Roosevelt, Franklin Delano

V

Roosevelt as President

Roosevelt's promise of “a new deal for the American people” foreshadowed a revolutionary extension of federal power into the nation's everyday life.

A

The Effort to Restore Prosperity

His first three months in office, known as the Hundred Days, were marked by innovative legislation originating in the executive branch. In a period of massive unemployment (25 per cent of the work force), a collapsed stock market, thousands of bank closings, and agricultural prices that had fallen below the cost of production, Congress, at Roosevelt's request, passed a series of emergency measures calculated to provide liquidity for banking institutions and relief for the individual and to prevent business bankruptcy. Further, abandonment of the gold standard in 1933 had the effect of devaluing the dollar in international markets.

In addition to relief measures, such as creation of the Works Progress Administration under the direction of Harry Hopkins, the New Deal aimed at long-range economic solutions to problems stemming from World War I. The farm depression, a result of overproduction, had begun in 1921 and sent millions to the cities during the 1920s; Roosevelt regarded it as the root cause of the economic collapse of the late 1920s. He responded with a broad agricultural programme framed by the Agricultural Adjustment Acts of 1933 and 1938. This legislation introduced production controls for certain basic commodities in order to create a balance between supply and demand; it promoted reforestation and conservation; and it provided subsidy payments for curtailed planting. The programme of the Tennessee Valley Authority, created in 1933, included construction of dams to produce hydroelectric power, water management, improvement of farming techniques and river navigation, and construction of hospitals and schools. New industries attracted by low-cost electricity and labour diversified the southern economy and benefited an impoverished area.

B

The New Deal Coalition

Although Roosevelt's ties to the city and trade unions were never strong, many New Deal measures alienated the business community; at the same time, they attracted blacks and other urban minorities and the labour movement into the Democratic party, thus forming the so-called New Deal Coalition, the basis of Democratic party support for the following 50 years. The National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA, 1933) began as an industrial stabilization scheme designed to eliminate cut-throat practices and maintain prices. Section 7a of the law, which promoted labour unionization, alienated conservative businesspeople, however. Strict securities-issue and stock exchange regulation, enforced by the new Securities and Exchange Commission, intensified business opposition. Benefits provided by the Social Security Act, by unemployment insurance legislation, and by the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 attracted workers' support. In 1935 and 1936 the then-conservative-dominated US Supreme Court struck at key New Deal measures by declaring provisions of both the NIRA and the Agricultural Adjustment Act unconstitutional.

C

Second Term

After winning a resounding victory over Alfred M. Landon in the 1936 presidential election, Roosevelt tried to neutralize the Court by proposing the appointment of new justices, but Congress rejected this “court-packing” plan in 1937. In the ensuing years a congressional coalition of conservative Republicans and Democrats, fearful of growing federal spending in the 1937-1938 depression and anxious to curtail expansion of federal power into areas traditionally reserved to the states, checked the New Deal's momentum. The imminence of war in Europe, followed by US involvement, drew attention away from the president's domestic defeats and made possible his victories over Republican candidates Wendell L. Willkie in 1940 and Thomas E. Dewey in 1944.

D

Pre-war Foreign Policy

Roosevelt was a pragmatist in his diplomatic views in the inter-war period. Although he had been a supporter of Woodrow Wilson, he abandoned Wilson's internationalist ideas when the country turned to isolationism in the 1920s. Then, in the late 1930s, spurred by Adolf Hitler's aggression in Europe and Japanese expansionism in the Pacific, Roosevelt moved the United States back towards engagement in world affairs. He was restrained, however, by the persistence of strong isolationist sentiment among the voters and by congressional passage of a series of neutrality laws intended to prevent American involvement in a second world war. Roosevelt won the contest when, alarmed by Germany's defeat of France in 1940, Congress passed his lend-lease legislation to help Great Britain's continued resistance to the Germans. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, brought the United States into the war on the side of Britain and the Soviet Union.