planning we want to get people um up to date so like in tennessee they're going to create the tennessee valley authority the tva which is going to create dams and bring hydro um electricity electricity to areas that still haven't received electricity um like the appalachian regions and then we're going to try to get people to work and one of the um most famous of the worker programs was the ccc and that stood for the civilian conservation corps and that put men who were 18 to 25 years old so those who were most likely to become hobos and ride the rails to work and they sent them to parks and cities and they had them build roads build dams they had them work on planting trees and cutting down trees um foliage clearing i mean you name it they were doing it and they were paid thirty dollars um not sure if it was thirty dollars a week or thirty dollars a month i don't remember but they whatever they were paid 25 of it had to go to their families and they were given you know quarters to live in and food so the majority of their money was going home and that was to help rebuild the economy but also keep people from going to jail for being miscreants and and getting into trouble so it worked out and it actually helped a lot of young men get back on their feet now it didn't help women but this was just one of the ways of giving direct relief to people because people wanted to work they wanted to get their incomes going and we needed the economy to jumpstart so all this is happening in the first 100 days that fdr is president now fdr was very savvy and knew that he needed to sell his idea to the american people and so he came up with this plan to give radio speeches and they became known as fireside chats in which he wanted to just let the american people know hey this is what i'm doing this is what i'm thinking you can trust me i'm giving it to you straight and um the very first one was march 12 1933 in which he talked about the banking crisis and he explained the bank holidays and he uses the right type of rhetoric to calm people's fears and these fireside tracks were very very successful but not everyone was on board with fdr's plans uh and a lot of people they didn't think that he went far enough so um father coughlin he uh was a minister who believed that everyone deserved a annual income and so he proposed this idea that if people didn't make a certain amount the government should fill in the difference and what's interesting is that this is actually going to be a plan that will be reintroduced in the early 70s by none other than richard nixon but people thought this was too radical now another one of his challengers is dr francis townsend who is from long beach california and he said no no no no young people can work we need to focus on the elderly the elderly have no safety net and so he called it the townsend plan in fact that is going to be the basis for some of the ideas that fall in that find their way into the social security administration um what we have now social security um elderly benefits many of the ideas come from this townsend plan but my favorites my favorites of all of his critics was this guy named huey long um of louisiana and he oh he was a hoot he had a plan called the share our wealth plan in which he wanted everyone who who made over a million dollars to be a hundred percent tax so you could make up to a million dollars but after that the rest of it went to the government and his policies were every man's a king and every man should be able to be um you know equal when it came to the opportunity for well now he's actually going to be assassinated on the steps of the louisiana capital in 1935 but i do want to show you a video that uh of him giving a speech before he was assassinated 125 million american people but morgan and rockefeller and mira and baruch have walked up and took 85 percent of the vitals off the table [Applause] now how are you going to feed the balance of the people what's morgan and baruch and rockefeller and melon gonna do with all that grub they can't eat it they can't wear their clothes they can't live in the house give them a yacht give the palace send them to reno and get my new wife when they want it that's what they want but when they've got everything on the gods living earth that they can eat and they can wear and they can live in and all that their children can live in and wear and eat and only children's children can use then we got to call mr morgan and mr mellon and mr rockefeller baggage say come back here well i'll step back on this table here that you took away from me that you don't need leave something else for the american people i love it leave something else for the american people so as you can see huey long he was very angry towards the super wealthy and the rockefellers and the more jp morgan's and he's saying look there should be a limit and the rest should go to the american people should be redistributed this was not something that most americans agreed with um but during the depression a lot of people did feel that the wealthiest americans needed to pay greater amounts of taxes to help the country now for the radicals a lot of the programs from fdr were not far enough especially those who align themselves with socialist causes or communist causes now he's going to win re-election very easily and following his victory he is going to announce a second new deal and the second new deal begins in 1935 and it continues upon the ideas of relief recovery and reform this does increase tax rates for the most wealthy to please some of the more um liberal aspects of the democratic party it does create the uh works um the uh you know why i can't think of it oh the works progress can think of that um which funneled in 11 billion dollars to create new jobs particularly jobs outside of just manual labor because we've got teachers we've got artists we've got other people in the united states who have skills that could be put to use so for example artists are going to be hired to paint murals at different federal buildings they're going to be hired to create um you know statues that go outside of parks so we're putting people to work outside of just hey go plant some trees go build some roads now the wagner act that is passed in 1935 is going to protect the rights of union workers and it's going to allow for union activity to continue and even grow which is