When Congress adjourned June 16th, 1933,
they basically ended that first 100 days,
a period during which Roosevelt and his administration pushed through Congress,
and Congress supported,
the passage of approximately 15 major pieces of legislation.
It was an amazing, amazing amount of legislation to come through Congress
in that amount of time. And yet, for all of that,
Roosevelt, throughout the 1930s
would struggle to deal with the problems of the Great Depression.
I tend to kind of accept the notion
that it was not anything Franklin Roosevelt did, or his administration did,
that ended the Great Depression. Rather, if we want to understand how the
depression came to end,
we probably need to look to the Second World War, primarily because of
the massive amount of federal spending
that the war entailed, things like defense contracts,
but also because of how the Second World War altered
the global economy and, sort of, the post-war position that the United States
had after the war. So, to kind of,
I guess, add some substance to that,
let me suggest a few statistics here very quickly. In 1933, there are
approximately 13 million
unemployed in the United States.
Now, if you consider the size of America's labor force
in 1933, that would be approximately 25 percent
unemployment. That's one in every four
workers who are looking for a job, and I don't think,
I know, we haven't seen anything like that since the 1930s.
In 1936, Roosevelt's
policies, apparently, were having some good effect.
The number had dropped down to about 9 million unemployed,
and they had dropped the unemployment rate down to about
16.9%.
The problem was,
and this is a bigger problem for Roosevelt in the 30s,
that in 1929, the unemployment rate
had run somewhere around 3.2 percent.
So, while Roosevelt's policies clearly improve the situation for many Americans,
they didn't necessarily bring the United States back, statistically or otherwise,
to where it had been at the end of the 1920s, that,
sort of, decade of prosperity. And what that does, really,
it opens the door to criticism
Roosevelt and the New Deal. And he'll see, during the 1930s,
plenty of criticism from both the left and the right.
Or, put another way, Roosevelt would see plenty of criticism
from people who would argue that he had gone too far, had exceeded
the constitutional powers granted to him
as president, had usurped powers of Congress
as the executive, but at the same time
Roosevelt would face criticism from people who vociferously
that he simply wasn't being radical enough, that the changes he sought to
make,
to bring back to revive, the American economy,
were not fundamental or structural enough
to really help the mass of the American people.
So, Roosevelt is, sort of, taking it from both sides,
and so is, as a result, the New Deal.
Some other more specific arguments made against Roosevelt
had to do with taxes, that in some instances they were too high,
with budgets, some said that roosevelt was being too conservative while others
complained that he wasn't being conservative enough,
that he was more than willing, too easily, to deal in deficit spending.
There were those who argued that Roosevelt's policy subverted
this idea individual initiative, that people should pull themselves up by
their bootstraps,
that they should be entrepreneurial, that they should,
they should work hard to get ahead, and if you made them dependent upon federal
monies, that they would lose that incentive,
and thus lose the values that had made the United States
the United States, made it as successful as it was.
There are others who criticized Roosevelt's policies for favoring big
business.
It was often the case, for instance, with the National Industrial Recovery Act,
that the blanket codes were being set by the largest players in the industries
covered by those codes.
That they had an excessive say in how the
codes were constructed, and often used the tool
of the NRA, the National Recovery Administration, to benefit themselves
and their big business interests. So,
you're getting it from all over.
I think it's not an unbalanced view of the New Deal.
Roosevelt's New Deal was not
salvation itself. It was not the saving grace
of the depression. And yet, it did have positive effects.
But I think it's also worthwhile to consider that the effects were not
equal for all groups in society.
And I just want to mention, very quickly, a few examples that
kind of appeal to me just a little bit.
I mentioned before that in 1933, under the auspices
of the AAA, that farmers had plowed under crops,
and they plowed under somewhere around 10.4 million acres of cotton in 1933.
They killed 6 million hogs.
That, you know that's, a bit of bad publicity when people are starving, but
the depth of the change, the depth of the impact, goes
a little bit further. And let me just suggest
a couple ways in which that happens.
One of the sort of unintended consequences
of the AAA was, effectively, the removal
of massive numbers of people from the land,
massive numbers of farmers from the land,
from farming. And it worked something like this:
under the processes put in place, under the AAA,
the parity payments, those payments that
were to be given in exchange for farmers not growing so much, to reduce supply,
those payments were intended to go
to farmers who were farming, and that would include sharecroppers.
But the distribution method for those payments often went through the landowners
who own the land on which sharecroppers farmed.
Throughout the South, to provide one example,
it made no sense, made no sense,
for landowners to share the payments
from the federal government with sharecroppers, when it would be just as
easy
to remove those sharecroppers from the land, to refuse to renew contracts
and just say, well you're on your own.
Why not just keep the money. It's your land. You're not growing crops on it.
The payment is meant for you. So, in essence, you have
what's been called a modern day enclosure movement,
if you're familiar with the enclosure movement going back to England
in which farmers were excluded from the Commons.
Well, the idea here is that farmers are excluded
from land, and they're not landowners,
their sharecroppers.
Whether or not you're removed from the land, it does become harder and harder, without
crops and without payment, to stay on the land. So, it may well be that you'll remove
yourself. The number of sharecropping farms
dropped from 776,000 in
1930 to 541,000 in 1940.
Now, there are a number of factors involved here,
but there are numerous cases in which the primary
factor forcing people from the land was that they could no longer grow crops,
and they received no remuneration from the government for
not growing crops. So, they move on.
And that adds, I mean--it's worth considering that--that adds, fundamentally,
to the continuation of the great migration, this great demographic change,
that I've talked about before. That's just one effort, on my part, to sort of
complicate the New Deal.
But in terms of the actual voices directed against
Roosevelt's New Deal, let me, in the next segment, sort of specify
and run through those.
And we'll start there.