New Deal

The Routledge Dictionary of Politics, Third Edition

The New Deal was the name given to the peacetime policies of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, President of the USA from 1933–45. These policies Roosevelt hoped would end or ameliorate the Great Depression in the USA which followed the stock market crash of 1929 and which threw millions of Americans out of work and into poverty. The phrase was first used in his speech accepting the Democratic presidential nomination in 1932 and it consciously echoed the call by his relative Theodore Roosevelt (US president from 1901–09) for a ‘square deal’ for the American people. Since the New Deal other American presidents have tried to coin similarly resonant terms for their policies so that there has been President Truman’s Fair Deal, President Kennedy’s New Frontier and President Johnson’s Great Society.

The individual programmes contained in the New Deal were very much ad hoc responses to the problems of unemployment and social dislocation experienced in the USA of the 1930s. Only in retrospect did they seem to embrace any coherent political philosophy or underlying economic doctrine. The policies did, however, introduce a significant amount of government intervention to the economy and greatly expanded the role of the federal government generally.

As a result the New Deal proved to be extremely controversial and met with substantial opposition both from businessmen wedded to traditional ideas of laissez-faire and from the Supreme Court, which ruled many of the key items of Roosevelt’s legislative programme (for example, the National Industrial Recovery Act) unconstitutional. However, the policies were popular with the electorate as a whole and the New Deal is usually seen as a crucial period in American political history both because it precipitated a party realignment and because it greatly changed the nature of the US federal system (see federalism). As a result of the party realignment key groups in American society such as blacks, labour unions and the poor became linked to the Democratic Party, which used this coalition to retain the presidency from 1933–52 and to dominate congressional elections thereafter. Only with the rise of the new politics of the 1960s did the Democratic coalition seem in danger of losing its majority status, and even then the evidence of its break-up is ambiguous.

The New Deal is sometimes divided into two periods. In the first period, which lasted from 1933–35, the measures were generally exploratory and moderate. In the second period President Roosevelt, assured of electoral support after his re-election in 1936, felt able to act more radically and to confront the Supreme Court over its attempts to challenge his legislative programme.