# data[].attributes.body
The main reason why the Great Depression started is there was a crash in the stock market in October 1929. This led to people panicking, investors being wiped out, and people losing their jobs.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Contents

1. What Caused the Great Depression?

2. Stock Market Crash of 1929

3. Bank Runs and the Hoover Administration

4. Roosevelt Elected

5. The New Deal: A Road to Recovery

6. African Americans in the Great Depression

7. Women in the Great Depression

8. Great Depression Ends and World War II Begins

9. PHOTO GALLERIES

The Great Depression was the worst economic downturn in the history of the industrialized world, lasting from 1929 to 1939. It began after the stock market crash of October 1929, which sent Wall Street into a panic and wiped out millions of investors. Over the next several years, consumer spending and investment dropped, causing steep declines in industrial output and employment as failing companies laid off workers. By 1933, when the Great Depression reached its lowest point, some 15 million Americans were unemployed and nearly half the country's banks had failed.

What Caused the Great Depression?

Throughout the 1920s, the U.S. economy expanded rapidly, and the nation's total wealth more than doubled between 1920 and 1929, a period dubbed " the Roaring Twenties."

The stock market, centered at the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street in New York City, was the scene of reckless speculation, where everyone from millionaire tycoons to cooks and janitors poured their savings into stocks. As a result, the stock market underwent rapid expansion, reaching its peak in August 1929.

By then, production had already declined and unemployment had risen, leaving stock prices much higher than their actual value. Additionally, wages at that time were low, consumer debt was proliferating, the agricultural sector of the economy was struggling due to drought and falling food prices and banks had an excess of large loans that could not be liquidated.

The American economy entered a mild recession during the summer of 1929, as consumer spending slowed and unsold goods began to pile up, which in turn slowed factory production. Nonetheless, stock prices continued to rise, and by the fall of that year had reached stratospheric levels that could not be justified by expected future earnings.

Stock Market Crash of 1929

On October 24, 1929, as nervous investors began selling overpriced shares en masse, the stock market crash that some had feared happened at last. A record 12.9 million shares were traded that day, known as "Black Thursday."

Five days later, on October 29 or "Black Tuesday," some 16 million shares were traded after another wave of panic swept Wall Street. Millions of shares ended up worthless, and those investors who had bought stocks "on margin" (with borrowed money) were wiped out completely.

As consumer confidence vanished in the wake of the stock market crash, the downturn in spending and investment led factories and other businesses to slow down production and begin firing their workers. For those who were lucky enough to remain employed, wages fell and buying power decreased.

Many Americans forced to buy on credit fell into debt, and the number of foreclosures and repossessions climbed steadily. The global adherence to the gold standard, which joined countries around the world in a fixed currency exchange, helped spread economic woes from the United States throughout the world, especially Europe.

Bank Runs and the Hoover Administration

Despite assurances from President Herbert Hoover and other leaders that the crisis would run its course, matters continued to get worse over the next three years. By 1930, 4 million Americans looking for work could not find it; that number had risen to 6 million in 1931.

Meanwhile, the country's industrial production had dropped by half. Bread lines, soup kitchens and rising numbers of homeless people became more and more common in America's towns and cities. Farmers couldn't afford to harvest their crops, and were forced to leave them rotting in the fields while people elsewhere starved. In 1930, severe droughts in the Southern Plains brought high winds and dust from Texas to Nebraska, killing people, livestock and crops. The " Dust Bowl " inspired a mass migration of people from farmland to cities in search of work.

In the fall of 1930, the first of four waves of banking panics began, as large numbers of investors lost confidence in the solvency of their banks and demanded deposits in cash, forcing banks to liquidate loans in order to supplement their insufficient cash reserves on hand.

Bank runs swept the United States again in the spring and fall of 1931 and the fall of 1932, and by early 1933 thousands of banks had closed their doors.

In the face of this dire situation, Hoover's administration tried supporting failing banks and other institutions with government loans; the idea was that the banks in turn would loan to businesses, which would be able to hire back their employees.

Roosevelt Elected

Hoover, a Republican who had formerly served as U.S. secretary of commerce, believed that government should not directly intervene in the economy, and that it did not have the responsibility to create jobs or provide economic relief for its citizens.

In 1932, however, with the country mired in the depths of the Great Depression and some 15 million people (more than 20 percent of the U.S. population at the time) unemployed, Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt won an overwhelming victory in the presidential election.

By Inauguration Day (March 4, 1933), every U.S. state had ordered all remaining banks to close at the end of the fourth wave of banking panics, and the U.S. Treasury didn't have enough cash to pay all government workers. Nonetheless, FDR (as he was known) projected a calm energy and optimism, famously declaring "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

Roosevelt took immediate action to address the country's economic woes, first announcing a four-day "bank holiday" during which all banks would close so that Congress could pass reform legislation and reopen those banks determined to be sound. He also began addressing the public directly over the radio in a series of talks, and these so-called " fireside chats " went a long way towards restoring public confidence.

During Roosevelt's first 100 days in office, his administration passed legislation that aimed to stabilize industrial and agricultural production, create jobs and stimulate recovery.

In addition, Roosevelt sought to reform the financial system, creating the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation ( FDIC) to protect depositors' accounts and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to regulate the stock market and prevent abuses of the kind that led to the 1929 crash.

The New Deal: A Road to Recovery

Among the programs and institutions of the New Deal that aided in recovery from the Great Depression were the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), which built dams and hydroelectric projects to control flooding and provide electric power to the impoverished Tennessee Valley region, and the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a permanent jobs program that employed 8.5 million people from 1935 to 1943.

When the Great Depression began, the United States was the only industrialized country in the world without some form of unemployment insurance or social security. In 1935, Congress passed the Social Security Act, which for the first time provided Americans with unemployment, disability and pensions for old age.

After showing early signs of recovery beginning in the spring of 1933, the economy continued to improve throughout the next three years, during which real GDP (adjusted for inflation) grew at an average rate of 9 percent per year.

A sharp recession hit in 1937, caused in part by the Federal Reserve's decision to increase its requirements for money in reserve. Though the economy began improving again in 1938, this second severe contraction reversed many of the gains in production and employment and prolonged the effects of the Great Depression through the end of the decade.

Depression-era hardships had fueled the rise of extremist political movements in various European countries, most notably that of Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime in Germany. German aggression led war to break out in Europe in 1939, and the WPA turned its attention to strengthening the military infrastructure of the United States, even as the country maintained its neutrality.

African Americans in the Great Depression

One-fifth of all Americans receiving federal relief during the Great Depression were black, most in the rural South. But farm and domestic work, two major sectors in which blacks were employed, were not included in the 1935 Social Security Act, meaning there was no safety net in times of uncertainty. Rather than fire domestic help, private employers could simply pay them less without legal repercussions. And those relief programs for which blacks were eligible on paper were rife with discrimination in practice, since all relief programs were administered locally.

Despite these obstacles, Roosevelt's "Black Cabinet," led by Mary McLeod Bethune, ensured nearly every New Deal agency had a black advisor. The number of African-Americans working in government tripled.

Women in the Great Depression

There was one group of Americans who actually gained jobs during the Great Depression: Women. From 1930 to 1940, the number of employed women in the United States rose 24 percent from 10.5 million to 13 million Though they'd been steadily entering the workforce for decades, the financial pressures of the Great Depression drove women to seek employment in ever greater numbers as male breadwinners lost their jobs. The 22 percent decline in marriage rates between 1929 and 1939 also created an increase in single women in search of employment.

Women during the Great Depression had a strong advocate in First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who lobbied her husband for more women in office-like Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, the first woman to ever hold a cabinet position.

Jobs available to women paid less, but were more stable during the banking crisis: nursing, teaching and domestic work. They were supplanted by an increase in secretarial roles in FDR's rapidly-expanding government. But there was a catch: over 25 percent of the National Recovery Administration's wage codes set lower wages for women, and jobs created under the WPA confined women to fields like sewing and nursing that paid less than roles reserved for men.

Married women faced an additional hurdle: By 1940, 26 states had placed restrictions known as marriage bars on their employment, as working wives were perceived as taking away jobs from able-bodied men - even if, in practice, they were occupying jobs men would not want and doing them for far less pay.

Great Depression Ends and World War II Begins

With Roosevelt's decision to support Britain and France in the struggle against Germany and the other Axis Powers, defense manufacturing geared up, producing more and more private sector jobs.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 led to America's entry into World War II, and the nation's factories went back in full production mode.

This expanding industrial production, as well as widespread conscription beginning in 1942, reduced the unemployment rate to below its pre-Depression level. The Great Depression had ended at last, and the United States turned its attention to the global conflict of World War II.

Access hundreds of hours of historical video, commercial free, with HISTORY Vault. Start your free trial today.
PHOTO GALLERIES

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
What Caused the Great Depression? Stock Market Crash of 1929 Bank Runs and the Hoover Administration Roosevelt Elected The New Deal: A Road to Recovery African Americans in the Great Depression Women in the Great Depression Great Depression Ends and World War II Begins PHOTO GALLERIES The Great Depression was the worst economic downturn in the history of the industrialized world, lasting from 1929 to 1939.

# data[].attributes.headline
What were "Hoovervilles" and what was life for people living in them?

# data[].attributes.subject
What were "Hoovervilles" and what was life for people living in them?

# data[].attributes.body
Hoovervilles were not nice places. They were villages of salvaged shacks that didn't provide very good shelter from the cold and rain. Many people in Hoovervilles did not have access to clean water.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Kids learn about the Hoovervilles of the Great Depression including how they got their name, what they were, who lived there, how big were they, hobos, soup kitchens, and facts. Educational article for students, schools, and teachers.

# data[].attributes.headline
What were 3 expectations of southern women in the 1930's? 

# data[].attributes.subject
What were 3 expectations of southern women in the 1930's? 

# data[].attributes.body
Women were not aloud to work but when they did they had to work 10 times harder then men. Married women had one job and that was to take care of her family. You did not want to be a single women in the south back in the day people saw it as a bad sign.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Women in the 1930s & 1940s: HIST18.2: History of Women in the United States Since 1877: Section 0972: Donegan A

# data[].attributes.headline
How did Franklin Delano Roosevelt expand the rights of freedom of the American people during is presidency?

# data[].attributes.subject
How did Franklin Delano Roosevelt expand the rights of freedom of the American people during is presidency?

# data[].attributes.body
Roosevelt insisted people shared the entitlement of freedom of speech, expression, to worship god in his own way and more.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
On January 6, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt addresses Congress in an effort to move the nation away from a foreign policy of neutrality. The president had watched with increasing anxiety as European nations struggled and fell to Hitler's fascist regime and was intent on rallying public support for the United States to take a stronger interventionist role. In his address to the 77th Congress, Roosevelt stated that the need of the moment is that our actions and our policy should be devoted primarily-almost exclusively-to meeting the foreign peril. For all our domestic problems are now a part of the great emergency.

Roosevelt insisted that people in all nations of the world shared Americans' entitlement to four freedoms: the freedom of speech and expression, the freedom to worship God in his own way, freedom from want and freedom from fear. After Roosevelt's death and the end of World War II, his widow Eleanor often referred to the four freedoms when advocating for passage of the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Mrs. Roosevelt participated in the drafting of that declaration, which was adopted by the United Nations in 1948.
READ MORE: How Eleanor Roosevelt Pushed for a Universal Declaration of Human Rights

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Franklin D. Roosevelt speaks of Four Freedoms

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
On January 6, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt addresses Congress in an effort to move the nation away from a foreign policy of neutrality. The president had watched with increasing anxiety as European nations struggled and fell to Hitler's fascist regime and was intent on rallying public support for the United States to take a stronger interventionist role.

# data[].attributes.headline
Explain  the quote " the only thing we have to fear is fear itself".

# data[].attributes.subject
Explain  the quote " the only thing we have to fear is fear itself".

# data[].attributes.body
This quote is stated by Franklin D. Roosevelt and he said this to keep the best possible mindset during the great depression. Roosevelt wanted to prevent bad outcomes from materializing during a horrid time where money was a struggle for all.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Who Said, ‘We Have Nothing to Fear Except Fear Itself’?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle examines the origins of a famous phrase ‘We have nothing to fear except fear itself.’ Those words – and the sentiment they convey…

# data[].attributes.headline
How did the Great Depression impact daily life in the 1930s

# data[].attributes.subject
How did the Great Depression impact daily life in the 1930s

# data[].attributes.body
The Great Depression impacted daily life by jobs being lost and people becoming homeless. They had a lack of food so most either starved or begged for food. They tried to send African Americans and Latinos to Mexico because they didn´t have enough food for everyone.

# data[].attributes.body
Harper Lee paid her taxes by working as an airplane ticket clerk. She was working a day job while writing her first novel. She almost became a lawyer.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Harper Lee became a literary icon with the success of her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel To Kill A Mockingbird. But she chose to lead a secluded life out of the spotlight until her death in 2016 at age 89. Here are a few facts you might not know about the enigmatic author.

1. Her full name was Nelle Harper Lee.

Nelle is her grandmother's name, Ellen, spelled backward. Lee dropped her given name when she published To Kill a Mockingbird to keep people from mispronouncing it "Nellie."

2. Harper Lee almost became a lawyer.

Lee intended to follow in the footsteps of her beloved father, Amasa Coleman Lee, who first trained as a teacher, then passed the bar exam and practiced law. She attended law school at the University of Alabama, but quit six months before she was scheduled to graduate, with a plan to move to New York and pursue writing.

3. Harper Lee paid the bills by working as an airline ticket clerk.

Lee got a job as a ticket agent for Eastern Air Lines and British Overseas Airways, which both had offices at New York City's Idlewild Airport ( renamed John F. Kennedy International Airport in 1963). She worked on the draft of To Kill a Mockingbird and other projects in her spare time. But soon, her good friends gave her the ultimate Christmas present: an envelope with one year's wages, so she could take the time off to write.

4. Harper Lee had a long friendship with Truman Capote.

Lee and Truman Capote met as children when they lived next door to each other in Alabama. She modeled the neighborhood boy Dill in To Kill a Mockingbird on Capote, while he relied on her for research assistance in Kansas while writing In Cold Blood. In 1960, Lee wrote her own account related to the Clutter murders, which form the centerpiece of Capote's book; She profiled Alvin Dewey, the Kansas Bureau of Investigation agent who investigated the case, for the publication . But her story was unbylined-perhaps to avoid stepping on her friend's intellectual turf.

5. Harper Lee wanted Spencer Tracy to play Atticus Finch.

It's hard to imagine anyone but Gregory Peck playing Atticus Finch in the 1962 film adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird, but Lee herself preferred Spencer Tracy, whom she felt had the look of an all-American, upstanding citizen. She even wrote a note to Tracy encouraging him to take the part, but he responded that he was too busy. Peck snagged the lead role and went on to win an Oscar for his performance.

6. Harper Lee published her second book when she was 89 years old.

It was long thought that To Kill a Mockingbird would be Lee's first and last novel. But in 2015, HarperCollins published her rediscovered manuscript Go Set a Watchman as something of a sequel to Mockingbird, an instant and controversial bestseller that caused a sensation in the publishing industry. But it actually a first draft of Mockingbird, which her editors had encouraged her to rework.

