This study will argue that despite its limitations, the New Deal of President Franklin D. Roosevelt as a reform movement accomplished as much as was possible to correct the economic, political and social flaws in a society committed to capitalism and characterized by a huge degree of concentrated economic power.
Despite the fact that the New Deal included a number of radical reform packages which flew in the face of the thoroughly capitalist nature of the society, the seeds of the movement were actually planted a decade and a half earlier when certain leaders saw that at least a slightly more socialistic approach to domestic policies was necessary to correct the injustices of capitalism. As William E. Leuchtenburg writes:
The Felix Frankfurters and Isador Lubins who in the 1930s would be an important aspect of the New Deal got their first taste of national power in 1917. Many of this corps of administrators rejected the Victorian competitive ideal for the goal of a planned economy. They were exhilarated by . . . the direction of the economy for public ends rather than private profit (Leuchtenburg Perils 35).
Whereas in 1917 such reform was desirable, by 1932, after the Depression was entrenched, that reform was absolutely necessary if the country was going to survive. In the 1932 election, Roosevelt made clear that he would establish new policies to deal with the economic crises of the Depression, but he did not spell out the specifics of those changes. In the interim between Roosevelt's election and his taking of office, "The economy reached rock bottom. . . . Thousands of banks closed while hundreds of thousands of people lost their jobs" (Schulzinger 151). The simple fact that Roosevelt was able with his New Deal to pull the nation out of the Depression is the best evidence that he accomplished a great deal in correcting many of the major flaws which had created the Depression in the first place.
Even in those progr...