going to be very important in the 1940s to gaining rights for women and minorities during world war ii and building upon that townsend plan you are going to see the creation of the social security act which created the social security administration and that is who gives out pensions they give out unemployment benefits for the disabled and they give out funds to uh children who are orphaned so those are the only three types of people that can get social security benefits you have to be elderly over the age of 65 you have to be disabled and or you have to be a child so the age of 18 and you've had lost a parent um you've had a parent pass away those three groups of people qualify for social security benefits now in uh 1936 we see uh the new deal referendum on at stake when it comes to the national election so we have over 60 of the people giving a thumbs up to the new deal and because of that fdr wins in a landslide but now we're seeing party shift so we have a new deal coalition so this is the new democratic party it's still going to be southern whites who are going to align themselves um with the democratic party until the 1980s we will see progressives including republicans who are going to leave the party and instead join with the democrats who want more government action we are going to see white ethnic groups in the cities particularly those who are part of labor that is associated with union so people who are in the auto industry or the construction industry they are going to join the democratic coalition midwest farmers are going to join the democratic coalition they're very happy with the agricultural adjustment and african americans african americans will vote for the first time in a large block in the 1936 election because of their involvement in fdr's first term in office now why is this significant because traditionally the republican party had been aligned with progressivism it had been the party of teddy roosevelt it had been the party that had wanted to regulate business it had been the party that had helped try to um you know re-establish african-american rights during reconstruction african americans though are going to abandon the republican party in the 1930s because they do not feel that this party is helping their lives and this is when we start to see this shift in that the republican party which had been the party about progressivism and about individual rights will slowly shift and kind of lose its way in the 50s and early 60s and the democratic party will align itself with this sort of keynesian theory of the government should step in when things get rough and government involvement in people's lives is not bad and progressive ideas lead to regulation against bad business practices so this is when we fundamentally shift and we have the republican party being reborn as a more um party catering to business and the democratic party being more catering to the people through the government now in 1936 it's a national election and fdr is going to win overwhelmingly you can see he uh gets 523 electoral to eight the popular vote is 61 to 36 which again is the largest margin in history um he went by over 11 million votes and so he is going to take this as a mandate to continue what he's doing but the conservatives who are emerging merging both within his party and within the the republican party are feeling that the big government is getting too big and the supreme court which was conservative had already taken action against some of his programs including the national recovery act the agricultural adjustment act and the minimum wage law and so fdr thought of this plan what he called court packing which would have expanded the supreme court from nine members to 13 members and the idea was as members turn 70 you can add new members here's the thing in the constitution the the clause article three for who gets to be a supreme court member is very vague and it says um they can keep their job through good behavior which means that we really can't take the job away from them so they get a tenure for life and people have argued that this isn't necessarily fair because if they're on there forever then if public opinion is shifting there's no way to really get rid of um justices and there's a fear that if you have too many conservative justices it can't they can start passing conservative legislate not passing but they can make judgments in a towards um progressive legislation against progressive legislation and the same thing if there's too many um liberal justices they can make just judgments against uh conservative legislation and so there's this fear and he wanted to increase the number the constitution says nothing about the number of justices originally it was five and then at one point it was ten and then they took it or at one point it was seven and then it went to ten and then it went to nine i went from five to seven to nine to ten and then back down to nine so it throughout history what i'm trying to get at is that it has changed and so he thought well this is a way to kind of ensure the balance people did not like that idea and they said look you're trying to pack the court with a bunch of liberal justices and that's not right so it is going to be completely rejected now what's interesting is that this is something that has come up again in more recent years about people wanting to expand the uh the supreme court and again it's faced huge challenges saying oh no that can't happen it's never happened no that's not true we the numbers in the past but it the last time that anyone ever tried to change the numbers was um in 37 by roosevelt and it did not go well i mean people were very upset about this um the southerners are going to um come together with republicans and they're going to write this conservative manifesto in which they basically say the government's overstepping its its boundaries and it doesn't help that there's a recession again during the depression in 1937 to 38. so we kind of started getting back out and then things get bad again you can see some of the political cartoons you have the organization the supreme court revision eventually that's leading towards dictatorship step by step of fdr you've held things up long enough fdr is mad at the supreme court because they're acting like a buggy that's holding up all of the new legislation all right for african-americans and native