7. To Kill a Mockingbird is one of the best-selling books of all time.

Lee's influential novel has sold more than 40 million copies, on par with blockbusters like V.C. Andrews's Flowers in the Attic and Carl Sagan's Cosmos.

8. Harper Lee was really into sports.

While living in New York City, she became an avid Mets fan. Even after returning to Alabama, she often flew to New York to attend games. Lee also said she did her best thinking while playing golf and called herself "a rabid football fan," especially of the University of Alabama Crimson Tide.
Do you love reading? Are you eager to know incredibly interesting facts about novelists and their works? Then pick up our new book, The Curious Reader: A Literary Miscellany of Novels and Novelists, out May 25!
Subscribe to our Newsletter!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Harper Lee became a literary icon with the success of her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel To Kill A Mockingbird . But she chose to lead a secluded life out of the spotlight until her death in 2016 at age 89. Here are a few facts you might not know about the enigmatic author.

# data[].attributes.headline
What brought the end to the great depression?

# data[].attributes.subject
What brought the end to the great depression?

# data[].attributes.body
Franklin D Roosevelt was elected as president and promised to make government programs to end the great depression. He created agencies to provide jobs and opportunity, along with with keeping the economy safe and protected from another depression. Some people argue that world war II ended the depression but without the help of Franklin Roosevelt and the 42 agencies he created the depression would not have ended.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Great Depression was a worldwide economic depression that lasted 10 years. It began on "Black Thursday," Oct. 24, 1929. Over the next four days, stock prices fell 22% in the stock market crash of 1929. That crash cost investors $30 billion, the equivalent of $396 billion today. That terrified the public because the crash cost more than World War I. The Depression had begun earlier in August when the economy contracted.

Key Takeaways

The Great Depression was a worldwide economic depression that lasted 10 years.

The depression was caused by the stock market crash of 1929 and the Fed's reluctance to increase the money supply

GDP during the Great Depression fell by half, limiting economic movement.

A combination of the New Deal and World War II lifted the U.S. out of the Depression.

Unemployment Reached 25%

The Great Depression affected all aspects of society. By its height in 1933, unemployment had risen from 3% to 25% of the nation's workforce. Wages for those who still had jobs fell. U.S. gross domestic product was cut in half, from $103 billion to $55 billion, due partly to deflation. The Consumer Price Index fell 27% between November 1929 to March 1933, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Panicked government leaders passed the Smoot-Hawley tariff in 1930 to protect domestic industries and jobs, but it actually worsened the issue. World trade plummeted 66% as measured in U.S. dollars between 1929 and 1934.

The Depression's pain was felt worldwide, leading to World War II. Germans were already burdened with financial reparations from World War I. That caused hyperinflation. As a result, the people became desperate enough to elect Adolf Hitler's Nazi party to a majority in 1933.

Life During The Depression

The Depression caused many farmers to lose their farms. At the same time, years of over-cultivation and drought created the "Dust Bowl" in the Midwest, destroying agricultural production in a previously fertile region. Thousands of these farmers and other unemployed workers migrated to California in search of work.

Many ended up living as homeless "hobos." Others moved to shantytowns called "Hoovervilles," named after then-President Herbert Hoover.

What Caused It

According to Ben Bernanke, a past chairman of the Federal Reserve, the central bank helped create the Depression. It used tight monetary policies when it should have done the opposite. According to Bernanke, these were the Fed's five critical mistakes:

1. The Fed began raising the fed funds rate in the spring of 1928. It kept increasing it through a recession that started in August 1929.

2. When the stock market crashed, investors turned to the currency markets. At that time, the gold standard supported the value of the dollars held by the U.S. government. Speculators began trading in their dollars for gold in September 1931. That created a run on the dollar.

3. The Fed raised interest rates again to preserve the dollar's value. That further restricted the availability of money for businesses. More bankruptcies followed.

4. The Fed did not increase the supply of money to combat deflation.

5. Investors withdrew all their deposits from banks. The failure of the banks created more panic. The Fed ignored the banks' plight. This situation destroyed any of consumers' remaining confidence in financial institutions. Most people withdrew their cash and put it under their mattresses. That further decreased the money supply.

The Fed did not put enough money in circulation to get the economy going again. Instead, the Fed allowed the total supply of U.S. dollars to fall by a third. Later research has supported parts of Bernanke's assessment.

What Ended the Great Depression

In 1932, the country elected Franklin D. Roosevelt as president. He promised to create federal government programs to end the Great Depression. Within 100 days, he signed the New Deal into law, creating 42 new agencies throughout its lifetime. They were designed to create jobs, allow unionization, and provide unemployment insurance. Many of these programs still exist. They help safeguard the economy and prevent another depression.

New Deal programs include Social Security, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

Many argue that World War II, not the New Deal, ended the Depression. Still, others contend that if FDR had spent as much on the New Deal as he did during the War, it would have ended the Depression. In the nine years between the launch of the New Deal and the attack on Pearl Harbor, FDR increased the debt by $3 billion. In 1942, defense spending added $23 billion to the debt. In 1943, it added another $64 billion.

Reasons a Great Depression Could Not Happen Again

While anything is possible, it's unlikely to happen again. Central banks around the world, including the Federal Reserve, have learned from the past. There are better safeguards in place to protect against catastrophe, and developments in monetary policy help manage the economy. The Great Recession, for instance, had a significantly smaller impact.

But monetary policy can't offset fiscal policy. Some argue that the sizes of the U.S. national debt and the current account deficit could trigger an economic crisis. Experts also predict that climate change could cause profound losses.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
What Happened During the Great Depression?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Great Depression was a worldwide economic depression that lasted 10 years. It began on "Black Thursday," Oct. 24, 1929. Over the next four days, stock prices fell 22% in the stock market crash of 1929. That crash cost investors $30 billion, the equivalent of $396 billion today.

# data[].attributes.body
The Scottsboro Trials was in 1931. It was nine African-American teenagers, ages 12-19, accused of raping two white women.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Scottsboro Trials were among the most infamous episodes of legal injustice in the Jim Crow South. The events that culminated in the trials began in the early spring of 1931, when nine young black men were falsely accused of raping two white women on a train. The cases were tried and appealed in Alabama and twice argued before the U.S. Supreme Court. Despite evidence that exonerated the accused and even a retraction by one of the accusers, the state pursued the case and all-white juries delivered guilty verdicts that initially carried the death penalty. Several of the accused were sentenced to prison terms and all endured long stays in prison as the case made its way through the legal system. The case later served as one of the inspirations for Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel To Kill a Mockingbird.

Scottsboro Trial Defendants

The saga began on March 25, 1931, when a fight broke out between groups of young black and white passengers riding a freight train through Jackson County. The white boys were forced from the train and wired ahead to the next stop on the line to have the black youths apprehended. When the train stopped just outside the town of Paint Rock, local police and a mob apprehended nine African Americans ranging in age from 13 to 20. Only four of the young men knew each other and were traveling together. The police also questioned Victoria Price and Ruby Bates, two white women who also were hitching a ride on the train looking for work. In the hope of avoiding vagrancy and morality charges, the women falsely accused the nine young black men-Olen Montgomery, Clarence Norris, Haywood Patterson, Ozzie Powell, Willie Roberson, Charlie Weems, Eugene Williams, and brothers Andy and Roy Wright-of rape. The accused were arrested and transported to Scottsboro, the Jackson County seat, to await trial.

Over the next seven years, as the case made its way through the state and federal judicial system, "Scottsboro" became an international cause célèbre that dramatically encapsulated the American South's troubled post- Reconstruction history of legal and extralegal racial violence, the social and political upheaval of the - Great Depression, and the lingering cultural divide between North and South. In the process, the Scottsboro case in many ways inaugurated the modern civil rights movement.

The first set of trials took place in four groups over the course of just four days in early April 1931. Thousands of angry whites gathered outside the courthouse to monitor the proceedings and at the request of the local sheriff, Gov. Benjamin Meek Miller sent the Alabama National Guard to Scottsboro to prevent a lynching. Before an all-white jury and a hostile judge, the defendants' court-appointed attorney put up a meager defense, repeatedly declining to cross-examine witnesses and failing to scrutinize the prosecution's key pieces of evidence. Each of the four juries returned guilty verdicts in a matter of hours. Eight defendants were sentenced to death, but the jury split over whether to sentence the youngest defendant, 13-year-old Roy Wright, to death or life imprisonment, and a mistrial was declared. Wright remained in prison, awaiting the verdicts in the trials of his co-defendants, until 1937. The judge set the executions for July 10, the earliest possible date the law would allow.

The case might have ended there were it not for the intervention of the International Labor Defense (ILD), a radical legal-action organization sponsored by the Communist Party USA. The ILD recognized the case's potential to become a lightning rod for a national struggle against racism, as well as a powerful propaganda vehicle and recruitment tool for the Communist

Ruby Bates

Party. ILD lawyers quickly won the trust of the defendants and their parents, as well as a stay of execution until the case could be reviewed by the Alabama Supreme Court. This action was aided by a flood of letters from non-Communists, black and white, from across the country who learned of the case through ILD promotional efforts. The participation of the Communist-affiliated group significantly intensified the already charged atmosphere in Alabama and around the nation. Meanwhile, the nation's leading African American civil rights organization, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ( NAACP), reacted slowly to the case because of initial doubts about the defendants' innocence. Bitter rivals, the ILD and NAACP would battle for control of both the legal defense and the hearts and minds of African Americans for the duration of the case. For their part, Alabama officials defended the verdicts and wanted no interference by either outside organization in what they considered a local affair.

The ILD pursued the case through the conventional legal channels of state and federal courts of appeal. However, it did not believe that justice could be secured through litigation alone. As a result, the group mounted a relentless media campaign, sponsoring rallies, parades, and nationwide speaking tours designed to raise money for the defense and to expose the gross inequities in the Alabama justice system to the court of public opinion. ILD publicity efforts transformed the case from a local matter into an international spectacle. "Scottsboro" united radicals, liberals, and moderates, as well as blacks and whites, in a common-if often contentious-alliance and inspired a host of songs, dramas, artwork, and poetry from left-wing artists around the world.

In the courtroom, the ILD appealed the case before the Alabama Supreme Court, which upheld the convictions. The group then turned to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in November 1932 overrode the Alabama decisions and granted new trials to all of the defendants. In the process, Powell v. Alabama, as the Supreme Court's ruling was labeled, established a key precedent for enforcing African Americans' right to adequate counsel under the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Scottsboro Trial

At the state and circuit court levels however, the legal campaign to free the Scottsboro defendants met with repeated frustration and disappointment despite overwhelming evidence of the defendants' innocence. The most persuasive evidence came from one of the accusers herself, Ruby Bates. In the break between the first set of trials and lead defendant Haywood Patterson's second trial, which began in March 1933, Bates recanted her story and agreed to testify for the defense, admitting that Price concocted the story to avoid charges for vagrancy and crossing state lines for "immoral purposes" in violation of the Mann Act. She later marched in protests and spoke at rallies for the accused. In addition, Samuel Liebowitz, the ILD's non-Communist lead attorney, found numerous inconsistencies in Price's testimony and highlighted the medical examinations of Price and Bates, which refuted the pair's charge of rape. But once more the jury returned a guilty verdict and recommended the death penalty. Then, in an act of incredible courage, Judge James Horton overrode the jury's verdict. Horton had carefully reviewed the evidence and met privately with one of the medical examiners, who told him he thought the girls were lying. Lawyers for the state, however, continued to pursue the case, this time under a judge sympathetic to the prosecution. In December 1933, Haywood Patterson and Clarence Norris were convicted of rape and sentenced to death for a third time by another all-white jury. Five other defendants remained in prison, awaiting new trials, while the remaining two were removed to juvenile court and later convicted. In June 1934, the Alabama Supreme Court once again upheld the convictions of Patterson and Norris.

Scottsboro Defendants

Following this latest round of guilty verdicts, ILD attorneys attempted to bribe Victoria Price in a foolish act of desperation. When the bribe came to light, Liebowitz, whose relationship with the ILD was always tenuous, severed ties with the group and established his own rival defense organization, the American Scottsboro Committee (ASC). The attempted bribe and the departure of Liebowitz marked the beginning of the end for the ILD as the leader of the Scottsboro legal defense. Eventually, the ILD would become a junior partner in a third organization, a liberal coalition called the Scottsboro Defense Committee (SDC).

In January of 1935, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to review the third convictions of Patterson and Norris. Three months later, the court once again overturned the guilty verdicts and ordered new trials, ruling in Patterson v. Alabama and Norris v. Alabama that the defendants were denied a fair trial because African Americans had been systematically excluded from Jackson County jury rolls. The landmark decision paved the way for the integration of juries across the nation.

Scottsboro Boys Museum and Cultural Center

Patterson was convicted of rape for a fourth time in January 1936, but this time his sentence was set at 75 years in prison. Following the verdict, another of the defendants, Ozzie Powell, was shot in the head after attacking a deputy sheriff in an apparent escape attempt. After Patterson's conviction was upheld in the Alabama Supreme Court, the prosecution and the Scottsboro Defense Committee agreed to a strange compromise in an effort to end the long ordeal. Clarence Norris was convicted of rape and sentenced to death; Norris' sentence was subsequently commuted to life imprisonment by Alabama governor Bibb Graves. Andy Wright and Charlie Weems also were convicted of rape and sentenced to lengthy prison terms. Rape charges were dropped against Powell, but he was convicted of assaulting the deputy sheriff and sentenced to 20 years. Meanwhile, all charges against the other four defendants-Roy Wright, Olen Montgomery, Willie Roberson, and Eugene Williams-were dropped. Thus, on the basis of the same body of evidence, four defendants were freed and four convicted. In 1938, a final attempt to win the remaining prisoners' freedom failed when both the Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles and Governor Graves denied pardon applications. Charlie Weems was paroled in 1943; Clarence Norris and Andy Wright were paroled a year later but both were sent back to prison shortly thereafter for violating the terms of their probation; Ozzie Powell was paroled in 1946; Haywood Patterson escaped from prison in 1948. Norris, the last surviving defendant, was finally pardoned in 1976. On April 19, 2013, Alabama governor Robert Bentley signed historic legislation exonerating the nine men of all guilt in the case at the Scottsboro Boys Museum and Cultural Center in Scottsboro. Clarence Norris Jr. was in attendance. On November 21, 2013, the Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles voted unanimously to pardon Haywood Patterson, Charlie Weems, and Andy Wright, the last of the accused to still have convictions in their records.

In human terms, the Scottsboro trials were an unmitigated tragedy. The defendants' lives were shattered by the long legal battle and the horrific conditions in the Alabama prison system. Most of the so-called Scottsboro Boys struggled to adapt to life as free men. In legal terms, the case was likewise a gross miscarriage of justice, despite the important precedents established by the U.S. Supreme Court. As a political and social movement and a cultural symbol, however, the Scottsboro case played an immeasurable part in undermining the structures of white supremacy in Alabama, the South, and throughout the nation.
Additional Resources
Acker, James R. Scottsboro and Its Legacy: The Cases that Challenged American Legal and Social Justice. Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers, 2008

Anker, Daniel, et al. "Scottsboro: An American Tragedy." DVD. The American Experience. Alexandria, Va.: PBS Home Video, 2005.

