What were the concepts of relief, recovery, and reform that formed the basis for the New Deal?

Question

I would like to understand the entire concept of the New Deal. Thank you for any input.

-IrishDancer003

Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal that is.

Answer 1

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal

A socialist idea that was intended to help people who were suffering financially. Through the years it has been abused and many people have become dependent on this aide.

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The New Deal was the name President Franklin D. Roosevelt gave to the series of programs between 1933–1938 with the goal of relief, recovery and reform of the United States economy during the Great Depression. However, the economy did not substantially recover until 1940, when war expenditures commenced.[1] Dozens of alphabet agencies were created as a result of the New Deal. Historians distinguish between the "First New Deal" of 1933, which had something for almost every group, and the "Second New Deal" (1935–37), which was less comprehensive. The opponents of the New Deal, complaining of the cost and the shift of power to Washington, stopped its expansion after 1937, and abolished many of its programs by 1943. The Supreme Court ruled the National Recovery Administration unconstitutional. The main programs still important today are Social Security and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)

The New Deal had three components: direct relief, economic recovery, and financial reform; these were also called the 'Three Rs'.

Relief was the immediate effort to help the one-third of the population that was hardest hit by the depression. Roosevelt expanded Hoover's Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) work relief program, and added the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), Public Works Administration (PWA), and (starting in 1935) the Works Progress Administration (WPA). In 1935 the social security and unemployment insurance programs were added. Separate programs were set up for relief in rural America, such as the Resettlement Administration (RA) and Farm Security Administration (FSA). These work relief programs have been praised by most economists in retrospect.[citation needed] Milton Friedman who after taking a graduate degree in economics was employed by the WPA to analyze family budgets and studied the hardships of families said that, at the time, he and his wife "regarded [these job-creation progams] appropriate responses to the critical situation" but not "the price- and wage-fixing measures of the National Recovery Administration and the Agricultural Adjustment Administration."[3] However, Friedman later concluded that all government intervention associated with the New Deal was "the wrong cure for the wrong disease," arguing that simply the money supply should have been expanded.[4]

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.

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. It included the National Recovery Administration (NRA, 1933), regulation of Wall Street (SEC, 1934), the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) farm programs (1933 and 1938), insurance of bank deposits (Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation 1933) and the Wagner Act encouraging labor unions (1935). Despite urgings by some New Dealers, there was no major anti-trust program. Roosevelt said that he opposed socialism (in the sense of state ownership of factories), and only one major program, the Tennessee Valley Authority (1933), involved government ownership of the means of production. Milton Friedman is typical of a majority of economists who have criticized the NRA and AAA for setting prices and wages, which distorted the market.[5]

Two old words now took on new meaning. "Liberal" no longer referred to classical liberalism but now meant a supporter of the New Deal; conservative meant an opponent. Whether the New Deal was successful in achieving the three Rs is usually approached not as a historical problem but as a current debate over whether the program should be a model for government action today. Liberals continue to battle conservatives. The term "New Deal" is also used to describe the liberal New Deal Coalition that Roosevelt created to support his programs, including the Democratic party, big city machines, labor unions, Catholic and Jewish minorities, African Americans, farmers, and most Southern whites.

By 1934, the Supreme Court began declaring significant parts of the New Deal unconstitutional. This led Roosevelt to propose the Court-packing Bill in 1937. Although the bill failed, the Supreme Court started upholding New Deal laws. By 1942, the Supreme Court had almost completely abandoned its "judicial activism" of striking down congressional laws, as accused by New Deal supporters. The Supreme Court ruled in Wickard v. Filburn that the Commerce Clause covered almost all such regulation allowing the necessary expansion of federal power to make the New Deal "constitutional".


