The New Deal: Crash Course US History #34

Episode 34 – The New Deal Hi, I'm John Green, this is the story of CrashCourse in America, and today we're going to get a little controversial as we discuss the FDR administration's response to the Great Depression: the New Deal. By the way, that's the National Recovery Administration, not the National Rifle Association or the No Rodents Allowed Club, of which I am a card-carrying member. Did the New Deal end the Depression (spoiler alert: mehhh)? More controversially, did it destroy American freedom or expand the definition of freedom? Was it a good thing in the end? Mr. Green, Mr. Green. Yes.

Ohh, Past Self, you are not qualified to make that statement. That? I was just trying to be provocative and controversial. Isn't that what generates views? You have the worst ideas about how to make people like you. But anyway, not EVERYTHING about the New Deal was controversial. This is CrashCourse, not TMZ. introduction The New Deal redefined the role of the federal government for most Americans and led to a realignment of Democratic Party voters, the so-called New Deal coalition. (Good job on the names, historians.) And regardless of whether you believe the New Deal meant more freedom for more people or was a plot by red-shirted communists, the New Deal is extremely important in American

history

.

Wait a second. I'm wearing a red shirt. What are you trying to say about me, Stan? As the owner of the means of production, I demand that the salary of the writer who made that joke be reduced. So, after his lackluster response to the Great Depression, Herbert Hoover had no chance of winning the 1932 presidential election, but he also ran as if he didn't really want the job. Furthermore, his opponent was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was the closest thing to a natural-born politician the United States had ever seen, except for Kid President. The phrase New Deal emerged from FDR's campaign, and when he was a candidate, FDR suggested that it was the responsibility of the government to guarantee every man the right to earn a comfortable living, but he did not say HOW he intended to achieve it.

For example, it would not come from government spending, since FDR called for a balanced budget and criticized Hoover for spending so much. Maybe it would magically happen if we legalized alcohol again and one thing FDR did ask for was an end to Prohibition, which was a campaign promise he kept. After three years of the Great Depression, many Americans were seriously in need of a drink and the government was looking for tax revenue, so no more Prohibition. FDR won 57% of the vote and Democrats took control of Congress for the first time in a decade. While FDR receives most of the credit, he did not actually create the New Deal or put it into effect.

It was approved by Congress. So WTFDR was the New Deal? Basically, it was a set of government programs aimed at solving depression and preventing future depressions. There are a couple of ways historians conceptualize it. One is to categorize programs by their function. This is where we see the New Deal described as the three Rs. Relief programs provided aid, usually money, to the poor in need. Recovery programs were aimed at fixing the economy in the short term and getting people back to work. And finally, the Run DMC program was designed to increase sales of Adidas sneakers. No, unfortunately, they were reform programs designed to regulate the economy in the future to prevent future depressions.

But some of the programs, like Social Security, don't fit easily into a single category, and there are some blurred lines between recovery and reform. For example, how do you classify the bank holiday and the Emergency Banking Act of March 1933, for example? FDR's order to temporarily close banks also created the FDIC, which insures individual deposits against future banking disasters. By the way, we still have all that, but was it recovery, because it helped the economy in the short term by creating more stable banks, or was it reform because federal deposit insurance prevents bank runs? A second way to think about the New Deal is to divide it into phases, which historians, with their creative naming, call the First and Second New Deals.

This more chronological approach indicates that there has to be some kind of cause and effect because otherwise why would there be a second New Deal if the first one worked so perfectly? The First New Deal comprises Roosevelt's programs before 1935, many of which were approved in the first hundred days of his presidency. It turns out that when it comes to getting our notoriously gridlocked Congress to pass legislation, nothing motivates more than crisis and fear. Stan, can I get the omen filter? We may see this again. So, in a brief break from its trademark filibuster, Congress passed laws establishing the Civilian Conservation Corps, which paid young people to build national parks, the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the Glass Stegall Act, which banned commercial banks. buying and selling stocks, and the National Industrial Recovery Act.

Which established the National Recovery Administration, which has lightning in its clutches. The NRA was designed to have government planners and business leaders work together to coordinate industry standards for production, pricing, and working conditions. But that whole idea of ​​public-private cooperation wasn't much immediate help to many of the hungry unemployed, so the Hundred Days reluctantly included the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, to give welfare payments to people who were desperate Alright. Let's go to the thought bubble. Roosevelt was concerned that people would become dependent on humanitarian aid and preferred programs that created temporary jobs. A section of the NIRA created the Public Works Administration, which allocated $33 billion to build things like the Triborough Bridge.