Carter, Dan T. Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984.

Goodman, James. Stories of Scottsboro. New York: Pantheon Books, 1994.

Kelley, Robin D.G. "Scottsboro Case," in Buhle, Mari Jo, Paul Buhle, Dan Georgakas, eds. Encyclopedia of the American Left. New York: Garland Publishing, 1990.

Norris, Clarence, and Sybil D. Washington. The Last of the Scottsboro Boys. New York: Putnam, 1978.

Patterson, Haywood, and Earl Conrad. Scottsboro Boy. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1950.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Scottsboro Trials were among the most infamous episodes of legal injustice in the Jim Crow South. The events that culminated in the trials began in the early spring of 1931, when nine young black men were falsely accused of raping two white women on a train.

# data[].attributes.body
Jim Crow laws were a collection of state and local statutes that legalized racial segregation. They denied African American people the right to vote hold jobs and get an education.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Black Codes

The roots of Jim Crow laws began as early as 1865, immediately following the ratification of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery in the United States.

Black codes were strict local and state laws that detailed when, where and how formerly enslaved people could work, and for how much compensation. The codes appeared throughout the South as a legal way to put Black citizens into indentured servitude, to take voting rights away, to control where they lived and how they traveled and to seize children for labor purposes.

The legal system was stacked against Black citizens, with former Confederate soldiers working as police and judges, making it difficult for African Americans to win court cases and ensuring they were subject to Black codes.

These codes worked in conjunction with labor camps for the incarcerated, where prisoners were treated as enslaved people. Black offenders typically received longer sentences than their white equals, and because of the grueling work, often did not live out their entire sentence.

Ku Klux Klan

During the Reconstruction era, local governments, as well as the national Democratic Party and President Andrew Johnson, thwarted efforts to help Black Americans move forward.

Violence was on the rise, making danger a regular aspect of African American life. Black schools were vandalized and destroyed, and bands of violent white people attacked, tortured and lynched Black citizens in the night. Families were attacked and forced off their land all across the South.

The most ruthless organization of the Jim Crow era, the Ku Klux Klan, was born in 1865 in Pulaski, Tennessee, as a private club for Confederate veterans.

The KKK grew into a secret society terrorizing Black communities and seeping through white Southern culture, with members at the highest levels of government and in the lowest echelons of criminal back alleys.

Jim Crow Laws Expand

At the start of the 1880s, big cities in the South were not wholly beholden to Jim Crow laws and Black Americans found more freedom in them.

This led to substantial Black populations moving to the cities and, as the decade progressed, white city dwellers demanded more laws to limit opportunities for African Americans.

Jim Crow laws soon spread around the country with even more force than previously. Public parks were forbidden for African Americans to enter, and theaters and restaurants were segregated.

Segregated waiting rooms in bus and train stations were required, as well as water fountains, restrooms, building entrances, elevators, cemeteries, even amusement-park cashier windows.

Laws forbade African Americans from living in white neighborhoods. Segregation was enforced for public pools, phone booths, hospitals, asylums, jails and residential homes for the elderly and handicapped.

Some states required separate textbooks for Black and white students. New Orleans mandated the segregation of prostitutes according to race. In Atlanta, African Americans in court were given a different Bible from white people to swear on. Marriage and cohabitation between white and Black people was strictly forbidden in most Southern states.

It was not uncommon to see signs posted at town and city limits warning African Americans that they were not welcome there.

Ida B. Wells

As oppressive as the Jim Crow era was, it was also a time when many African Americans around the country stepped forward into leadership roles to vigorously oppose the laws.

Memphis teacher Ida B. Wells became a prominent activist against Jim Crow laws after refusing to leave a first-class train car designated for white people only. A conductor forcibly removed her and she successfully sued the railroad, though that decision was later reversed by a higher court.

Angry at the injustice, Wells devoted herself to fighting Jim Crow laws. Her vehicle for dissent was newspaper writing: In 1889 she became co-owner of the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight and used her position to take on school segregation and sexual harassment.

Wells traveled throughout the South to publicize her work and advocated for the arming of Black citizens. Wells also investigated lynchings and wrote about her findings.

A mob destroyed her newspaper and threatened her with death, forcing her to move to the North, where she continued her efforts against Jim Crow laws and lynching.

Charlotte Hawkins Brown

Charlotte Hawkins Brown was a North Carolina-born, Massachusetts-raised Black woman who returned to her birthplace at the age of 17, in 1901, to work as a teacher for the American Missionary Association.

After funding was withdrawn for that school, Brown began fundraising to start her own school, named the Palmer Memorial Institute.

Brown became the first Black woman to create a Black school in North Carolina and through her education work became a fierce and vocal opponent of Jim Crow laws.

Isaiah Montgomery

Not everyone battled for equal rights within white society-some chose a separatist approach.

Convinced by Jim Crow laws that Black and white people could not live peaceably together, formerly enslaved Isaiah Montgomery created the African American-only town of Mound Bayou, Mississippi, in 1887.

Montgomery recruited other former enslaved people to settle in the wilderness with him, clearing the land and forging a settlement that included several schools, an Andrew Carnegie-funded library, a hospital, three cotton gins, a bank and a sawmill. Mound Bayou still exists today, and is still almost 100 percent Black.

Jim Crow Laws in the 20th Century

As the 20th century progressed, Jim Crow laws flourished within an oppressive society marked by violence.

Following World War I, the NAACP noted that lynchings had become so prevalent that it sent investigator Walter White to the South. White had lighter skin and could infiltrate white hate groups.

As lynchings increased, so did race riots, with at least 25 across the United States over several months in 1919, a period sometimes referred to as " Red Summer." In retaliation, white authorities charged Black communities with conspiring to conquer white America.

With Jim Crow dominating the landscape, education increasingly under attack and few opportunities for Black college graduates, the Great Migration of the 1920s saw a significant migration of educated Black people out of the South, spurred on by publications like The Chicago Defender, which encouraged Black Americans to move north.

Read by millions of Southern Black people, white people attempted to ban the newspaper and threatened violence against any caught reading or distributing it.

The poverty of the Great Depression only deepened resentment, with a rise in lynchings, and after World War II, even Black veterans returning home met with segregation and violence.

Jim Crow in the North

The North was not immune to Jim Crow-like laws. Some states required Black people to own property before they could vote, schools and neighborhoods were segregated, and businesses displayed "Whites Only" signs.

In Ohio, segregationist Allen Granbery Thurman ran for governor in 1867 promising to bar Black citizens from voting. After he narrowly lost that political race, Thurman was appointed to the U.S. Senate, where he fought to dissolve Reconstruction-era reforms benefiting African Americans.

After World War II, suburban developments in the North and South were created with legal covenants that did not allow Black families, and Black people often found it difficult or impossible to obtain mortgages for homes in certain "red-lined" neighborhoods.

When Did Jim Crow Laws End?

The post-World War II era saw an increase in civil rights activities in the African American community, with a focus on ensuring that Black citizens were able to vote. This ushered in the civil rights movement, resulting in the removal of Jim Crow laws.

In 1948 President Harry Truman ordered integration in the military, and in 1954, the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that educational segregation was unconstitutional, bringing to an end the era of "separate-but-equal" education.

In 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, which legally ended the segregation that had been institutionalized by Jim Crow laws.

And in 1965, the Voting Rights Act halted efforts to keep minorities from voting. The Fair Housing Act of 1968, which ended discrimination in renting and selling homes, followed.

Jim Crow laws were technically off the books, though that has not always guaranteed full integration or adherence to anti-racism laws throughout the United States. Several recent pieces of legislation-such as House Bill 1020 in Mississippi, which aimed to disenfranchise the majority-Black capital city of Jackson by creating a new judicial district overseen by white leaders-are often compared to Jim Crow laws.

Sources

The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow. Richard Wormser.
Segregated America. Smithsonian Institute.
Jim Crow Laws. National Park Service.
"Exploiting Black Labor After the Abolition of Slavery." The Conversation.
"Hundreds of black Americans were killed during 'Red Summer.' A century later, still ignored." Associated Press/USA Today.
"Here's What's Become Of A Historic All-Black Town In The Mississippi Delta." NPR.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Jim Crow Laws: Definition, Facts & Timeline | HISTORY

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Jim Crow laws were state and local statutes that legalized racial segregation. Enacted after the Civil War, the laws denied equal opportunity to Black citizens.

# data[].attributes.body
The New Deal included new constraints and safeguards on the banking industry and efforts to re-inflate the economy after prices had fallen sharply. New Deal programs included both laws passed by Congress as well as presidential executive orders during the first term of the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The New Deal was a series of programs, public work projects, financial reforms, and regulations enacted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the United States between 1933 and 1939. Major federal programs and agencies included the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), the Civil Works Administration (CWA), the Farm Security Administration (FSA), the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 (NIRA) and the Social Security Administration (SSA). They provided support for farmers, the unemployed, youth and the elderly. The New Deal included new constraints and safeguards on the banking industry and efforts to re-inflate the economy after prices had fallen sharply. New Deal programs included both laws passed by Congress as well as presidential executive orders during the first term of the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The programs focused on what historians refer to as the "3 R's": relief for the unemployed and for the poor, recovery of the economy back to normal levels, and reform of the financial system to prevent a repeat depression. The New Deal produced a political realignment, making the Democratic Party the majority (as well as the party that held the White House for seven out of the nine presidential terms from 1933 to 1969) with its base in liberal ideas, the South, big city machines and the newly empowered labor unions, and various ethnic groups. The Republicans were split, with conservatives opposing the entire New Deal as hostile to business and economic growth and liberals in support. The realignment crystallized into the New Deal coalition that dominated presidential elections into the 1960s while the opposing conservative coalition largely controlled Congress in domestic affairs from 1937 to 1964.

By 1936, the term " liberal" was typically used for supporters of the New Deal and " conservative" for its opponents. From 1934 to 1938, Roosevelt was assisted in his endeavors by a "pro-spender" majority in Congress (drawn from two-party, competitive, non-machine, progressive and left party districts). In the 1938 midterm election, Roosevelt and his liberal supporters lost control of Congress to the bipartisan conservative coalition. Many historians distinguish between a First New Deal (1933-1934) and a Second New Deal (1935-1936), with the second one more liberal and more controversial.

The First New Deal (1933-1934) dealt with the pressing banking crisis through the Emergency Banking Act and the 1933 Banking Act. The Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) provided $500 million ($10 billion today) for relief operations by states and cities, while the short-lived CWA gave locals money to operate make-work projects in 1933-1934. The Securities Act of 1933 was enacted to prevent a repeated stock market crash. The controversial work of the National Recovery Administration (NRA) was also part of the First New Deal.

The Second New Deal in 1935-1936 included the National Labor Relations Act to protect labor organizing, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) relief program (which made the federal government the largest employer in the nation), the Social Security Act and new programs to aid tenant farmers and migrant workers. The final major items of New Deal legislation were the creation of the United States Housing Authority and the FSA, which both occurred in 1937; and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which set maximum hours and minimum wages for most categories of workers. The FSA was also one of the oversight authorities of the Puerto Rico Reconstruction Administration, which administered relief efforts to Puerto Rican citizens affected by the Great Depression.

The economic downturn of 1937-1938 and the bitter split between the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) labor unions led to major Republican gains in Congress in 1938. Conservative Republicans and Democrats in Congress joined the informal conservative coalition. By 1942-1943, they shut down relief programs such as the WPA and the CCC and blocked major liberal proposals. Nonetheless, Roosevelt turned his attention to the war effort and won reelection in 1940-1944. Furthermore, the Supreme Court declared the NRA and the first version of the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) unconstitutional, but the AAA was rewritten and then upheld. Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953-1961) left the New Deal largely intact, even expanding it in some areas. In the 1960s, Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society used the New Deal as inspiration for a dramatic expansion of liberal programs, which Republican Richard Nixon generally retained. However, after 1974 the call for deregulation of the economy gained bipartisan support. The New Deal regulation of banking ( Glass-Steagall Act) lasted until it was suspended in the 1990s.

Several New Deal programs remain active and those operating under the original names include the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the Federal Crop Insurance Corporation (FCIC), the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). The largest programs still in existence today are the Social Security System and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

Economic collapse (1929-1933)

From 1929 to 1933 manufacturing output decreased by one third, which economist Milton Friedman called the Great Contraction. Prices fell by 20%, causing deflation that made repaying debts much harder. Unemployment in the United States increased from 4% to 25%. Additionally, one-third of all employed persons were downgraded to working part-time on much smaller paychecks. In the aggregate, almost 50% of the nation's human work-power was going unused.

The depression had devastated the nation. As Roosevelt took the oath of office at noon on March 4, 1933, all state governors had authorized bank holidays or restricted withdrawals-many Americans had little or no access to their bank accounts. Farm income had fallen by over 50% since 1929. Between 1930 and 1933, an estimated 844,000 non-farm mortgages were foreclosed on, out of a total of five million. Political and business leaders feared revolution and anarchy. Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., who remained wealthy during the Depression, stated years later that "in those days I felt and said I would be willing to part with half of what I had if I could be sure of keeping, under law and order, the other half".

The phrase "New Deal" was coined by an adviser to Roosevelt, Stuart Chase, although the term was originally used by Mark Twain in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.

Throughout the nation men and women, forgotten in the political philosophy of the Government, look to us here for guidance and for more equitable opportunity to share in the distribution of national wealth... I pledge myself to a new deal for the American people. This is more than a political campaign. It is a call to arms.

First New Deal (1933-1934)

Roosevelt entered office without a specific set of plans for dealing with the Great Depression-so he improvised as Congress listened to a very wide variety of voices. Among Roosevelt's more famous advisers was an informal " Brain Trust", a group that tended to view pragmatic government intervention in the economy positively. His choice for Secretary of Labor, Frances Perkins, greatly influenced his initiatives. Her list of what her priorities would be if she took the job illustrates: "a forty-hour workweek, a minimum wage, worker's compensation, unemployment compensation, a federal law banning child labor, direct federal aid for unemployment relief, Social Security, a revitalized public employment service and health insurance".

The New Deal policies drew from many different ideas proposed earlier in the 20th century. Assistant Attorney General Thurman Arnold led efforts that hearkened back to an anti-monopoly tradition rooted in American politics by figures such as Andrew Jackson and Thomas Jefferson. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, an influential adviser to many New Dealers, argued that "bigness" (referring, presumably, to corporations) was a negative economic force, producing waste and inefficiency. However, the anti-monopoly group never had a major impact on New Deal policy. Other leaders such as Hugh S. Johnson of the NRA took ideas from the Woodrow Wilson Administration, advocating techniques used to mobilize the economy for World War I. They brought ideas and experience from the government controls and spending of 1917-1918. Other New Deal planners revived experiments suggested in the 1920s, such as the TVA. The "First New Deal" (1933-1934) encompassed the proposals offered by a wide spectrum of groups (not included was the Socialist Party, whose influence was all but destroyed). This first phase of the New Deal was also characterized by fiscal conservatism (see Economy Act, below) and experimentation with several different, sometimes contradictory, cures for economic ills.

Roosevelt created dozens of new agencies. They are traditionally and typically known to Americans by their alphabetical initials.

