Depression and War: The Myth Of Laissez-Faire in American History, Part IV

Though Roosevelt really had no specific outline for putting the country back on its feet, his approach to recovery and the overall role of government was counter to every prior American president. He would also change the face of the Democratic Party. Foner writes:

Under Roosevelt's guidance, the Democratic Party was transformed from a bastion of localism and states' rights into a broad coalition of farmers, industrial workers, the reform-minded urban middle class, liberal intellectuals, and, somewhat incongruously, the white-supremacist South, all committed to federal intervention to reconstruct the economy and provide Americans with social security.

Further, Foner explains, the Great Depression would "discredit the idea that social progress rested on the unrestrained pursuit of wealth" and recharging "the Progressive conviction that the national state must protect Americans from the vicissitudes of the marketplace." Roosevelt would declare that life in America "was no longer free; liberty no longer real; men could no longer follow the pursuit of happiness." FDR would take great measures to change this.³

With Congress essentially at his mercy, Roosevelt successfully rammed through an amalgam of new government programs and aid packages to combat the growing economic unrest. His first term included an array of new initiatives: The Emergency Banking and Relief Act (1933); the Home Owners Loan Act (1933); the Securities Exchange Act (1934); the first Agricultural Adjustment Act (1933); the National Industrial Recovery Act - all programs greatly expanding previous efforts of President Hoover. The Wagner Act of 1935 brought the government into legally supporting the workers' right to collective bargaining. And the most radical of all programs was the Tennessee Valley Authority (1933), the creation of government-owned networks of dams and hydroelectric plants in the Tennessee Valley, and denounced by its opponents as socialistic.⁴

Roosevelt's Second New Deal (as it was called to coincide with the end of his first and beginning of his second term) went even farther. The Social Security Act, passed in 1935, provided pensions to retired Americans and millions of dollars in direct to the unemployed and dependant children (AFDC). New loan and low-cost housing programs were initiated by the newly created United States Housing Authority in 1937. The federal government began requiring all food, drug, and cosmetic manufacturers to detail their ingredients and forbade the use of false advertising, also in 1937, through the Food, Drug, And Cosmetic Act. And perhaps most important to America's workers, the Fair Labor Standards Act was passed in 1938.

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