Was the New Deal a success Reddit

Before the Great Depression, what we now think of as the social welfare net was essentially nonexistent. State governments on the whole considered their job to maintain the social order and the federal government tended to consider its contribution to economic well-being a benevolent overseer focused more on foreign affairs. (This is of course an oversimplification.)

When the Depression hit as a result in part of the 1929 stock crash, it transformed American society. Where before the poor had been a fringe problem, now they constituted something like the majority. Entire industries failed because they had customers, and thousands of people's savings disappeared as a result of bank runs.

In 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt rode the wave of popular disgust with GOP president Hoover's inability/unwillingness to deal with the crisis into the White House on his New Deal platform. Fundamentally, it was a promise that the government of the previous century, focused on fighting Indians and managing foreign affairs, and being essentially disinterested in the welfare of the average citizen, was going to change. Instead, FDR's federal government (which included Democratic majorities in Congress as well as many state legislatures) was going to take on social welfare as a central goal of government's mission.

This was implemented in wide-reaching changes to economically-focused legislation, including the creation of many programs we now take for granted as well as some measures today's audiences would consider practically communist. This included the creation of Social Security to take care of those too old to work, the Fair Labor Standards Act which guaranteed a minimum wage and required the payment of overtime rates for work weeks longer than 40 hours, the Works Progress Administration, to invent socially useful jobs for people to do (lots of public areas with masonry stairs or parkways date from this period), and the National Recovery Administration, a federal agency dedicated to putting people back on the job. Labor protections for unionizing workers and prevention of child labor were also part of the program.

The New Deal also included farm production quotas and price controls that created artificial scarcity for food and goods, reigniting the market. Many of these programs at both the state and federal level were eventually struck down by an elitist and hidebound Supreme Court in a series of 5-4 decisions until FDR proposed his court-packing plan. This was a threat to greatly increase the size of the Court -- with FDR appointees. But before the plan even got to the drafting stage, the Chief Justice changed sides, and the Court started approving New Deal legislation 5-4. (This is called the Switch in Time to Save Nine, although historical scholarship has gone back and forth over the years as to how much the Court-packing plan was the reason for the Switch and to what extent it was an honest, non-coerced evolution by the Chief.)

Either way, the New Deal did have palpable, steady, and yet somewhat modest effects on the economy (which was in the worst hole it had ever been in, so you wouldn't expect anything to work quickly), although more directly it kept many, many people from starving or freezing to death during the mid-1930's, whether it fully grew the economy or not.

Then in the end of the decade America got involved in WWII, which provided a massive economic stimulus. All the young out of work men got jobs as GI's, and all the out of work women, older men, and immigrants got jobs building tanks or aircraft engines. By the end of the War, the U.S. economy was humming, and the list-War prosperity continued for decades (and to some ways of thinking, even up to the turn of the 21st century).

But the New Deal legacy , which absolutely did take root, is a central revision in the understood role of the government as an institution that should help average individuals prosper, and protect them when they need help. That ideal runs through Johnson's Great Society programs of the 1960's to the establishment of Obamacare in this decade, and even the Republican establishment has accepted a version of this view as seen in George W. Bush's own Medicare expansion and creation of PEPFAR, an anti-AIDS program.

In 1940, the US Unemployment rate was still averaging 14.6%. FDR's policies weren't doing anything until the United States entered World War II. Then the national economy only had a temporary recovery as industry transformed for war production. The national debt after the war was 120% the nation's GDP (we borrowed more than $211 billion to finance the war). Then congress lowered taxes, cut back a lot of the New Deal programs, and balanced the budget. Allowing the free market to do its job after the war was what really got the US out of The Depression.

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