The First 100 Days (1933)

The American people were generally extremely dissatisfied with the crumbling economy, mass unemployment, declining wages and profits and especially Herbert Hoover's policies such as the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act and the Revenue Act of 1932. Roosevelt entered office with enormous political capital. Americans of all political persuasions were demanding immediate action and Roosevelt responded with a remarkable series of new programs in the "first hundred days" of the administration, in which he met with Congress for 100 days. During those 100 days of lawmaking, Congress granted every request Roosevelt asked and passed a few programs (such as the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to insure bank accounts) that he opposed. Ever since, presidents have been judged against Roosevelt for what they accomplished in their first 100 days. Walter Lippmann famously noted:

At the end of February we were a congeries of disorderly panic-stricken mobs and factions. In the hundred days from March to June we became again an organized nation confident of our power to provide for our own security and to control our own destiny.

At the beginning of the Great Depression, the economy was destabilized by bank failures followed by credit crunches. The initial reasons were substantial losses in investment banking, followed by bank runs. Bank runs occur when a large number of customers withdraw their deposits because they believe the bank might become insolvent. As the bank run progressed, it generated a self-fulfilling prophecy: as more people withdrew their deposits, the likelihood of default increased and this encouraged further withdrawals.

Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz have argued that the drain of money out of the banking system caused the monetary supply to shrink, forcing the economy to likewise shrink. As credit and economic activity diminished, price deflation followed, causing further economic contraction with disastrous impact on banks. Between 1929 and 1933, 40% of all banks (9,490 out of 23,697 banks) failed. Much of the Great Depression's economic damage was caused directly by bank runs.

On March 9, 1933, Roosevelt sent to Congress the Emergency Banking Act, drafted in large part by Hoover's top advisors. The act was passed and signed into law the same day. It provided for a system of reopening sound banks under Treasury supervision, with federal loans available if needed. Three-quarters of the banks in the Federal Reserve System reopened within the next three days. Billions of dollars in hoarded currency and gold flowed back into them within a month, thus stabilizing the banking system. By the end of 1933, 4,004 small local banks were permanently closed and merged into larger banks. Their deposits totaled $3.6 billion. Depositors lost $540 million (equivalent to $10,795,835,476 in 2020) and eventually received on average 85 cents on the dollar of their deposits.

The Glass-Steagall Act limited commercial bank securities activities and affiliations between commercial banks and securities firms to regulate speculations. It also established the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), which insured deposits for up to $2,500, ending the risk of runs on banks. This banking reform offered unprecedented stability as while throughout the 1920s more than five hundred banks failed per year, it was less than ten banks per year after 1933.

Under the gold standard, the United States kept the dollar convertible to gold. The Federal Reserve would have had to execute an expansionary monetary policy to fight the deflation and to inject liquidity into the banking system to prevent it from crumbling-but lower interest rates would have led to a gold outflow. Under the gold standards, price-specie flow mechanism countries that lost gold, but nevertheless wanted to maintain the gold standard, had to permit their money supply to decrease and the domestic price level to decline ( deflation). As long as the Federal Reserve had to defend the gold parity of the dollar it had to sit idle while the banking system crumbled.

The dollar was allowed to float freely on foreign exchange markets with no guaranteed price in gold. With the passage of the Gold Reserve Act in 1934, the nominal price of gold was changed from $20.67 per troy ounce to $35. These measures enabled the Federal Reserve to increase the amount of money in circulation to the level the economy needed. Markets immediately responded well to the suspension in the hope that the decline in prices would finally end. In her essay "What ended the Great Depression?" (1992), Christina Romer argued that this policy raised industrial production by 25% until 1937 and by 50% until 1942.

Before the Wall Street Crash of 1929, securities were unregulated at the federal level. Even firms whose securities were publicly traded published no regular reports or even worse rather misleading reports based on arbitrarily selected data. To avoid another crash, the Securities Act of 1933 was passed. It required the disclosure of the balance sheet, profit and loss statement, and the names and compensations of corporate officers for firms whose securities were traded. Additionally, the reports had to be verified by independent auditors. In 1934, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission was established to regulate the stock market and prevent corporate abuses relating to corporate reporting and the sale of securities.

Many unemployed people were put to work under Roosevelt on a variety of government-financed public works projects, including the construction of bridges, airports, dams, post offices, hospitals, and hundreds of thousands of miles of road. Through reforestation and flood control, they reclaimed millions of hectares of soil from erosion and devastation. As noted by one authority, Roosevelt's New Deal "was literally stamped on the American landscape".

The rural U.S. was a high priority for Roosevelt and his energetic Secretary of Agriculture, Henry A. Wallace. Roosevelt believed that full economic recovery depended upon the recovery of agriculture and raising farm prices was a major tool, even though it meant higher food prices for the poor living in cities.

Many rural people lived in severe poverty, especially in the South. Major programs addressed to their needs included the Resettlement Administration (RA), the Rural Electrification Administration (REA), rural welfare projects sponsored by the WPA, National Youth Administration (NYA), Forest Service and Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), including school lunches, building new schools, opening roads in remote areas, reforestation and purchase of marginal lands to enlarge national forests.

Roosevelt was keenly interested in farm issues and believed that true prosperity would not return until farming was prosperous. Many different programs were directed at farmers. The first 100 days produced the Farm Security Act to raise farm incomes by raising the prices farmers received, which was achieved by reducing total farm output. The Agricultural Adjustment Act created the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) in May 1933. The act reflected the demands of leaders of major farm organizations (especially the Farm Bureau) and reflected debates among Roosevelt's farm advisers such as Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace, M.L. Wilson, Rexford Tugwell and George Peek.

The AAA aimed to raise prices for commodities through artificial scarcity. The AAA used a system of domestic allotments, setting total output of corn, cotton, dairy products, hogs, rice, tobacco, and wheat. The farmers themselves had a voice in the process of using the government to benefit their incomes. The AAA paid land owners subsidies for leaving some of their land idle with funds provided by a new tax on food processing. To force up farm prices to the point of "parity," 10 million acres (40,000 km ²) of growing cotton was plowed up, bountiful crops were left to rot and six million piglets were killed and discarded.

The idea was to give farmers a "fair exchange value" for their products in relation to the general economy ("parity level"). Farm incomes and the income for the general population recovered fast since the beginning of 1933. Food prices remained still well below the 1929 peak. The AAA established an important and long-lasting federal role in the planning of the entire agricultural sector of the economy and was the first program on such a scale for the troubled agricultural economy. The original AAA targeted landowners, and therefore did not provide for any sharecroppers or tenants or farm laborers who might become unemployed.

A Gallup poll printed in the Washington Post revealed that a majority of the American public opposed the AAA. In 1936, the Supreme Court declared the AAA to be unconstitutional, stating that "a statutory plan to regulate and control agricultural production, [is] a matter beyond the powers delegated to the federal government". The AAA was replaced by a similar program that did win Court approval. Instead of paying farmers for letting fields lie barren, this program subsidized them for planting soil-enriching crops such as alfalfa that would not be sold on the market. Federal regulation of agricultural production has been modified many times since then, but together with large subsidies is still in effect today.

The Farm Tenancy Act in 1937 was the last major New Deal legislation that concerned farming. It created the Farm Security Administration (FSA), which replaced the Resettlement Administration.

The Food Stamp Plan, a major new welfare program for urban poor, was established in 1939 to provide stamps to poor people who could use them to purchase food at retail outlets. The program ended during wartime prosperity in 1943 but was restored in 1961. It survived into the 21st century with little controversy because it was seen to benefit the urban poor, food producers, grocers, and wholesalers as well as farmers, thus it gained support from both liberal and conservative Congressmen. In 2013, Tea Party activists in the House nonetheless tried to end the program, now known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, while the Senate fought to preserve it.

Recovery was the effort in numerous programs to restore the economy to normal health. By most economic indicators, this was achieved by 1937-except for unemployment, which remained stubbornly high until World War II began. Recovery was designed to help the economy bounce back from depression. Economic historians led by Price Fishback have examined the impact of New Deal spending on improving health conditions in the 114 largest cities, 1929-1937. They estimated that every additional $153,000 in relief spending (in 1935 dollars, or $1.95 million in the year 2000 dollars) was associated with a reduction of one infant death, one suicide, and 2.4 deaths from infectious disease.

NRA "Blue Eagle" campaign

From 1929 to 1933, the industrial economy suffered from a vicious cycle of deflation. Since 1931, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the voice of the nation's organized business, promoted an anti-deflationary scheme that would permit trade associations to cooperate in government-instigated cartels to stabilize prices within their industries. While existing antitrust laws clearly forbade such practices, the organized business found a receptive ear in the Roosevelt Administration.

Roosevelt's advisors believed that excessive competition and technical progress had led to overproduction and lowered wages and prices, which they believed lowered demand and employment ( deflation). He argued that government economic planning was necessary to remedy this. New Deal economists argued that cut-throat competition had hurt many businesses and that with prices having fallen 20% and more, "deflation" exacerbated the burden of debt and would delay recovery. They rejected a strong move in Congress to limit the workweek to 30 hours. Instead, their remedy, designed in cooperation with big business, was the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA). It included stimulus funds for the WPA to spend and sought to raise prices, give more bargaining power for unions (so the workers could purchase more), and reduce harmful competition.

At the center of the NIRA was the National Recovery Administration (NRA), headed by former General Hugh S. Johnson, who had been a senior economic official in World War I. Johnson called on every business establishment in the nation to accept a stopgap "blanket code": a minimum wage of between 20 and 45 cents per hour, a maximum workweek of 35-45 hours and the abolition of child labor. Johnson and Roosevelt contended that the "blanket code" would raise consumer purchasing power and increase employment. To mobilize political support for the NRA, Johnson launched the "NRA Blue Eagle" publicity campaign to boost what he called "industrial self-government". The NRA brought together leaders in each industry to design specific sets of codes for that industry-the most important provisions were anti-deflationary floors below which no company would lower prices or wages and agreements on maintaining employment and production. In a remarkably short time, the NRA announced agreements from almost every major industry in the nation. By March 1934, industrial production was 45% higher than in March 1933.

NRA Administrator Hugh Johnson was showing signs of a mental breakdown due to the extreme pressure and workload of running the National Recovery Administration. After two meetings with Roosevelt and an abortive resignation attempt, Johnson resigned on September 24, 1934, and Roosevelt replaced the position of Administrator with a new National Industrial Recovery Board, of which Donald Richberg was named Executive Director.

On May 27, 1935, the NRA was found to be unconstitutional by a unanimous decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of Schechter v. the United States. After the end of the NRA, quotas in the oil industry were fixed by the Railroad Commission of Texas with Tom Connally's federal Hot Oil Act of 1935, which guaranteed that illegal "hot oil" would not be sold. By the time NRA ended in May 1935, well over 2 million employers accepted the new standards laid down by the NRA, which had introduced a minimum wage and an eight-hour workday, together with abolishing child labor. These standards were reintroduced by the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.

The New Deal had an important impact on the housing field. The New Deal followed and increased President Hoover's lead-and-seek measures. The New Deal sought to stimulate the private home building industry and increase the number of individuals who owned homes. The New Deal implemented two new housing agencies; Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC) and the Federal Housing Administration (FHA). HOLC set uniform national appraisal methods and simplified the mortgage process. The Federal Housing Administration (FHA) created national standards for home construction.

Reform was based on the assumption that the depression was caused by the inherent instability of the market and that government intervention was necessary to rationalize and stabilize the economy and to balance the interests of farmers, business and labor. Reforms targeted the causes of the depression and sought to prevent a crisis like it from happening again. In other words, financially rebuilding the U.S. while ensuring not to repeat history.

Most economic historians assert that protectionist policies, culminating in the Smoot-Hawley Act of 1930, worsened the Depression. Roosevelt already spoke against the act while campaigning for president during 1932. In 1934, the Reciprocal Tariff Act was drafted by Cordell Hull. It gave the president power to negotiate bilateral, reciprocal trade agreements with other countries. The act enabled Roosevelt to liberalize American trade policy around the globe and it is widely credited with ushering in the era of liberal trade policy that persists to this day.

The Puerto Rico Reconstruction Administration oversaw a separate set of programs in Puerto Rico. It promoted land reform and helped small farms, it set up farm cooperatives, promoted crop diversification and helped the local industry. The Puerto Rico Reconstruction Administration was directed by Juan Pablo Montoya Sr. from 1935 to 1937.

Second New Deal (1935-1936)

In the spring of 1935, responding to the setbacks in the Court, a new skepticism in Congress and the growing popular clamor for more dramatic action, New Dealers passed important new initiatives. Historians refer to them as the "Second New Deal" and note that it was more liberal and more controversial than the "First New Deal" of 1933-1934.

Until 1935, only a dozen states had implemented old-age insurance, and these programs were woefully underfunded. Just one state (Wisconsin) had an insurance program. The United States was the only modern industrial country where people faced the Depression without any national system of social security. The work programs of the "First New Deal" such as CWA and FERA were designed for immediate relief, for a year or two.

The most important program of 1935, and perhaps of the New Deal itself, was the Social Security Act. It established a permanent system of universal retirement pensions ( Social Security), unemployment insurance and welfare benefits for the handicapped and needy children in families without a father present. It established the framework for the U.S. welfare system. Roosevelt insisted that it should be funded by payroll taxes rather than from the general fund - he said: "We put those payroll contributions there so as to give the contributors a legal, moral, and political right to collect their pensions and unemployment benefits. With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program".

The National Labor Relations Act of 1935, also known as the Wagner Act, finally guaranteed workers the rights to collective bargaining through unions of their own choice. The Act also established the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to facilitate wage agreements and to suppress the repeated labor disturbances. The Wagner Act did not compel employers to reach agreement with their employees, but it opened possibilities for American labor. The result was a tremendous growth of membership in the labor unions, especially in the mass-production sector, led by the older and larger American Federation of Labor and the new, more radical Congress of Industrial Organizations. Labor thus became a major component of the New Deal political coalition. However, the intense battle for members between the AFL and the CIO coalitions weakened labor's power.

The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 set maximum hours (44 per week) and minimum wages (25 cents per hour) for most categories of workers. Child labor of children under the age of 16 was forbidden, children under 18 years were forbidden to work in hazardous employment. As a result, the wages of 300,000 workers, especially in the South, were increased and the hours of 1.3 million were reduced. It was the last major New Deal legislation and it passed with support of Northern industrialists who wanted to stop the drain of jobs to the low-wage South.

Roosevelt nationalized unemployment relief through the Works Progress Administration (WPA), headed by close friend Harry Hopkins. Roosevelt had insisted that the projects had to be costly in terms of labor, beneficial in the long term and the WPA was forbidden to compete with private enterprises-therefore the workers had to be paid smaller wages. The Works Progress Administration (WPA) was created to return the unemployed to the workforce. The WPA financed a variety of projects such as hospitals, schools, and roads, and employed more than 8.5 million workers who built 650,000 miles of highways and roads, 125,000 public buildings as well as bridges, reservoirs, irrigation systems, parks, playgrounds and so on.

