The Great Depression and the New Deal,
1933-1939
EXPANDING THE “VARYING VIEWPOINTS”
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Roosevelt: The Coming of the New Deal (1959).
A view of the New Deal as a radical transformation:
“By bringing to Washington a government determined to govern, Roosevelt unlocked new energies in a people who had lost faith, not just in government’s ability to meet the economic crisis, but almost in the ability of anyone to do anything. The feeling of movement was irresistible.... A despairing land had a vision of America as it might some day be.... ‘It’s more than a New Deal,’ said Harold Ickes. ‘It’s a new world. People feel free again. They can breathe naturally. It's like quitting a morgue for the open woods.’ ‘We have had our revolution,’ said Collier’s, ‘and we like it.’”
William E. Leuchtenberg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal (1963).
A view of the New Deal as a “halfway revolution”:
“The New Deal achieved a more just society by recognizing groups which had been largely unrepresented-staple farmers, industrial workers, particular ethnic groups, and the new intellectual-administrative class. Yet this was still a halfway revolution. It swelled the ranks of the bourgeoisie but left many Americans – sharecroppers, slum dwellers, most Negroes–outside the new equilibrium.... The New Dealers perceived that they had done more in those years than had been done in any comparable period of American history, but they also saw that there was much still to be done, much, too, that continued to baffle them.”
QUESTIONS ABOUT THE “VARYING VIEWPOINTS”
1. What does each of these historians regard as the fundamental achievement of the New Deal?
2. What weaknesses does Leuchtenberg see in the New Deal?
3. How might each of these historians interpret such programs as the AAA, Social Security, and the Wagner Act?
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