So much for a balanced budget. The Civil Works Administration, founded in November 1933, employed 4 million people building bridges, schools and airports. However, government intervention reached its highest point in the Tennessee Valley Authority. This program built a series of dams in the Tennessee River Valley to control flooding, prevent deforestation, and provide cheap electrical power to people in rural counties in seven southern states. But, despite all that sweet, sweet electricity, the TVA was really controversial because it put the government in direct competition with private companies. Aside from the NIRA, few laws were as controversial as the Agricultural Adjustment Act.

Basically, the AAA gave the government the power to try to raise agricultural prices by setting production quotas and paying farmers to plant less food. This seemed ridiculous to hungry Americans who witnessed 6 million pigs being slaughtered without being turned into bacon. Wait, Stan, 6 million pigs? But... bacon is good for me... Only the owner farmers saw the benefits of the AAA, so the majority of African American farmers who were tenants or sharecroppers continued to suffer. And the suffering was especially acute in Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas and Colorado, where drought created the Dust Bowl. All this direct government intervention in the economy was too much for the Supreme Court.

In 1936, the court struck down AAA in United States v. Butler. Previously, in the Schechter Poultry case (also known as the sick chicken case; ultimately an interestingly named Supreme Court case), the court invalidated the NIRA because its regulations “delegated legislative powers to the president and attempted to regulate local businesses who were not involved in interstate business.” commerce." Thanks, thought bubble. So, with the Supreme Court invalidating laws left and right, it seemed like the New Deal was about to fall apart. FDR responded by proposing a law that would allow him to appoint new Supreme Court justices if the sitting judges would reach the age of 70 and not retire.

Now, this was totally constitutional – you can move forward with the Constitution, if Nicolas Cage hasn't already stolen it – but it seemed like such a brazen power grab that the Roosevelt's plan to "pack the court" caused a huge backlash. Stop it all. I was just informed that Nicolas Cage stole the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution. I want to apologize to Nic Cage himself and also to everyone involved in the franchise. National Treasure, which is truly a national treasure. Anyway, in the end, the Supreme Court began to uphold the New Deal laws, ushering in a new era of Supreme Court jurisprudence in which government regulation of the economy was permitted. under a very broad reading of the commercial clause.

Because really not all commerce is interstate commerce? I mean, if I go to Jimmy John's, don't I get out of the state of hunger and into the state of satisfaction? Thus began the Second New Deal, which shifted the focus from recovery to economic security. Two laws stand out here for their far-reaching effects: the National Labor Relations Act, also called the Wagner Act, and the Social Security Act. The Wagner Act guaranteed workers the right to unionize and created a National Labor Relations Board to hear disputes over unfair labor practices. In 1934 alone there were more than 2,000 strikes, including one involving 400,000 textile workers.

Oh, is it time for the Mystery Document? Man, I wish there was a union to keep me from getting electrocuted. The rules here are simple. I assume the author of the Mysterious Document. And I usually make mistakes and surprise myself. “Refusing to allow people to be paid less than a living wage preserves our own market for us. There is no point in producing anything if the number of people who can buy even the cheapest products is gradually reduced. The only way to preserve our markets is with an adequate salary.” Well, I mean you don't usually make it that easy, but I guess it's Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Damn! Eleanor Roosevelt? Eleanor. Of

course

it was Leonor. Ah! The most important union during the 1930s was the Congress of Industrial Organizations, which set out to unionize entire industries such as steel manufacturing and automobile workers. In 1936, the United Auto Workers launched a new tactic called the sit-down strike. Workers at the Fisher Body Plant in Flint, Michigan simply stopped working, sat down, and occupied the plant. Ultimately, GM agreed to negotiate and the UAW won. Union membership rose to 9 million as “CIO unions helped stabilize a chaotic labor situation and offered their members a sense of dignity and freedom.” That quote, by the way, is from our old friend Eric Foner.

God, I love you, Foner. And unions played an important role in shaping the ideology of the second New Deal because they insisted that the economic crisis had been caused by underconsumption, and that the best way to combat the depression was to raise workers' wages so they could buy many things. It was thought that if people experienced less economic insecurity, they would spend more money, so there were widespread calls for public housing and universal health insurance. And that brings us to the crowning achievement of the Second New Deal, and/or the crowning achievement of its communist plot, the Social Security Act of 1935.