Prominent projects were the Lincoln Tunnel, the Triborough Bridge, the LaGuardia Airport, the Overseas Highway and the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. The Rural Electrification Administration used cooperatives to bring electricity to rural areas, many of which still operate. The National Youth Administration was another semi-autonomous WPA program for youth. Its Texas director, Lyndon B. Johnson, later used the NYA as a model for some of his Great Society programs in the 1960s. The WPA was organized by states, but New York City had its own branch Federal One, which created jobs for writers, musicians, artists and theater personnel. It became a hunting ground for conservatives searching for communist employees.

The Federal Writers' Project operated in every state, where it created a famous guide book-it also catalogued local archives and hired many writers, including Margaret Walker, Zora Neale Hurston and Anzia Yezierska, to document folklore. Other writers interviewed elderly ex-slaves and recorded their stories. Under the Federal Theater Project, headed by charismatic Hallie Flanagan, actresses and actors, technicians, writers and directors put on stage productions. The tickets were inexpensive or sometimes free, making theater available to audiences unaccustomed to attending plays.

One Federal Art Project paid 162 trained woman artists on relief to paint murals or create statues for newly built post offices and courthouses. Many of these works of art can still be seen in public buildings around the country, along with murals sponsored by the Treasury Relief Art Project of the Treasury Department. During its existence, the Federal Theatre Project provided jobs for circus people, musicians, actors, artists and playwrights, together with increasing public appreciation of the arts.

In 1935, Roosevelt called for a tax program called the Wealth Tax Act ( Revenue Act of 1935) to redistribute wealth. The bill imposed an income tax of 79% on incomes over $5 million. Since that was an extraordinarily high income in the 1930s, the highest tax rate actually covered just one individual- John D. Rockefeller. The bill was expected to raise only about $250 million in additional funds, so revenue was not the primary goal. Morgenthau called it "more or less a campaign document". In a private conversation with Raymond Moley, Roosevelt admitted that the purpose of the bill was "stealing Huey Long's thunder" by making Long's supporters of his own. At the same time, it raised the bitterness of the rich who called Roosevelt "a traitor to his class" and the wealth tax act a "soak the rich tax".

A tax called the undistributed profits tax was enacted in 1936. This time the primary purpose was revenue, since Congress had enacted the Adjusted Compensation Payment Act, calling for payments of $2 billion to World War I veterans. The bill established the persisting principle that retained corporate earnings could be taxed. Paid dividends were tax deductible by corporations. Its proponents intended the bill to replace all other corporation taxes-believing this would stimulate corporations to distribute earnings and thus put more cash and spending power in the hands of individuals. In the end, Congress watered down the bill, setting the tax rates at 7 to 27% and largely exempting small enterprises. Facing widespread and fierce criticism, the tax deduction of paid dividends was repealed in 1938.

The United States Housing Act of 1937 created the United States Housing Authority within the U.S. Department of the Interior. It was one of the last New Deal agencies created. The bill passed in 1937 with some Republican support to abolish slums.

The Roosevelt administration was under assault during Roosevelt's second term, which presided over a new dip in the Great Depression in the fall of 1937 that continued through most of 1938. Production and profits declined sharply. Unemployment jumped from 14.3% in May 1937 to 19.0% in June 1938. The downturn was perhaps due to nothing more than the familiar rhythms of the business cycle, but until 1937 Roosevelt had claimed responsibility for the excellent economic performance. That backfired in the recession and the heated political atmosphere of 1937.

Keynes did not think that the New Deal under Roosevelt ended the Great Depression: "It is, it seems, politically impossible for a capitalistic democracy to organize expenditure on the scale necessary to make the grand experiments which would prove my case - except in war conditions."

The U.S. reached full employment after entering World War II in December 1941. Under the special circumstances of war mobilization, massive war spending doubled the gross national product (GNP). Military Keynesianism brought full employment and federal contracts were cost-plus. Instead of competitive bidding to get lower prices, the government gave out contracts that promised to pay all the expenses plus a modest profit. Factories hired everyone they could find regardless of their lack of skills-they simplified work tasks and trained the workers, with the federal government paying all the costs. Millions of farmers left marginal operations, students quit school and housewives joined the labor force.

The emphasis was for war supplies as soon as possible, regardless of cost and inefficiencies. Industry quickly absorbed the slack in the labor force and the tables turned such that employers needed to actively and aggressively recruit workers. As the military grew, new labor sources were needed to replace the 12 million men serving in the military. Propaganda campaigns started pleading for people to work in the war factories. The barriers for married women, the old, the unskilled-and (in the North and West) the barriers for racial minorities-were lowered.

In 1929, federal expenditures accounted for only 3% of GNP. Between 1933 and 1939, federal expenditures tripled, but the national debt as a percent of GNP showed little change. Spending on the war effort quickly eclipsed spending on New Deal programs. In 1944, government spending on the war effort exceeded 40% of GNP. The U.S. economy experienced dramatic growth during the Second World War mostly due to the deemphasis of free enterprise in favor of the imposition of strict controls on prices and wages. These controls shared broad support among labor and business, resulting in cooperation between the two groups and the U.S. government. This cooperation resulted in the government subsidizing business and labor through both direct and indirect methods.

Conservative domination of Congress during the war meant that all welfare projects and reforms had to have their approval, which was given when business supported the project. For example, the Coal Mines Inspection and Investigation Act of 1941 significantly reduced fatality rates in the coal-mining industry, saving workers' lives and company money. In terms of welfare, the New Dealers wanted benefits for everyone according to need. However, conservatives proposed benefits based on national service-especially tied to military service or working in war industries-and their approach won out.

The Servicemen's Dependents Allowance Act of 1942 provided family allowances for dependents of enlisted men. Emergency grants to states were authorized in 1942 for programs for day care for children of working mothers. In 1944, pensions were authorized for all physically or mentally helpless children of deceased veterans regardless of the age of the child at the date the claim was filed or at the time of the veteran's death, provided the child was disabled at the age of sixteen and that the disability continued to the date of the claim. The Public Health Service Act, which was passed that same year, expanded federal-state public health programs and increased the annual amount for grants for public health services.

The Emergency Maternity and Infant Care Program (EMIC), introduced in March 1943 by the Children's Bureau, provided free maternity care and medical treatment during an infant's first year for the wives and children of military personnel in the four lowest enlisted pay grades. One out of seven births was covered during its operation. EMIC paid $127 million to state health departments to cover the care of 1.2 million new mothers and their babies. The average cost of EMIC maternity cases completed was $92.49 for medical and hospital care. A striking effect was the sudden rapid decline in home births as most mothers now had paid hospital maternity care.

Under the 1943 Disabled Veterans Rehabilitation Act, vocational rehabilitation services were offered to wounded World War II veterans and some 621,000 veterans would go on to receive assistance under this program. The G.I. Bill ( Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944) was a landmark piece of legislation, providing 16 million returning veterans with benefits such as housing, educational and unemployment assistance and played a major role in the postwar expansion of the American middle class.

In response to the March on Washington Movement led by A. Philip Randolph, Roosevelt promulgated Executive Order 8802 in June 1941, which established the President's Committee on Fair Employment Practices (FEPC) "to receive and investigate complaints of discrimination" so that "there shall be no discrimination in the employment of workers in defense industries or government because of race, creed, color, or national origin".

In 1941, 40% of all American families lived on less than the $1,500 per year defined as necessary by the Works Progress Administration for a modest standard of living. The median income stood at $2,000 a year, while 8 million workers earned below the legal minimum. From 1939 to 1944, wages and salaries more than doubled, with overtime pay and the expansion of jobs leading to a 70% rise in average weekly earnings during the course of the war. Membership in organized labor increased by 50% between 1941 and 1945 and because the War Labor Board sought labor-management peace, new workers were encouraged to participate in the existing labor organizations, thereby receiving all the benefits of union membership such as improved working conditions, better fringe benefits and higher wages. As noted by William H. Chafe, "with full employment, higher wages and social welfare benefits provided under government regulations, American workers experienced a level of well-being that, for many, had never occurred before".

As a result of the new prosperity, consumer expenditures rose by nearly 50%, from $61.7 billion at the start of the war to $98.5 billion by 1944. Individual savings accounts climbed almost sevenfold during the course of the war. The share of total income held by the top 5% of wage earners fell from 22% to 17% while the bottom 40% increased their share of the economic pie. In addition, during the course of the war the proportion of the American population earning less than $3,000 (in 1968 dollars) fell by half.

Analysts agree the New Deal produced a new political coalition that sustained the Democratic Party as the majority party in national politics into the 1960s. A 2013 study found that "an average increase in New Deal relief and public works spending resulted in a 5.4 percentage point increase in the 1936 Democratic voting share and a smaller amount in 1940. The estimated persistence of this shift suggests that New Deal spending increased long-term Democratic support by 2 to 2.5 percentage points. Thus, it appears that Roosevelt's early, decisive actions created long-lasting positive benefits for the Democratic party... The New Deal did play an important role in consolidating Democratic gains for at least two decades".

However, there is disagreement about whether it marked a permanent change in values. Cowie and Salvatore in 2008 argued that it was a response to Depression and did not mark a commitment to a welfare state because the U.S. has always been too individualistic. MacLean rejected the idea of a definitive political culture. She says they overemphasized individualism and ignored the enormous power that big capital wields, the Constitutional restraints on radicalism and the role of racism, antifeminism and homophobia. She warns that accepting Cowie and Salvatore's argument that conservatism's ascendancy is inevitable would dismay and discourage activists on the left. Klein responds that the New Deal did not die a natural death-it was killed off in the 1970s by a business coalition mobilized by such groups as the Business Roundtable, the Chamber of Commerce, trade organizations, conservative think tanks and decades of sustained legal and political attacks.

Historians generally agree that during Roosevelt's 12 years in office there was a dramatic increase in the power of the federal government as a whole. Roosevelt also established the presidency as the prominent center of authority within the federal government. Roosevelt created a large array of agencies protecting various groups of citizens-workers, farmers and others-who suffered from the crisis and thus enabled them to challenge the powers of the corporations. In this way, the Roosevelt administration generated a set of political ideas-known as New Deal liberalism-that remained a source of inspiration and controversy for decades. New Deal liberalism lay the foundation of a new consensus. Between 1940 and 1980, there was the liberal consensus about the prospects for the widespread distribution of prosperity within an expanding capitalist economy. Especially Harry S. Truman's Fair Deal and in the 1960s Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society used the New Deal as inspiration for a dramatic expansion of liberal programs.

The New Deal's enduring appeal on voters fostered its acceptance by moderate and liberal Republicans.

Should any party attempt to abolish social security and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group of course, that believes you can do these things [...] Their number is negligible and they are stupid.

In 1964, Barry Goldwater, an unreconstructed anti-New Dealer, was the Republican presidential candidate on a platform that attacked the New Deal. The Democrats under Lyndon B. Johnson won a massive landslide and Johnson's Great Society programs extended the New Deal. However, the supporters of Goldwater formed the New Right which helped to bring Ronald Reagan into the White House in the 1980 presidential election. Once an ardent supporter of the New Deal, Reagan turned against it, now viewing government as the problem rather than solution and, as president, moved the nation away from the New Deal model of government activism, shifting greater emphasis to the private sector.

A 2016 review study of the existing literature in the Journal of Economic Literature summarized the findings of the research as follows:

The studies find that public works and relief spending had state income multipliers of around one, increased consumption activity, attracted internal migration, reduced crime rates, and lowered several types of mortality. The farm programs typically aided large farm owners but eliminated opportunities for share croppers, tenants, and farm workers. The Home Owners' Loan Corporation's purchases and refinancing of troubled mortgages staved off drops in housing prices and home ownership rates at relatively low ex post cost to taxpayers. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation's loans to banks and railroads appear to have had little positive impact, although the banks were aided when the RFC took ownership stakes.

Historians debating the New Deal have generally been divided between liberals who support it, conservatives who oppose it, and some New Left historians who complain it was too favorable to capitalism and did too little for minorities. There is consensus on only a few points, with most commentators favorable toward the CCC and hostile toward the NRA.

Consensus historians of the 1950s, such as Richard Hofstadter, according to Lary May:

[B]elieved that the prosperity and apparent class harmony of the post-World War II era reflected a return to the true Americanism rooted in liberal capitalism and the pursuit of individual opportunity that had made fundamental conflicts over resources a thing of the past. They argued that the New Deal was a conservative movement that built a welfare state, guided by experts, that saved rather than transformed liberal capitalism.

The most common arguments can be summarized as follows:

Allowed the nation to come through its greatest depression without undermining the capitalist system (Billington and Ridge)

Made the capitalist system more beneficial by enacting banking and stock market regulations to avoid abuses and providing greater financial security, through, for example, the introduction of Social Security or the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (David M. Kennedy)

Created a better balance among labor, agriculture and industry (Billington and Ridge)

Produced a more equal distribution of wealth (Billington and Ridge)

Help conserve natural resources (Billington and Ridge)

Permanently established the principle that the national government should take action to rehabilitate and preserve America's human resources (Billington and Ridge)

Julian Zelizer (2000) has argued that fiscal conservatism was a key component of the New Deal. A fiscally conservative approach was supported by Wall Street and local investors and most of the business community-mainstream academic economists believed in it as apparently did the majority of the public. Conservative southern Democrats, who favored balanced budgets and opposed new taxes, controlled Congress and its major committees. Even liberal Democrats at the time regarded balanced budgets as essential to economic stability in the long run, although they were more willing to accept short-term deficits. As Zelizer notes, public opinion polls consistently showed public opposition to deficits and debt. Throughout his terms, Roosevelt recruited fiscal conservatives to serve in his administration, most notably Lewis Douglas the Director of Budget in 1933-1934; and Henry Morgenthau Jr., Secretary of the Treasury from 1934 to 1945. They defined policy in terms of budgetary cost and tax burdens rather than needs, rights, obligations, or political benefits. Personally, Roosevelt embraced their fiscal conservatism, but politically he realized that fiscal conservatism enjoyed a strong wide base of support among voters, leading Democrats and businessmen. On the other hand, there was enormous pressure to act and spending money on high visibility work programs with millions of paychecks a week.

Revenues were so low that borrowing was necessary (only the richest 3% paid any income tax between 1926 and 1940). Douglas therefore hated the relief programs, which he said reduced business confidence, threatened the government's future credit and had the "destructive psychological effects of making mendicants of self-respecting American citizens". Roosevelt was pulled toward greater spending by Hopkins and Ickes and as the 1936 election approached he decided to gain votes by attacking big business.

Morgenthau shifted with Roosevelt, but at all times tried to inject fiscal responsibility-he deeply believed in balanced budgets, stable currency, reduction of the national debt and the need for more private investment. The Wagner Act met Morgenthau's requirement because it strengthened the party's political base and involved no new spending. In contrast to Douglas, Morgenthau accepted Roosevelt's double budget as legitimate-that is a balanced regular budget and an "emergency" budget for agencies, like the WPA, PWA and CCC, that would be temporary until full recovery was at hand. He fought against the veterans' bonus until Congress finally overrode Roosevelt's veto and gave out $2.2 billion in 1936. His biggest success was the new Social Security program as he managed to reverse the proposals to fund it from general revenue and insisted it be funded by new taxes on employees. It was Morgenthau who insisted on excluding farm workers and domestic servants from Social Security because workers outside industry would not be paying their way.