[edit] The Origins of the New Deal
On the 29th of October, 1929, the crash of the U.S. stock market—known as Black Tuesday—reflected a trend of a worldwide economic crisis. In 1929–1933, unemployment in the U.S. increased from the original 4% to 25%, manufacturing output collapsed by approximately a third. Prices everywhere fell, making the burden of the repayments of debts much harder. Heavy industry, mining, lumbering and agriculture felt its impact. Retail and banking also felt the impact as millions of Americans lost their life savings in the stock market and became destitute. The impact was much less severe in white collar and service sectors, but every city and state was hit hard.

Upon accepting the Democratic nomination for president, Roosevelt promised "a new deal for the American people." (The phrase was borrowed from the title of Stuart Chase's book A New Deal published earlier that year.) Roosevelt entered office with no single ideology or plan for dealing with the depression. He was willing to try anything, and, indeed, in the "First New Deal" (1933-34) virtually every organized group (except the Socialists and Communists) gained much of what they demanded. This "First New Deal" thus was self-contradictory, pragmatic, and experimental. The economy eventually recovered from the deep pit of 1932, and started heading upward again until 1937, when the Recession of 1937 sent the economy back to 1934 levels of unemployment. Whether the New Deal was responsible for the recovery, or whether it even slowed the recovery, is a subject of debate.

The New Deal drew from many different sources over the previous half-century. Some New Dealers, led by Thurman Arnold, went back to the anti-monopoly tradition in the Democratic party that stretched back a century. Monopoly was bad for America, Louis Brandeis kept insisting, because it produced waste and inefficiency. However, the anti-monopoly group never had a major impact on New Deal policy.

From the Wilson administration, other New Dealers, such as Hugh Johnson of the NRA, were shaped by efforts to mobilize the economy for World War I, They brought ideas and experience from the government controls and spending of 1917-18. And from the policy experiments of the 1920s, New Dealers picked up ideas from efforts to harmonize the economy by creating cooperative relationships among its constituent elements. Roosevelt brought together a Brain Trust of academic advisers to assist in his recovery efforts. They sought to introduce extensive government intervention in the economy instead of allowing laisser-faire run its course. New Dealers such as Donald Richberg, as the replacment head of the NRA, said "A nationally planned economy is the only salvation of our present situation and the only hope for the future."[6] Historian Clarence B. Carson says:

At this remove in time from the early days of the New Deal, it is difficult to recapture, even in imagination, the heady enthusiasm among a goodly number of intellectuals for a government planned economy. So far as can now be told, they believed that a bright new day was dawning, that national planning would result in an organically integrated economy in which everyone would joyfully work for the common good, and that American society would be freed at last from those antagonisms arising, as General Hugh Johnson put it, from “the murderous doctrine of savage and wolfish individualism, looking to dog-eat-dog and devil take the hindmost.[7]

The New Deal faced some very vocal conservative and classical liberal opposition. The first organized opposition in 1934 came from the American Liberty League led by Democrats such as 1924 and 1928 presidential candidates John W. Davis and Al Smith. There was also a large loose grouping of opponents of the New Deal who have come to be known as the Old Right which included politicians, intellectuals, writers, and newspaper editors of various philosophical persuasions including classical liberals, conservatives, Democrats and Republicans.

Answer 2

Briefly, one of the main benefits of most of the New Deal actions by FDR was to calm the fears of the general public and to give them hope. The public felt that the government was trying to help in those very desperate times. A major benefit was the restoring of confidence in the financial institutions. The New Deal programs such as federal deposit insurance and stock market regulation helped restore confidence in those financial institutions. The psychological benefits were enormous. The restoration of confidence was vital because America’s economic problems had had repercussions around the world.

Answer 3

I was never one whom others would call a ' nerd ', but I can tell you one thing that is a sure enough fact: His " New Deal " is still accepted today as a brilliant solution to many social problems that were accruing in our Society. God Bless America !!

Answer 4

Communisn,Socialism,Marxism,and good old fasioned redistribution of wealth.The same thing over 70,000 Americans gave their lives to protect us against.