New Deal Reforms

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

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rnment offered to share equally with the states the care of destitute persons over sixty-five who would not be able to take part in the old-age insurance system. . . . It reversed historic assumptions about the nature of social responsibility, and it established the proposition that the individual has clear-cut social rights (Leuchtenburg, New Deal, 132-133). Politically, there is no doubt that the New Deal utterly transformed the thinking of the people and leaders of the nation with respect to the role of politics and the government in the defining and shaping of what a democracy should be. This political aspect was hardly a matter of simply bringing big business under government control. After all, big business would have eventually fallen victim to the Depression, so that "The New Deal could advance impressive claims to being regarded as a 'savior of capitalism.'" His administration "sought deliberately," said Roosevelt, "'to energize private enterprise'" (Leuchtenburg, New Deal, 336). As Leuchtenburg writes, At a time when democracy was under attack elsewhere in the world, the achievements of the New Deal were especially significant. . . . The United States had become, "as it was in the 18th century, the victorious emblem a
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Approximate Word count = 2460
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)

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