Roosevelt appointed an unprecedented number of African Americans to second-level positions in his administration-these appointees were collectively called the Black Cabinet. The WPA, NYA and CCC relief programs allocated 10% of their budgets to blacks (who comprised about 10% of the total population, and 20% of the poor). They operated separate all-black units with the same pay and conditions as white units. Some leading white New Dealers, especially Eleanor Roosevelt, Harold Ickes and Aubrey Williams, worked to ensure blacks received at least 10% of welfare assistance payments. However, these benefits were small in comparison to the economic and political advantages that whites received. Most unions excluded blacks from joining and enforcement of anti-discrimination laws in the South was virtually impossible, especially since most blacks worked in hospitality and agricultural sectors.

The New Deal programs put millions of Americans immediately back to work or at least helped them to survive. The programs were not specifically targeted to alleviate the much higher unemployment rate of blacks. Some aspects of the programs were even unfavorable to blacks. The Agricultural Adjustment Acts for example helped farmers which were predominantly white, but reduced the need of farmers to hire tenant farmers or sharecroppers which were predominantly black. While the AAA stipulated that a farmer had to share the payments with those who worked the land this policy was never enforced. The Farm Service Agency (FSA), a government relief agency for tenant farmers, created in 1937, made efforts to empower African Americans by appointing them to agency committees in the South. Senator James F. Byrnes of South Carolina raised opposition to the appointments because he stood for white farmers who were threatened by an agency that could organize and empower tenant farmers. Initially, the FSA stood behind their appointments, but after feeling national pressure FSA was forced to release the African Americans from their positions. The goals of the FSA were notoriously liberal and not cohesive with the southern voting elite. Some harmful New Deal measures inadvertently discriminated against blacks. Thousands of blacks were thrown out of work and replaced by whites on jobs where they were paid less than the NRA's wage minimums because some white employers considered the NRA's minimum wage "too much money for Negroes". By August 1933, blacks called the NRA the "Negro Removal Act". An NRA study found that the NIRA put 500,000 African Americans out of work.

There was no attempt whatsoever to end segregation, or to increase black rights in the South, and a number of leaders that promoted the New Deal were racist and anti semites.

The wartime Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC) executive orders that forbade job discrimination against African Americans, women and ethnic groups was a major breakthrough that brought better jobs and pay to millions of minority Americans. Historians usually treat FEPC as part of the war effort and not part of the New Deal itself.

The New Deal was racially segregated as blacks and whites rarely worked alongside each other in New Deal programs. The largest relief program by far was the WPA-it operated segregated units, as did its youth affiliate the NYA. Blacks were hired by the WPA as supervisors in the North, but of 10,000 WPA supervisors in the South only 11 were black. Historian Anthony Badger argues that "New Deal programs in the South routinely discriminated against blacks and perpetuated segregation". In its first few weeks of operation, CCC camps in the North were integrated. By July 1935, practically all the camps in the United States were segregated, and blacks were strictly limited in the supervisory roles they were assigned. Kinker and Smith argue that "even the most prominent racial liberals in the New Deal did not dare to criticize Jim Crow".

Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes was one of the Roosevelt Administration's most prominent supporters of blacks and former president of the Chicago chapter of the NAACP. In 1937, when Senator Josiah Bailey Democrat of North Carolina accused him of trying to break down segregation laws Ickes wrote him to deny that:

I think it is up to the states to work out their social problems if possible, and while I have always been interested in seeing that the Negro has a square deal, I have never dissipated my strength against the particular stone wall of segregation. I believe that wall will crumble when the Negro has brought himself to a high educational and economic status.... Moreover, while there are no segregation laws in the North, there is segregation in fact and we might as well recognize this.

Many women were employed on FERA projects run by the states with federal funds. The first New Deal program to directly assist women was the Works Progress Administration (WPA), begun in 1935. It hired single women, widows, or women with disabled or absent husbands. The WPA employed about 500,000 women and they were assigned mostly to unskilled jobs. 295,000 worked on sewing projects that made 300 million items of clothing and bedding to be given away to families on relief and to hospitals and orphanages. Women also were hired for the WPA's school lunch program. Both men and women were hired for the small but highly publicized arts programs (such as music, theater, and writing).

The Social Security program was designed to help retired workers and widows but did not include domestic workers, farmers or farm laborers, the jobs most often held by blacks. However, Social Security was not a relief program and it was not designed for short-term needs, as very few people received benefits before 1942.

Roosevelt's New Deal Recovery programs focused on stabilizing the economy by creating long-term employment opportunities, decreasing agricultural supply to drive prices up, and helping homeowners pay mortgages and stay in their homes, which also kept the banks solvent. In a survey of economic historians conducted by Robert Whaples, Professor of Economics at Wake Forest University, anonymous questionnaires were sent to members of the Economic History Association. Members were asked to disagree, agree, or agree with provisos with the statement that read: "Taken as a whole, government policies of the New Deal served to lengthen and deepen the Great Depression". While only 6% of economic historians who worked in the history department of their universities agreed with the statement, 27% of those that work in the economics department agreed. Almost an identical percent of the two groups (21% and 22%) agreed with the statement "with provisos" (a conditional stipulation) while 74% of those who worked in the history department and 51% in the economic department disagreed with the statement outright.

Economic growth and unemployment (1933-1941)

From 1933 to 1941, the economy expanded at an average rate of 7.7% per year. Despite high economic growth, unemployment rates fell slowly.

John Maynard Keynes explained that situation as an underemployment equilibrium where skeptic business prospects prevent companies from hiring new employees. It was seen as a form of cyclical unemployment.

At the beginning of the Great Depression, many economists traditionally argued against deficit spending. The fear was that government spending would "crowd out" private investment and would thus not have any effect on the economy, a proposition known as the Treasury view, but Keynesian economics rejected that view. They argued that by spending vastly more money-using fiscal policy-the government could provide the needed stimulus through the multiplier effect. Without that stimulus, business simply would not hire more people, especially the low skilled and supposedly "untrainable" men who had been unemployed for years and lost any job skill they once had. Keynes visited the White House in 1934 to urge President Roosevelt to increase deficit spending. Roosevelt afterwards complained that "he left a whole rigmarole of figures - he must be a mathematician rather than a political economist".

The New Deal tried public works, farm subsidies and other devices to reduce unemployment, but Roosevelt never completely gave up trying to balance the budget. Between 1933 and 1941, the average federal budget deficit was 3% per year. Roosevelt did not fully utilize[clarification needed ] deficit spending. The effects of federal public works spending were largely offset by Herbert Hoover's large tax increase in 1932, whose full effects for the first time were felt in 1933 and it was undercut by spending cuts, especially the Economy Act. According to Keynesians like Paul Krugman, the New Deal therefore was not as successful in the short run as it was in the long run.

Following the Keynesian consensus (that lasted until the 1970s), the traditional view was that federal deficit spending associated with the war brought full-employment output while monetary policy was just aiding the process. In this view, the New Deal did not end the Great Depression, but halted the economic collapse and ameliorated the worst of the crises.

Milton Friedman

More influential among economists has been the monetarist interpretation by Milton Friedman as put forth in A Monetary History of the United States,[citation needed ] which includes a full-scale monetary history of what he calls the " Great Contraction." Friedman concentrated on the failures before 1933 and points out that between 1929 and 1932 the Federal Reserve allowed the money supply to fall by a third which is seen as the major cause that turned a normal recession into a Great Depression. Friedman especially criticized the decisions of Hoover and the Federal Reserve not to save banks going bankrupt. Friedman's arguments got an endorsement from a surprising source when Fed Governor Ben Bernanke made this statement:

Let me end my talk by abusing slightly my status as an official representative of the Federal Reserve. I would like to say to Milton and Anna: Regarding the Great Depression, you're right. We did it. We're very sorry. But thanks to you, we won't do it again.

Monetarists state that the banking and monetary reforms were a necessary and sufficient response to the crises. They reject the approach of Keynesian deficit spending. In an interview in 2000, Friedman said:

You have to distinguish between two classes of New Deal policies. One class of New Deal policies was reform: wage and price control, the Blue Eagle, the national industrial recovery movement. I did not support those. The other part of the new deal policy was relief and recovery ... providing relief for the unemployed, providing jobs for the unemployed, and motivating the economy to expand ... an expansive monetary policy. Those parts of the New Deal I did support.

Bernanke and Parkinson: cleared the way for a natural recovery

Ben Bernanke and Martin Parkinson declared in "Unemployment, Inflation, and Wages in the American Depression" (1989) that "the New Deal is better characterized as having cleared the way for a natural recovery (for example, by ending deflation and rehabilitating the financial system) rather than as being the engine of recovery itself".

Challenging the traditional view, monetarists and New Keynesians like J. Bradford DeLong, Lawrence Summers and Christina Romer argued that recovery was essentially complete prior to 1942 and that monetary policy was the crucial source of pre-1942 recovery. The extraordinary growth in money supply beginning in 1933 lowered real interest rates and stimulated investment spending. According to Bernanke, there was also a debt-deflation effect of the depression which was clearly offset by a reflation through the growth in money supply. However, before 1992 scholars did not realize that the New Deal provided for a huge aggregate demand stimulus through a de facto easing of monetary policy. While Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz argued in A Monetary History of the United States (1963) that the Federal Reserve System had made no attempt to increase the quantity in high-powered money and thus failed to foster recovery, they somehow did not investigate the impact of the monetary policy of the New Deal. In 1992, Christina Romer explained in "What Ended the Great Depression?" that the rapid growth in money supply beginning in 1933 can be traced back to a large unsterilized gold inflow to the U.S. which was partly due to political instability in Europe, but to a larger degree to the revaluation of gold through the Gold Reserve Act. The Roosevelt administration had chosen not to sterilize the gold inflow precisely because they hoped that the growth of money supply would stimulate the economy.

Replying to DeLong et al. in the Journal of Economic History, J. R. Vernon argues that deficit spending leading up to and during World War II still played a large part in the overall recovery, according to his study "half or more of the recovery occurred during 1941 and 1942".

According to Peter Temin, Barry Wigmore, Gauti B. Eggertsson and Christina Romer, the biggest primary impact of the New Deal on the economy and the key to recovery and to end the Great Depression was brought about by a successful management of public expectations. The thesis is based on the observation that after years of deflation and a very severe recession important economic indicators turned positive just in March 1933 when Roosevelt took office. Consumer prices turned from deflation to mild inflation, industrial production bottomed out in March 1933, investment doubled in 1933 with a turnaround in March 1933. There were no monetary forces to explain that turnaround. Money supply was still falling and short-term interest rates remained close to zero. Before March 1933, people expected a further deflation and recession so that even interest rates at zero did not stimulate investment. However, when Roosevelt announced major regime changes people[who? ] began to expect inflation and an economic expansion. With those expectations, interest rates at zero began to stimulate investment just as they were expected to do. Roosevelt's fiscal and monetary policy regime change helped to make his policy objectives credible. The expectation of higher future income and higher future inflation stimulated demand and investments. The analysis suggests that the elimination of the policy dogmas of the gold standard, a balanced budget in times of crises and small government led endogenously to a large shift in expectation that accounts for about 70-80 percent of the recovery of output and prices from 1933 to 1937. If the regime change had not happened and the Hoover policy had continued, the economy would have continued its free-fall in 1933 and output would have been 30 percent lower in 1937 than in 1933.

Followers of the real business-cycle theory believe that the New Deal caused the depression to persist longer than it would otherwise have. Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian say Roosevelt's policies prolonged the depression by seven years. According to their study, the "New Deal labor and industrial policies did not lift the economy out of the Depression", but that the "New Deal policies are an important contributing factor to the persistence of the Great Depression". They claim that the New Deal "cartelization policies are a key factor behind the weak recovery". They say that the "abandonment of these policies coincided with the strong economic recovery of the 1940s". The study by Cole and Ohanian is based on a real business-cycle theory model. Laurence Seidman noted that according to the assumptions of Cole and Ohanian, the labor market clears instantaneously, which leads to the incredible conclusion that the surge in unemployment between 1929 and 1932 (before the New Deal) was in their opinion both optimal and solely based on voluntary unemployment. Additionally, Cole and Ohanian's argument does not count workers employed through New Deal programs. Such programs built or renovated 2,500 hospitals, 45,000 schools, 13,000 parks and playgrounds, 7,800 bridges, 700,000 miles (1,100,000 km) of roads, 1,000 airfields and employed 50,000 teachers through programs that rebuilt the country's entire rural school system.

The economic reforms were mainly intended to rescue the capitalist system by providing a more rational framework in which it could operate. The banking system was made less vulnerable. The regulation of the stock market and the prevention of some corporate abuses relating to the sale of securities and corporate reporting addressed the worst excesses. Roosevelt allowed trade unions to take their place in labor relations and created the triangular partnership between employers, employees and government.

Paul Krugman stated that the institutions built by the New Deal remain the bedrock of the United States economic stability. Against the background of the 2007-2012 global financial crisis, he explained that the financial crises would have been much worse if the New Deals Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation had not insured most bank deposits and older Americans would have felt much more insecure without Social Security. Economist Milton Friedman after 1960 attacked Social Security from a free market view stating that it had created welfare dependency.

The New Deal banking reform has weakened since the 1980s. The repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999 allowed the shadow banking system to grow rapidly. Since it was neither regulated nor covered by a financial safety net, the shadow banking system was central to the financial crisis of 2007-2008 and the subsequent Great Recession.

While it is essentially consensus among historians and academics that the New Deal brought about a large increase in the power of the federal government, there has been some scholarly debate concerning the results of this federal expansion. Historians like Arthur M. Schlesinger and James T. Patterson have argued that the augmentation of the federal government exacerbated tensions between the federal and state governments. However, contemporaries such as Ira Katznelson have suggested that due to certain conditions on the allocation of federal funds, namely that the individual states get to control them, the federal government managed to avoid any tension with states over their rights. This is a prominent debate concerning the historiography of federalism in the United States and-as Schlesinger and Patterson have observed-the New Deal marked an era when the federal-state power balance shifted further in favor of the federal government, which heightened tensions between the two levels of government in the United States.

However, Schlesinger has disputed Katznelson's claim and has argued that the increase in the power of the federal government was perceived to come at the cost of states' rights, thereby aggravating state governments, which exacerbated federal-state tensions. Schlesinger has utilized quotes from the time to highlight this point and has observed that "the actions of the New Deal, [Ogden L.] Mills said, "abolish the sovereignty of the States. They make of a government of limited powers one of unlimited authority over the lives of us all".

Moreover, Schlesinger has argued that this federal-state tension was not a one-way street and that the federal government became just as aggravated with the state governments as they did with it. State governments were often guilty of inhibiting or delaying federal policies. Whether through intentional methods, like sabotage, or unintentional ones, like simple administrative overload-either way, these problems aggravated the federal government and thus heightened federal-state tensions. Schlesinger has also noted that "students of public administration have never taken sufficient account of the capacity of lower levels of government to sabotage or defy even a masterful President".

