Political Pressure and Shaping the Second New Deal

1. Political Pressure and Shaping the Second New Deal Viet Pham

2. Shaping the Second New Deal • Populists and socialists were not the only one who pushed Roosevelt to focus on social justice. • Because of Eleanor Roosevelt’s influence, the administration now included activists committed to progressive causes. • For example, Frances Perkins – America’s first woman cabinet member, came from a social work background. Harold Ickes – Roosevelt’s close adviser. • A circle of women activists in government and the Democratic Party, attached to Eleanor Roosevelt, were strong advocates for social reform.

3. Shaping the Second New Deal • A circle of women activists in government and the Democratic Party, attached to Eleanor Roosevelt, were strong advocates for social reform. • African Americans also had an unprecedented voice in the White House. • 1936 - at least fifty African Americans held relatively important positions in New Deal agencies and cabinet-level departments. • Journalists called these officials the “black cabinet.”

4. Shaping the Second New Deal • Mary McLeod Bethune: a distinguished educator who served as Director of Negro Affairs for the National Youth Administration. • Eleanor Roosevelt also worked tirelessly to make social justice issues the focus of the New Deal agenda. • Influenced by these advisers, Roosevelt drew political lessons from the success of populist demagogues and leftist politicians.

5. Americans’ Opinions of the Second New Deal • Many Americans look to the New Deal for help and for social justice. • Roosevelt would lose their support if that help was not coming. • Other Americans – not the poorest, those with tenuous hold on the middle class – were afraid of the continued chaos and wanted stability and security. • Others with more wealth were frightened by the populist promises of people like Long and Coughlin. • They wanted the New Deal to preserve American capitalism. • With these lessons in mind, Roosevelt looked ahead to the presidential election of 1936.

6. “The Big Bill” • The “Second New Deal” first achievement -> the momentous law called “the Big Bill.” • The Emergency Relief Appropriation Act provided $4 billion in new deficit spending, primarily to establish massive work programs for the jobless. • Besides Emergency Relief Appropriation Act: • The Resettlement Administration: settled poor families and organized rural homestead communities and suburban greenbelt town for low income workers. • The Rural Electrification Administration brought electricity to isolated rural areas. • The National Youth Administration sponsored work-relief programs for young adults and part-time jobs for students.

7. Work Administration Program (WPA) • The largest and best-known program funded by the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act. • Later renamed Work Projects Administration. Ultimately employed more than 8.5 million people. • Its workers built: • 650,000 miles of highways and roads • 125,000 public buildings • Bridges, reservoirs, irrigation systems, sewage treatment plants, parks, play-grounds and swimming pool.

8. Work Administration Program (WPA) • Many WPA projects helped local communities. • WPA workers built or renovated schools and hospitals, operated nurseries, and taught 1.5 million adults to read and write. • WPA sponsored a multitude of cultural programs. • Federal Theater Project • Arts Project • Federal Music Project

9. WPA’s Federal Writers Project (FWP) • The most ambitious of the New Deal’s cultural programs. • Hired talented authors such as John Steinbeck and Richard Wright. • Created guidebooks for every state and territory. They wrote about the plain people of the United States. • More than 2000 elderly people freed from slavery by the Civil War told their stories to FWP writers. • Life stories of sharecroppers and textile workers were published as These Are Our Lives (1939).

10. WPA’s Federal Writers Project (FWP) • These writers project and other WPA arts projects were controversial • Many of the WPA artists, musicians, actors, and writers sympathized with the political struggles of workers and farmers. • Its goal: not to overthrow the government, but to recover a tradition of American radicalism through remembering, and celebrating artistically, the lives and labor of American’s plain folk.

11. Social Security Act • The programs and agencies created by the Big Bill were only a short-term “emergency” strategy. • Roosevelt’s long-term strategy was the second major piece of Second New Deal legislation, the Social Security Act. • The Social Security Act created a federal system to provide for the social welfare of American citizens. • Key provision: • A federal pension system in which eligible workers paid mandatory Social Security taxes on their wages. • Their employers contributed an equivalent amount ->These workers then received federal retirement benefits.

12. Social Security Act • Created several welfare program: • A cooperative federal-state system of unemployment compensation. • Aid to Dependent Children (later renamed Aid to Families with Dependent Children, AFDIC) for needy children in families without fathers present. -> Saved tens of millions of Americans, especially the elderly, from lives of poverty and despair over the course of the twentieth century.

13. Social Security Act • Compared with the national systems of social security in most western European nations, The U.S Social Security system was fairly conservative. • The government did not pay for old-age benefits; workers and their bosses did. • The more workers earned, the less they were taxed proportionally -> The tax was regressive • The law did not cover agricultural labor, domestic service and casual labor not in the course of the employer’s trade or business (janitorial work at a hospital, farm laborers, domestic servants, service jobs in restaurant, hospital).-> A very high number of people of color received no benefits.

14. Social Security Act • The act also excluded public sector employees (teachers, nurses, librarians, and social workers). Most of them were women. • Despite the limitations, the Social Security Act was a highly significant development. • The federal government took responsibility for economic security of the aged, the temporarily jobless, dependent children, and people with disabilities.

15. Roosevelt’s Populist Strategies • The election of 1936 approached -> FDR began to use the populist language of his critics. • FDR: • Made harsh attacks on big business • Denounced the “unjust concentration of wealth and power” • Believed big business should be cut down to size through antitrust suits and heavy taxes. • He also supported the Wealth Tax Act.

16. Roosevelt’s Populist Strategies • The Wealth Tax Act: • helped achieve a slight redistribution of income by raising the income taxes of the wealthy. • imposed a new tax on business profits and increased taxes on inheritance, large gifts, and profits from sale of property. • November 1936 – Roosevelt won the presidency by a huge landslide over the Republican nominee, Governor Alf Landon of Kansas (27.8 million votes to 16.7 million).

17. Roosevelt’s Populist Strategies • The Democrats also won huge majorities in the House and Senate. • “New Deal coalition” • Roosevelt and the Democrats had created a powerful “New Deal coalition.” • Consisted of the urban masses, organized labor, the eleven states of the Confederacy, and northern blacks. -> The Democratic Party dominated the two-party system and would occupy the White House for the most of the next thirty years.

18. Works Cited Norton, Mary, Katzman, David, Blight, David, Chudacoff, Howard, Logewall, Fredrik, Bailey, Beth, Paterson, Thomas, and Tuttle, William. A People And A Nation, seventh edition. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005. Print.

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