The First New Deal | FDR Starts to Transform the Democratic Party!
In this episode, we talk about Franklin Roosevelt’s First New Deal—the first step in a radical transformation of the Democratic Party. When Roosevelt took office, he sought to collect a group of advisers with bold ideas about getting America out of the Great Depression. Looking for the best minds, he didn’t only pull from people with Democratic Party backgrounds. He also employed a lot of progressives with Republicans backgrounds, since the Progressive Movement had flourished among the professionals and academics whose expertise he needed. This group took on a name—the Brain Trust. Roosevelt’s Brain Trust added and lost members over time, including names like Rex Tugwell, Raymond Morley, Adolf Berle, Felix Frankfurter, Frances Perkins, Harlod Ickes, and Harry Hopkins. These advisors launched flurry of innovative policy experiments, all of which shared a common idea about how to solve the Depression. They wanted to reduce competition between firms and raise prices. Although the effect of many New Deal policies Keynesian stimulus, that’s not what the New Dealers themselves were trying to do. They were aware of John Maynard Keynes and his ideas, but mainly had a different economic theory in mind. They thought the key to getting America out of the Depression was to make firms more healthy, which they could do by increasing the prices they could charge and reducing the downward pressure on price of competition caused. Reducing this competitive pressure, they thought, would let companies put people back to work. The crown jewels of their First New Deal program were the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) and the National Recovery Administration (NRA), which each sought to coordinate the economy so every producer charge more for products and easily compete. This First New Deal was a radical break for the Democratic Party. Democrats had long prided themselves on fighting bigness, both in government and industry, back to Thomas Jefferson. It was the Federalists, Whigs, and Republicans who had always sought to work with industry, manage the economy, and spend on infrastructure. Now Roosevelt was working with industry titans and embracing bigness as an idea. Naturally, he soon found himself under attack from traditional Democratic populists who believed the progressive program of the First New Deal had sold out the party’s traditional constituency—workers and the little guy. They found a champion in the political boss of Louisiana, Senator Huey Long. Long was now attacking Roosevelt as a rich man in bed with his wealthy friends. Long had his own plan to get America out of the Depression, which he called Share Our Wealth. It would, he claimed, “make every man a king.” Long proposed very different solutions like caps on the income on millionaires, a guaranteed income, free college tuition, and an old age pension program. The New Dealers, believing Long was planning to challenge Roosevelt for Democratic nomination in 1936 and might actually win, decided it was time to pivot to a new program—a Second New Deal. The First New Deal was a progress program to coordinate the national economy. The Second New Deal would be a populist program to head off Huey Long and the populist revolt. Check out the book: https://www.amazon.com/Next-Realignment-Americas-Parties-Crumbling/dp/1633885089 Follow Frank on twitter: @frankjdistefano Learn more: https://www.frankdistefano.com/
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