James T. Patterson has reiterated this argument, though he observes that this increased tension can be accounted for not just from a political perspective, but from an economic one too. Patterson has argued that the tension between the federal and state governments at least partly also resulted from the economic strain under which the states had been put by the federal government's various policies and agencies. Some states were either simply unable to cope with the federal government's demand and thus refused to work with them, or admonished the economic restraints and actively decided to sabotage federal policies. This was demonstrated, Patterson has noted, with the handling of federal relief money by Ohio governor, Martin L. Davey. The case in Ohio became so detrimental to the federal government that Harry Hopkins, supervisor of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, had to federalize Ohio relief. Although this argument differs somewhat from Schlesinger's, the source of federal-state tension remained the growth of the federal government. As Patterson has asserted, "though the record of the FERA was remarkably good-almost revolutionary-in these respects it was inevitable, given the financial requirements imposed on deficit-ridden states, that friction would develop between governors and federal officials".

In this dispute, it can be inferred that Katznelson and Schlesinger and Patterson have only disagreed on their inference of the historical evidence. While both parties have agreed that the federal government expanded and even that states had a degree of control over the allocation of federal funds, they have disputed the consequences of these claims. Katznelson has asserted that it created mutual acquiescence between the levels of government, while Schlesinger and Patterson have suggested that it provoked contempt for the state governments on the part of the federal government and vice versa, thus exacerbating their relations. In short, irrespective of the interpretation this era marked an important time in the historiography of federalism and also nevertheless provided some narrative on the legacy of federal-state relations.

The initial perception of the New Deal was mixed. On the one hand, the eyes of the world were upon the United States because many American and European democrats saw in Roosevelt's reform program a positive counterweight to the seductive powers of the two great alternative systems, communism and fascism. As the historian Isaiah Berlin wrote in 1955: "The only light in the darkness was the administration of Mr. Roosevelt and the New Deal in the United States".

By contrast, enemies of the New Deal sometimes called it "fascist", but they meant very different things. Communists denounced the New Deal in 1933 and 1934 as fascist in the sense that it was under the control of big business. They dropped that line of thought when Stalin switched to the "Popular Front" plan of cooperation with liberals.

In 1934, Roosevelt defended himself against those critics in a "fireside chat":

[Some] will try to give you new and strange names for what we are doing. Sometimes they will call it 'Fascism', sometimes 'Communism', sometimes 'Regimentation', sometimes 'Socialism'. But, in so doing, they are trying to make very complex and theoretical something that is really very simple and very practical.... Plausible self-seekers and theoretical die-hards will tell you of the loss of individual liberty. Answer this question out of the facts of your own life. Have you lost any of your rights or liberty or constitutional freedom of action and choice?

After 1945, only few observers continued to see similarities and later on some scholars such as Kiran Klaus Patel, Heinrich August Winkler and John Garraty came to the conclusion that comparisons of the alternative systems do not have to end in an apology for Nazism since comparisons rely on the examination of both similarities and differences. Their preliminary studies on the origins of the fascist dictatorships and the American (reformed) democracy came to the conclusion that besides essential differences "the crises led to a limited degree of convergence" on the level of economic and social policy.[disputed ] The most important cause was the growth of state interventionism since in the face of the catastrophic economic situation both societies no longer counted on the power of the market to heal itself.

John Garraty wrote that the National Recovery Administration (NRA) was based on economic experiments in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, without establishing a totalitarian dictatorship. Contrary to that, historians such as Hawley have examined the origins of the NRA in detail, showing the main inspiration came from Senators Hugo Black and Robert F. Wagner and from American business leaders such as the Chamber of Commerce. The model for the NRA was Woodrow Wilson's War Industries Board, in which Johnson had been involved too. Historians argue that direct comparisons between Fascism and New Deal are invalid since there is no distinctive form of fascist economic organization. Gerald Feldman wrote that fascism has not contributed anything to economic thought and had no original vision of a new economic order replacing capitalism. His argument correlates with Mason's that economic factors alone are an insufficient approach to understand fascism and that decisions taken by fascists in power cannot be explained within a logical economic framework. In economic terms, both ideas were within the general tendency of the 1930s to intervene in the free market capitalist economy, at the price of its laissez-faire character, "to protect the capitalist structure endangered by endogenous crises tendencies and processes of impaired self-regulation".

Stanley Payne, a historian of fascism, examined possible fascist influences in the United States by looking at the KKK and its offshoots and movements led by Father Coughlin and Huey Long. He concluded that "the various populist, nativist, and rightist movements in the United States during the 1920s and 1930s fell distinctly short of fascism". According to Kevin Passmore, lecturer in History at Cardiff University, the failure of fascism in the United States was due to the social policies of the New Deal that channelled anti-establishment populism into the left rather than the extreme right.

In a 1968 essay, Barton J. Bernstein compiled a chronicle of missed opportunities and inadequate responses to problems. The New Deal may have saved capitalism from itself, Bernstein charged, but it had failed to help-and in many cases actually harmed-those groups most in need of assistance. In The New Deal (1967), Paul K. Conkin similarly chastised the government of the 1930s for its weak policies toward marginal farmers, for its failure to institute sufficiently progressive tax reform, and its excessive generosity toward select business interests. In 1966, Howard Zinn criticized the New Deal for working actively to actually preserve the worst evils of capitalism.

By the 1970s, liberal historians were responding with a defense of the New Deal based on numerous local and microscopic studies. Praise increasingly focused on Eleanor Roosevelt, seen as a more appropriate crusading reformer than her husband. Since then, research on the New Deal has been less interested in the question of whether the New Deal was a "conservative", "liberal", or "revolutionary" phenomenon than in the question of constraints within which it was operating.

In a series of articles, political sociologist Theda Skocpol has emphasized the issue of " state capacity" as an often-crippling constraint. Ambitious reform ideas often failed, she argued, because of the absence of a government bureaucracy with significant strength and expertise to administer them. Other more recent works have stressed the political constraints that the New Deal encountered. Conservative skepticism about the efficacy of government was strong both in Congress and among many citizens. Thus some scholars have stressed that the New Deal was not just a product of its liberal backers, but also a product of the pressures of its conservative opponents.

During the New Deal the communists established a network of a dozen or so members working for the government. They were low level and had a minor influence on policies. Harold Ware led the largest group which worked in the Agriculture Adjustment Administration (AAA) until Secretary of Agriculture Wallace got rid of them all in a famous purge in 1935. Ware died in 1935 and some individuals such as Alger Hiss moved to other government jobs. Other communists worked for the National Labor Relations Board, the National Youth Administration, the Works Progress Administration, the Federal Theater Project, the Treasury and the Department of State.

Since 1933, politicians and pundits have often called for a "new deal" regarding an object-that is, they demand a completely new, large-scale approach to a project. As Arthur A. Ekirch Jr. (1971) has shown, the New Deal stimulated utopianism in American political and social thought on a wide range of issues. In Canada, Conservative Prime Minister Richard B. Bennett in 1935 proposed a "new deal" of regulation, taxation and social insurance that was a copy of the American program, but Bennett's proposals were not enacted and he was defeated for reelection in October 1935. In accordance with the rise of the use of U.S. political phraseology in Britain, the Labour government of Tony Blair termed some of its employment programs "new deal", in contrast to the Conservative Party's promise of the "British Dream".

The Works Progress Administration subsidized artists, musicians, painters and writers on relief with a group of projects called Federal One. While the WPA program was by far the most widespread, it was preceded by three programs administered by the US Treasury which hired commercial artists at usual commissions to add murals and sculptures to federal buildings. The first of these efforts was the short-lived Public Works of Art Project, organized by Edward Bruce, an American businessman and artist. Bruce also led the Treasury Department's Section of Painting and Sculpture (later renamed the Section of Fine Arts) and the Treasury Relief Art Project (TRAP). The Resettlement Administration (RA) and Farm Security Administration (FSA) had major photography programs. The New Deal arts programs emphasized regionalism, social realism, class conflict, proletarian interpretations and audience participation. The unstoppable collective powers of common man, contrasted to the failure of individualism, was a favorite theme.

Many writers chose to write about the New Deal and whether they were for or against it and if it was helping the country out. Some of these writers were Ruth McKenney, Edmund Wilson and Scott Fitzgerald. Another subject that was very popular for novelists was the condition of labor. They ranged from subjects on social protest to strikes.

Under the WPA, the Federal Theatre project flourished. Countless theatre productions around the country were staged. This allowed thousands of actors and directors to be employed, among them were Orson Welles, and John Huston.

Films of the late New Deal era such as Citizen Kane (1941) ridiculed so-called "great men" while the heroism of the common man appeared in numerous movies, such as The Grapes of Wrath (1940). Thus in Frank Capra's famous films, including Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), Meet John Doe (1941) and It's a Wonderful Life (1946), the common people come together to battle and overcome villains who are corrupt politicians controlled by very rich, greedy capitalists.

By contrast, there was also a smaller but influential stream of anti-New Deal art. Gutzon Borglum's sculptures on Mount Rushmore emphasized great men in history (his designs had the approval of Calvin Coolidge). Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway disliked the New Deal and celebrated the autonomy of perfected written work as opposed to the New Deal idea of writing as performative labor. The Southern Agrarians celebrated premodern regionalism and opposed the TVA as a modernizing, disruptive force. Cass Gilbert, a conservative who believed architecture should reflect historic traditions and the established social order, designed the new Supreme Court building (1935). Its classical lines and small size contrasted sharply with the gargantuan modernistic federal buildings going up in the Washington Mall that he detested. Hollywood managed to synthesize liberal and conservative streams as in Busby Berkeley's Gold Digger musicals, where the storylines exalt individual autonomy while the spectacular musical numbers show abstract populations of interchangeable dancers securely contained within patterns beyond their control.

The New Deal had many programs and new agencies, most of which were universally known by their initials. Most were abolished during World War II while others remain in operation today or formed into different programs. They included the following:

Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA): a Hoover program to create unskilled jobs for relief; expanded by Roosevelt and Harry Hopkins; replaced by WPA in 1935.

United States bank holiday, 1933: closed all banks until they became certified by federal reviewers.

Abandonment of gold standard, 1933: gold reserves no longer backed currency; still exists.

Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), 1933-1942: employed young men to perform unskilled work in rural areas; under United States Army supervision; separate program for Native Americans.

Homeowners Loan Corporation (HOLC): helped people keep their homes, the government bought properties from the bank allowing people to pay the government instead of the banks in installments they could afford, keeping people in their homes and banks afloat.

Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), 1933: effort to modernize very poor region (most of Tennessee), centered on dams that generated electricity on the Tennessee River; still exists.

Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA), 1933: raised farm prices by cutting total farm output of major crops and livestock; replaced by a new AAA because the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional.

National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), 1933: industries set up codes to reduce unfair competition, raise wages and prices; ended 1935. The Supreme Court ruled the NIRA unconstitutional.

Public Works Administration (PWA), 1933: built large public works projects; used private contractors (did not directly hire unemployed). Ended 1938.

Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC): insures bank deposits and supervises state banks; still exists.

Glass-Steagall Act: regulates investment banking; repealed 1999 (not repealed, only two provisions changed).

Securities Act of 1933, created the SEC, 1933: codified standards for sale and purchase of stock, required awareness of investments to be accurately disclosed; still exists.

Civil Works Administration (CWA), 1933-1934: provided temporary jobs to millions of unemployed.

Indian Reorganization Act, 1934: moved away from assimilation; policy dropped.

Social Security Act (SSA), 1935: provided financial assistance to: elderly, handicapped, paid for by employee and employer payroll contributions; required 7 years contributions, so first payouts were in 1942; still exists.

Works Progress Administration (WPA), 1935: a national labor program for more than 2 million unemployed; created useful construction work for unskilled men; also sewing projects for women and arts projects for unemployed artists, musicians and writers; ended 1943.

National Labor Relations Act (NLRA); Wagner Act, 1935: set up the National Labor Relations Board to supervise labor-management relations. In the 1930s, it strongly favored labor unions. Modified by the Taft-Hartley Act (1947); still exists.

Judicial Reorganization Bill, 1937: gave the President power to appoint a new Supreme Court judge for every judge 70 years or older; failed to pass Congress.

Federal Crop Insurance Corporation (FCIC), 1938: insures crops and livestock against loss of production or revenue. Was restructured during the creation of the Risk Management Agency in 1996 but continues to exist.

Surplus Commodities Program (1936): gives away food to the poor; still exists as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

Fair Labor Standards Act 1938: established a maximum normal work week of 44 hours and a minimum wage of 40 cents/hour and outlawed most forms of child labor, though it still exists. The working hours have been lowered to 40 over the years, and the minimum wage has climbed to $7.25.[236]

"Most indexes worsened until the summer of 1932, which may be called the low point of the depression economically and psychologically". Economic indicators show the American economy reached nadir in summer 1932 to February 1933, then began recovering until the recession of 1937-1938. Thus the Federal Reserve Industrial Production Index hit its low of 52.8 on July 1, 1932 and was practically unchanged at 54.3 on March 1, 1933, but by July 1, 1933 it reached 85.5 (with 1935-39 = 100 and for comparison 2005 = 1,342). In Roosevelt's 12 years in office, the economy had an 8.5% compound annual growth of GDP, the highest growth rate in the history of any industrial country, but recovery was slow and by 1939 the gross domestic product (GDP) per adult was still 27% below trend.

Darby counts WPA workers as employed; Lebergott as unemployed

Source: Historical Statistics US (1976) series D-86; Smiley 1983

Badger, Anthony J. The New Deal: The Depression Years, 1933-1940. (2002) general survey from British perspective

Chafe, William H. ed. The Achievement of American Liberalism: The New Deal and its Legacies (2003)

Collins, Sheila and Gertrude Goldberg, When Government Helped: Learning from the Successes and Failures of the New Deal, (Oxford UP, 2014), ISBN 9780199990696

Conkin, Paul K. The New Deal. (1967), a brief New Left critique.

Dubofsky, Melvyn, ed. The New Deal: Conflicting Interpretations and Shifting Perspectives. (1992), older historiography

Eden, Robert, ed. New Deal and Its Legacy: Critique and Reappraisal (1989), essays by scholars

Encyclopaedia Britannica, "New Deal. (2020) online

Hiltzik, Michael. The New Deal: A Modern History (2011), popular history by journalist; 512pp

Kennedy, David M. Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945. (1999), survey; Pulitzer Prize borrow for 14 days

Kirkendall, Richard S. "The New Deal As Watershed: The Recent Literature", The Journal of American History, (1968) 54#4 pp. 839-52. in JSTOR, older historiography

McJimsey George T. The Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (2000) online

Polenberg, Richard. "The Era of Franklin D. Roosevelt 1933-1945 A Brief History with Documents" ISBN 0-312-13310-3

Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr (1957-1960), The Age of Roosevelt, the 3-volume classic narrative history. Strongly supports FDR.

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. The Age of Roosevelt vol 1: The Crisis Of The Old Order (1919-1933) (1956) online to March 1933

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. The Age Of Roosevelt vol 2: The Coming of the New Deal (1958) online covers 1933-34

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. The Age of Roosevelt vol 3: The Age of Upheaval (1960); online

Sitkoff, Harvard. ed. Fifty Years Later: The New Deal Evaluated. (1984). A friendly liberal evaluation.

Smith, Jason Scott. A Concise History of the New Deal (2014)

Arrington, Leonard J. "Western Agriculture and the New Deal." Agricultural History 44#4 (1970): 337-53.

Biles, Roger. The South and the New Deal (2006).