americans the years of fdr's new deal programming were very beneficial and a lot of this was led by his wife eleanor roosevelt who is considered the conscience of the new deal and she pushed her husband to do more for poor americans for women for black americans he's going to advocate that he have a very diverse and eclectic group of people some were called the black cabinet members including robert weaver william hasty mary mcleod bethune mary anderson anderson she was the very first african american to give a um singing performance in 1939 at the lincoln memorial people who were part of the democratic party from the southern states are going to boycott they were very upset that she as a black woman was given the stage but eleanor roosevelt stood her ground and said absolutely not we are not going to let people um push us around and that america is for all americans now we'll see increased opportunity for african americans but of course there's going to be discrimination within the new deal programs nobody's going to step up and ensure that black americans are insured equal opportunities to join the ccc or the tva nope they are not going to allow that um for those who are hired they are going to be segregated or native americans will finally repeal the dos act remember the dozen way back in 1886 that's going to go away in 1934 tribal land will begin to be returned um there will start to be sort of a reckoning and an acknowledgment of native american culture native american rights native american spirituality and like i said this is only adding upon americans re-um glorifying the old west and kind of incorporating native americans into the amer into like white america story and it builds up that idea of old white's progress to native americans but again they're going to not listen to the other side which was you know all that native americans lost now for organized labor we are going to see a lot of activity we have the national labor relations board we have the creation of the cio the congress of industrial organizations which will be the largest union in the united states we are going to see the fair labor standards act of 1938 that really helps women and children it sets a 40-hour work week so if you wonder why we have 40 hours it's because of the 1938 legislation it officially bans child labor permanently so at this point on word there's no more child labor it had pretty much been outlawed in all the states by 1920 but now it's it's federal we set a minimum wage at 25 cents but by 1945 the end of world war ii that will have jumped to 40 cents we will see auto workers who are going to start using movements that will be used by later unions including sit down strikes we're going to see more of the collective bargaining for women we will see an entire group of feminism develop out of the 1930s and they were known as the labor feminists now these are feminists not advocating for strict equality these are working women say that you know women have more responsibility because of child rearing so they wanted equality plus they wanted all the rights of men plus acknowledgement for female considerations such as maternity leave and child care now what's interesting is that that's still something that's being debated but now feminists are saying look it should just be you know equal that men and women deserve maternity and paternity uh leave men and women deserve to have access to child care at their workplace and that that shouldn't be put on to the female it should be put on uh the family as a whole whether you're a man or a woman so the labor feminists um some future feminists don't necessarily acknowledge their contributions towards working women especially women of color um because they were asking not for just equality but equality plus during the 30s union membership will rise from 3 to 10 million this is sort of the beginning of the big union activity in the united states because people are wanting to band together to make sure that their um rights and their needs are being seen too so finally the new deal impact and legacy there are a few things that you need to know under fdr we have a huge expansion of the role of the federal government and that has only continued to grow with every single presidency the role of the federal government grows and grows and grows in american lives we see um support for unions for the first time in america's history and though businesses aren't necessarily going to be thrilled about it they are going to work with unions in a way that they hadn't worked before we see subsidies for farmers we see some advancement though they are very minor for minorities especially black and native americans we see support for this new economic theory called keynesian economics in which the government is going to pump it's called uh priming the pump so you can imagine one of those old pumps that you had to pump pump pump before the water would get out and that kind of was the analogy that the economy needs the government to funnel money in and that's pumping and eventually you know the water will come out the economy will recover and we'll get back on track now i will say keynesian theory of economics um has been for the most part i wouldn't say debunked but it's been challenged in its purest form and um it's not gonna it it's going to be used until the mid 1960s when it no longer works and then we end up with an even worse economic crisis in the early 70s but during the 30s 40s and 50s it absolutely going to be the basis that when things get tough the government steps in with some sort of programming or aid to help americans up we see the political realignment of the democrats and the republican party now will have two totally different ideologies that are going to rule the democrats and the republicans and those are only going to grow over the next 50 60 years and then finally we need to acknowledge that the new deal did significantly lower unemployment but it didn't end the depression the depression does not come to an end until world war ii um production begins so it takes world war ii to get us out of the depression the actions of fdr the actions of the new deal legislation eased it helped it provided some relief it did not however completely fix the problems so that's it for now i hope you enjoyed learning about fdr and the new deal if you have any questions as always feel free to email me