Social Security included unemployment insurance, aid to the disabled, aid to poor families with children. , and, of

course

, retirement benefits. It was, and is, funded through payroll taxes rather than general tax revenues, and although state and local governments retained much discretion over how benefits would be distributed, Social Security still represented a transformation in the relationship between government federal government and American citizens. . Before the New Deal, most Americans did not expect the government to help them in times of economic hardship. After the New Deal the question was no longer whether the government should intervene, but how it should do so.

For a time, Roosevelt's U.S. government embraced Keynesian economics, the idea that the government should spend money even if it meant running deficits to prop up demand. And this meant that the State was much more present in people's lives. I mean, for some people that meant help or social security checks. For others, it meant a job in the most successful government employment program: the Works Progress Administration. The WPA not only built post offices, it paid painters to beautify them with murals, paid actors and writers to put on plays, and ultimately employed more than 3 million Americans each year until its end in 1943.

Also, by the way, I paid a lot of photographers to take amazing photos, which we can show you for free because they are owned by the government, so I will continue talking about how great they are. Oh look at that one, it's a winner. Well. Equally transformative, though less visually stimulating, was the changethat the New Deal brought to American politics. The popularity of FDR and his programs brought together urban progressives who would have been Republicans two decades earlier, with unionized workers (often immigrants, left-wing intellectuals, urban Catholics, and Jews). FDR also gained support from middle-class homeowners and brought African Americans into the Democratic Party.

Who's left to be a Republican, Stan? I guess there weren't many, which is why FDR kept getting re-elected until, you know, he died. But interestingly, one of the largest and most politically important blocs of the New Deal Coalition was made up of white southerners, many of whom were extremely racist. The Democrats had dominated the South since the end of Reconstruction, you know, because the other party was the party of Lincoln. And all those Southern Democrats who had been in Congress for so long became important legislative leaders. In fact, without them, FDR would never have been able to pass the New Deal laws, but southerners expected whites to dominate the government and the economy and insisted on local administration of many New Deal programs.

And that ensured that the AAA and NLRA excluded sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and domestic servants, all of whom were disproportionately African American. So did the New Deal end the depression? No. I mean, in 1940 more than 15% of the American workforce was still unemployed. But on the other hand, when FDR took office in 1933, the unemployment rate was 25%. Perhaps the best evidence that government spending was working is that when FDR reduced government subsidies to farms and the WPA in 1937, unemployment immediately rose back to nearly 20%. And many economic historians believe it is inaccurate to say that government spending failed to end the Depression because in the end, at least according to many economists, what ended the Depression was a massive government spending program called World War II.

So is the New Deal really that important? Yes. Because, first of all, it changed the shape of the American Democratic Party. African Americans and union workers became reliable Democratic votes. And secondly, it changed our way of thinking. For example, liberalism in the 19th century meant limited government and a free market economy. Roosevelt used the term to refer to a large, active state that saw freedom as “greater security for the average man.” And that idea that freedom is more closely linked to security than to freedom from government intervention is still very important in the way we think about freedom today.

No matter where they fall on the contemporary political spectrum, politicians constantly talk about keeping Americans safe. Furthermore, our tendency to associate the New Deal with FDR himself points to what Arthur Schlessinger called the “imperial presidency.” That is, we tend to associate all government policy with the president. For example, after the presidencies of Jackson and Lincoln, Congress reasserted itself as the most important branch of government. But that didn't happen after Roosevelt. But above all, the New Deal changed the expectations Americans had of their government. Now, when things get bad, we expect the government to do something. Today we will give our final words to Eric Foner, who never did, the New Deal “turned government into an institution directly experienced in the daily lives of Americans and directly concerned with their well-being.” Thanks for watching.

I will see you next week. Crash Course was created with the help of all these kind people. And it is possible thanks to your support at subbable.com. Here at Crash Course we want to make educational videos for free, for everyone, forever. And that is possible thanks to your subscription at subbable.com. You can make a monthly subscription and the price is up to you. It can even be zero dollars although more is better. Thank you so much for watching Crash Course and as we say in my hometown, don't forget to be awesome. ________________ Foner. Give me the ebook version Liberty p. 870 Foner.

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