Biles, Roger. Big City Boss in Depression and War: Mayor Edward J. Kelly of Chicago. (1984); mayor 1933-1947

Biles, Roger. Memphis: In the Great Depression (U of Tennessee Press, 1986).

Blakey, George T. Hard Times and New Deal in Kentucky: 1929-1939 (1986).

Braeman, John, Robert H. Bremner and David Brody, eds. The New Deal: Volume Two - the State and Local Levels (1975); 434 pp; chapters on Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Wyoming, Montana, Colorado, New Mexico, Oregon, Pittsburgh, and Kansas City.

Christin, Pierre, and Olivier Balez, eds. Robert Moses: The Master Builder of New York City (2014).

Ferguson, Karen Jane. Black Politics in New Deal Atlanta (2002).

Grant, Michael Johnston. Down and Out on the Family Farm: Rural Rehabilitation in the Great Plains, 1929-1945 (2002).

Heineman, Kenneth J. A Catholic New Deal: Religion and Reform in Depression Pittsburgh (2005).

Ingalls, Robert P. Herbert H. Lehman and New York's Little New Deal (1975).

Leader, Leonard. Los Angeles and the Great Depression. (1991). 344 pp.

Lowitt, Richard. The New Deal and the West (1984).

Malone, Michael P. (1969). "the New Deal in Idaho". Pacific Historical Review. 38 (3): 293-310. doi:10.2307/3636101. JSTOR 3636101.

Mullins, William H. The Depression and the Urban West Coast, 1929-1933: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland. (1991). 176 pp.

Nicolaides, Becky M. My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920-1965. (2002). 412 pp.

Patterson, James T. The New Deal and the States: Federalism in Transition (Princeton UP, 1969).

Stave, Bruce M. The New Deal and the Last Hurrah: Pittsburgh Machine Politics (1970).

Sternsher, Bernard ed., Hitting Home: The Great Depression in Town and Country (1970), essays by scholars on local history.

Stock, Catherine McNicol. Main Street in Crisis: The Great Depression and the Old Middle Class on the Northern Plains (1992).

Strickland, Arvarh E. "The New Deal Comes to Illinois." Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 63#1 (1970): 55-68. in JSTOR

Thomas, Jerry Bruce. An Appalachian New Deal: West Virginia in the Great Depression (1998).

Trout, Charles H. Boston, the Great Depression, and the New Deal (1977).

Tweton, D. Jerome, and Roberta Klugman. The New Deal at the Grass Roots: Programs for the People in Otter Tail County, Minnesota (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1988).

Volanto, Keith J. Texas, Cotton, and the New Deal (2005).

Volanto, Keith. "Where are the New Deal Historians of Texas?: A Literature Review of the New Deal Experience in Texas." East Texas Historical Journal 48+2 (2010): 7+ online

Wickens, James F. "The New Deal in Colorado." Pacific Historical Review 38#3 (1969): 275-91. in JSTOR

Williams, Mason B. City of Ambition: FDR, LaGuardia, and the Making of Modern New York (2013).

Beasley, Maurine H., Holly C. Shulman, Henry R. Beasley. The Eleanor Roosevelt Encyclopedia (2001)

Brands, H.W. Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (2008)

Charles, Searle F. Minister of Relief: Harry Hopkins and the Depression (1963)

Cohen, Adam, Nothing to Fear: FDR's Inner Circle and the Hundred Days that Created Modern America (2009)

Graham, Otis L. and Meghan Robinson Wander, eds. Franklin D. Roosevelt: His Life and Times. (1985). An encyclopedic reference. online

Ingalls, Robert P. Herbert H. Lehman and New York's Little New Deal (1975) online

McJimsey, George T. Harry Hopkins : ally of the poor and defender of Democracy (1987) online

Pederson, William D. ed. A Companion to Franklin D. Roosevelt (Blackwell Companions to American History) (2011); 35 essays by scholars; many deal with politics

Schwarz, Jordan A. Liberal: Adolf A. Berle and the vision of an American era (1987).

Sternsher, Bernard. Rexford Tugwell and the New Deal (1964) online

Economics, farms, labor and relief

Bernstein, Irving. Turbulent Years: A History of the American Worker, 1933-1941 (1970), cover labor unions

Blumberg, Barbara. The New Deal and the Unemployed: The View from New York City (1977).

Bremer, William W. "Along the American Way: The New Deal's Work Relief Programs for the Unemployed". Journal of American History 62 (December 1975): 636,52. in JSTOR

Brock, William R. Welfare, Democracy and the New Deal (1988), a British view

Burns, Helen M. The American Banking Community and New Deal Banking Reforms, 1933-1935 (1974)

Folsom, Burton. New Deal or Raw Deal?: How FDR's Economic Legacy has Damaged America (2008) ISBN 1-4165-9222-9, conservative interpretation

Fishback, Price. "The Newest on the New Deal" Essays in Economic & Business History 36#1 (2018) covers distribution and impact of spending and lending programs; online

Fox, Cybelle. Three Worlds of Relief: Race, Immigration, and the American Welfare State from the Progressive Era to the New Deal (2012) excerpt and text search

Friedman, Milton, and Anna Jacobson Schwartz. From New Deal Banking Reform to World War II Inflation (Princeton UP, 2014) online.

Gordon, Colin. New Deals: Business, Labor, and Politics, 1920-1935 (1994)

Grant, Michael Johnston. Down and Out on the Family Farm: Rural Rehabilitation in the Great Plains, 1929-1945 (2002)

Hawley, Ellis W. The New Deal and the Problem of Monopoly (1966)

Howard, Donald S. The WPA and Federal Relief Policy (1943)

Huibregtse, Jon R. American Railroad Labor and the Genesis of the New Deal, 1919-1935; (University Press of Florida; 2010; 172 pp.)

Jensen, Richard J. (1989). "The Causes and Cures of Unemployment in the Great Depression". Journal of Interdisciplinary History. 19 (4): 553-83. doi:10.2307/203954. JSTOR 203954.

Leff, Mark H. The Limits of Symbolic Reform: The New Deal and Taxation (1984)

Lindley, Betty Grimes and Ernest K. Lindley. A New Deal for Youth: The Story of the National Youth Administration (1938)

Malamud; Deborah C. "'Who They Are - or Were': Middle-Class Welfare in the Early New Deal" University of Pennsylvania Law Review v 151 No. 6 2003. pp. 2019+.

Meriam; Lewis. Relief and Social Security (1946). Highly detailed analysis and statistical summary of all New Deal relief programs; 912 pages online

Mitchell, Broadus. Depression Decade: From New Era through New Deal, 1929-1941 (1947), survey by economic historian

Moore, James R. "Sources of New Deal Economic Policy: The International Dimension." Journal of American History 61.3 (1974): 728-744. online

Morris, Charles R. A Rabble of Dead Money: The Great Crash and the Global Depression: 1929-1939 (PublicAffairs, 2017), 389 pp. online review

Myers, Margaret G. Financial History of the United States (1970). pp 317-42. online

Parker, Randall E. Reflections on the Great Depression (2002) interviews with 11 leading economists

Powell, Jim FDR's Folly: How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression (2003) ISBN 0-7615-0165-7

Rosenof, Theodore. Economics in the Long Run: New Deal Theorists and Their Legacies, 1933-1993 (1997)

Rothbard, Murray. America's Great Depression (1963), a libertarian approach

Saloutos, Theodore. The American Farmer and the New Deal (1982).

Schwartz, Bonnie Fox. The Civil works administration, 1933-1934: the business of emergency employment in the New Deal (Princeton University Press, 2014)

Singleton, Jeff. The American Dole: Unemployment Relief and the Welfare State in the Great Depression (2000)

Skocpol, Theda; Finegold, Kenneth (1982). "State Capacity and Economic Intervention in the Early New Deal" (PDF). Political Science Quarterly. 97 (2): 255-278. doi:10.2307/2149478. JSTOR 2149478. S2CID 155685115. Archived from the original (PDF) on June 15, 2020.

Skocpol, Theda; Finegold, Kenneth (1977). "Explaining New Deal Labor Policy". American Political Science Review. 84 (4): 1297-304. doi:10.2307/1963265. JSTOR 1963265.

Smith, Jason Scott. Building new deal liberalism: The political economy of public works, 1933-1956 (Cambridge UP, 2006).

Zelizer, Julian E. (2000). "The Forgotten Legacy of the New Deal: Fiscal Conservatism and the Roosevelt Administration, 1933-1938". Presidential Studies Quarterly. 30 (2): 331. doi:10.1111/j.0360-4918.2000.00115.x.

Best, Gary Dean. The Nickel and Dime Decade: American Popular Culture during the 1930s (1993) online

Cooney, Terry A. Balancing Acts: American Thought and Culture in the 1930s (Twayne, 1995)

Dickstein, Morris. Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression (2009)

Eldridge, David Nicholas. American Culture in the 1930s (Edinburgh University Press, 2008) online

Kelly, Andrew. Kentucky by Design: The Decorative Arts, American Culture, and the Federal Art Project's Index of American Design (University Press of Kentucky, 2015)

McKinzie, Richard. The New Deal for Artists (1984), well illustrated scholarly study

Mathews, Jane De Hart (1975). "Arts and the People: The New Deal Quest for a Cultural Democracy". Journal of American History. 62 (2): 316-39. JSTOR 1903257.

Pells, Richard. Radical Visions and American Dreams: Culture and Social Thought in the Depression Years (1973).

Roddick, Nick. A New Deal in Entertainment: Warner Brothers in the 1930s (London, BFI, 1983).

Shlaes, Amity. The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression (2007), a conservative approach

Shindler, Colin. Hollywood in Crisis: Cinema and American Society, 1929-1939 (Routledge, 1996).

Stott, William. Documentary Expression and Thirties America (University of Chicago Press, 1973).

Wecter, Dixon. The Age of the Great Depression, 1929-1941 (1948), social history

Alswang, John. The New Deal and American Politics (1978), voting analysis

Alter, Jonathan. The Defining Moment: FDR's Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope (2006), popular account

Badger, Anthony J. FDR: The First Hundred Days (2008)

Badger, Anthony J. New Deal / New South: An Anthony J. Badger Reader (2007)

Bernstein, Barton J. "The New Deal: The Conservative Achievements of Liberal Reform". In Barton J. Bernstein, ed., Towards a New Past: Dissenting Essays in American History, pp. 263-88. (1968), an influential New Left attack on the New Deal.

Brinkley, Alan. The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War. (1995) what happened after 1937

Cobb, James and Michael Namaroto, eds. The New Deal and the South (1984).

Domhoff, G. William, and Michael J. Webber. Class and Power in the New Deal: Corporate Moderates, Southern Democrats, and the Liberal-Labor Coalition (Stanford University Press; 2011) 304 pp. uses class dominance theory to examine the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the National Labor Relations Act, and the Social Security Act.

Ekirch Jr., Arthur A. Ideologies and Utopias: The Impact of the New Deal on American Thought (1971)

Fraser, Steve and Gary Gerstle, eds., The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, (1989), essays focused on the long-term results.

Garraty, John A. (1973). "The New Deal, National Socialism, and the Great Depression". American Historical Review. 78 (4): 907-44. doi:10.2307/1858346. JSTOR 1858346.

Higgs, Robert. Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government (1987), Austrian school critique

Katznelson, Ira. (2013). Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time. Liveright.

Ladd, Everett Carll and Charles D. Hadley. Transformations of the American Party System: Political Coalitions from the New Deal to the 1970s (1975), voting behavior

Lowitt, Richard. The New Deal and the West (1984).

Manza, Jeff (2000). "Political Sociological Models of the U.S. New Deal". Annual Review of Sociology. 26: 297-322. doi:10.1146/annurev.soc.26.1.297.

Milkis, Sidney M. and Jerome M. Mileur, eds. The New Deal and the Triumph of Liberalism (2002)

Rosen, Eliot A. The Republican Party in the Age of Roosevelt: Sources of Anti-Government Conservatism in the United States (2014)

Sitkoff, Harvard. A New Deal for Blacks: The Emergence of Civil Rights as a National Issue: The Depression Decade (2008)

Smith, Jason Scott. Building New Deal Liberalism: The Political Economy of Public Works, 1933-1956 (2005).

Szalay, Michael. New Deal Modernism: American Literature and the Invention of the Welfare State (2000)

Tindall, George B. The Emergence of the New South, 1915-1945 (1967). survey of entire South

Trout, Charles H. Boston, the Great Depression, and the New Deal (1977)

Venn, Fiona (1998). The New Deal. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ISBN 978-1-57958-145-9.

Ware, Susan. Beyond Suffrage: Women and the New Deal (1981)

Williams, Gloria-Yvonne. (2014). "African-Americans and the Politics of Race During the New Deal." In The New Deal and the Great Depression (pp. 131-44). Kent, OH:Kent State University Press. on academia.edu author's page

Williams, Mason B. City of Ambition: FDR, La Guardia, and the Making of Modern New York (2013)

Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1951 (1951) full of useful data; online

Cantril, Hadley and Mildred Strunk, eds. Public Opinion, 1935-1946 (1951), massive compilation of many public opinion polls online

Carter, Susan B. et al. eds. The Historical Statistics of the United States (6 vol: Cambridge UP, 2006); huge compilation of statistical data; online at some universities

Gallup, George Horace, ed. The Gallup Poll; Public Opinion, 1935-1971 3 vol (1972) summarizes results of each poll.

Lowitt, Richard and Maurice Beardsley, eds. One Third of a Nation: Lorena Hickock Reports on the Great Depression (1981)

Moley, Raymond. After Seven Years (1939), conservative memoir by ex-Brain Truster

Nixon, Edgar B. ed. Franklin D. Roosevelt and Foreign Affairs (3 vol 1969), covers 1933-37. 2nd series 1937-39 available on microfiche and in a 14 vol print edition at some academic libraries.

Rasmussen, Wayne D. ed Agriculture in the United States: a documentary history: vol 3: 1914-1940(Random House, 1975).

Roosevelt, Franklin D.; Rosenman, Samuel Irving, ed. The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt (13 vol, 1938, 1945); public material only (no letters); covers 1928-1945.

Zinn, Howard, ed. New Deal Thought (1966), a compilation of primary sources.

The Living New Deal Project, a digital database of the lasting effects of the New Deal founded in the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley

The Smithsonian American Art Museum's Exhibition "1934: A New Deal for Artists"

Art, Culture, and Government: The New Deal at 75. Library of Congress, American Folklife Center Documentation of March 13-14, 2008 Symposium including webcasts of presentations

Hannsgen, Greg E.and Papadimitriou, Dimitri B. Lessons from the New Deal: Did the New Deal Prolong or Worsen the Great Depression? Working Paper No. 581, The Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. October 2009.

New Deal by Alan Brinkley on History.com

Robert E. Burke Collection. 1892-1994. 60.42 cubic feet (68 boxes plus 2 oversize folders and one oversize vertical file). At the Labor Archives of Washington, University of Washington Libraries Special Collections. Contains material collected by Robert E. Burke on the New Deal from 1932 to 1959.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The New Deal was a series of programs, public work projects, financial reforms, and regulations enacted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the United States between 1933 and 1939. Major federal programs and agencies included the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), the Civil Works Administration (CWA), the Farm Security Administration (FSA), the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 (NIRA) and the Social Security Administration (SSA).