Effectiveness, Opposition and the Second New Deal
A New Deal — for Whom?
By 1934 the First New Deal had stopped the collapse, but the Depression had not ended. Around 11 million Americans were still unemployed. As Roosevelt’s programmes settled into operation, the question shifted from ‘will it work?’ to ‘who is it working for?’. The honest answer is uneven: the New Deal helped some groups powerfully and largely failed others. It also drew loud opposition from three different directions — the Supreme Court, congressional Republicans, and radical critics who argued Roosevelt had not gone nearly far enough. The political pressure forced the ‘Second New Deal’ of 1935.
The New Deal helped industrial workers, farmers and the elderly — through union recognition, AAA payments and Social Security pensions. It largely failed African-Americans, Mexican-Americans and the domestic and farm workers shut out of Social Security. Inequality remained a defining feature of recovery.
Who Benefited Most
Industrial workers were among the biggest winners. The 1935 Wagner Act guaranteed the right to join a trade union and bargain collectively. Union membership doubled from around 3.6 million in 1935 to 8.7 million by 1940. Farmers saw their incomes rise by around 50% in two years thanks to AAA payments. Older Americans gained Social Security pensions. Around 8.5 million workers found employment through the Works Progress Administration (WPA, 1935) building schools, post offices and roads. White women benefited from FERA and WPA jobs, even where pay was lower than men’s. Eleanor Roosevelt actively lobbied her husband to direct New Deal money towards women, miners and the rural poor.
Who Was Left Out
African-Americans gained much less. The AAA paid landowners to take fields out of production, but the cuts hit black sharecroppers and tenant farmers hardest — many were evicted. NRA codes set lower wages for southern workers, where most black Americans lived. Roosevelt refused to back a federal anti-lynching bill because he needed southern Democratic votes in Congress for the rest of his programme. CCC camps were segregated. Some 200,000 black Americans did join the CCC, and Roosevelt’s informal ‘Black Cabinet’ of African-American advisers (including Mary McLeod Bethune) gave the New Deal a moral language on race that earlier presidents had refused. But on the ground, the colour line held.
Mexican-Americans were excluded from many programmes and roughly 500,000 were ‘repatriated’ — in many cases deported — during the 1930s. Native Americans gained more under the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act, which ended the policy of forced assimilation and restored some tribal land rights, but rural poverty persisted. Domestic and agricultural workers (the bulk of black and Hispanic women’s employment) were excluded from Social Security entirely.
Women’s gains were real but limited. Frances Perkins became the first female Cabinet member as Secretary of Labor. Eleanor Roosevelt held weekly press conferences open only to women reporters and lobbied for women’s relief. Around 8,500 women were enrolled in a women’s version of the CCC. But NRA codes often set female wages below men’s, the CCC excluded married women, and the breadwinner ideology was reinforced rather than challenged. The Depression pushed many married women out of paid work to free up jobs for unemployed men.
Opposition from the Supreme Court
The most damaging early opposition came from the Supreme Court. In Schechter v. United States (May 1935) the Court unanimously struck down the NRA as an unconstitutional delegation of legislative power and federal interference with intra-state commerce. In United States v. Butler (January 1936) the Court struck down the AAA on similar grounds. Roosevelt was furious. In 1937 he proposed his ‘court-packing plan’: legislation that would let him appoint up to six new justices to outvote the conservative bloc. Even Democrats called it dictatorial. Congress rejected the plan, but the Court began to uphold New Deal legislation more sympathetically (the so-called ‘switch in time that saved nine’).
Republican and Radical Opposition
Republicans attacked the New Deal as an attack on individual liberty and a step towards socialism. Critics like Wendell Willkie warned that federal spending was unsustainable and that programmes like the TVA undermined private utility companies. The 1936 Republican candidate Alf Landon was crushed in a landslide — Roosevelt won 46 of 48 states — but Republican opposition would harden through Roosevelt’s second term.
More dangerous, politically, were radical critics who argued that the New Deal had not gone far enough. Senator Huey Long of Louisiana proposed his ‘Share Our Wealth’ programme — confiscate the great fortunes and give every family $5,000 and a guaranteed income. Father Charles Coughlin used his weekly radio broadcasts (40 million listeners at peak) to demand bank nationalisation and silver-backed currency, sliding into open antisemitism by 1936. Dr Francis Townsend proposed a $200-a-month pension for everyone over 60 to be spent within 30 days. Long was assassinated in September 1935; Coughlin was eventually silenced by the Catholic hierarchy. But by 1935 the three radical critics had together convinced Roosevelt that he needed bolder reforms or risked losing the centre to a populist challenger.
Even at the worst of the Depression, around 60 million Americans went to the cinema each week. Hollywood produced screwball comedies and gangster films offering escape; Walt Disney’s Snow White (1937) was the highest-grossing film of the decade. Radio reached 28 million households by 1939; Roosevelt’s fireside chats and Coughlin’s broadcasts both depended on the medium. Federal Project Number One under the WPA paid 40,000 unemployed artists, writers, photographers and musicians — producing public murals and the Federal Theatre Project; a separate agency, the Farm Security Administration, paid Dorothea Lange to photograph migrant workers. Popular culture both distracted from suffering and documented it.
The Second New Deal, 1935
The political pressure produced a sharper, more redistributive package in 1935. The Wagner Act guaranteed union rights, partly answering radical demands for worker power. The Social Security Act of August 1935 created federal pensions for the elderly, unemployment insurance and aid to dependent children — the first national welfare system in American history, though limited (it excluded domestic and agricultural workers). The WPA gave employment to 8.5 million workers between 1935 and 1943. A ‘wealth tax’ raised top federal income tax rates to 75% on the highest earners. Roosevelt’s contribution as president now included not just the Hundred Days but a sustained ability to move with political pressure rather than be broken by it.
The Second New Deal of 1935 included the Wagner Act (union rights), the Social Security Act (pensions, unemployment insurance, aid to dependent children) and the WPA (work for 8.5 million). It was driven by Court strikes, radical pressure and the 1936 election — and was more redistributive than the First New Deal.