Franklin Delano Roosevelt is among the most influential American presidents. He took over as president in 1932, three years after the start of the Great Depression. As president, Roosevelt wasted no time in rolling out a series of federal government programs aimed at giving relief to the poor, recover the ailing economy and review the country’s national approach to economics.
Roosevelt’s new structured formulae were collectively dubbed, ‘The New Deal.”After four years in power, the depression showed no signs of ending hence drastic improvements to the economy were needed. When Roosevelt accepted his party’s nomination at the Democratic National Convention on June 27, 1936, he promised a second New Deal for America. Roosevelt sounded tough in reaffirming his New Deal while firing warning shots towards his opponents. This was a caprice from a man known for his gentleman-like style of politics.
In 1935, Roosevelt created the Works Progress Administration (WPA) that created a lot of employment through the federal government. WPA worked in reducing unemployment levels throughout the country by hiring masses to work on government projects. This was the flagship of the New Deal policies towards employment. Despite all his intervention measures, Roosevelt knew that the New Deal was under undue attack. The President’s social class that also had the captains of industry was not pleased by his actions. His political opponents were not left behind in giving their criticism of the New Deal. Conservative Supreme Court justices were known to vote down some of his proposed laws and policies. The Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court while in the previous year, 1935, the National Recovery Administration had been declared unconstitutional too.
President Roosevelt did not hold back, calling out the elite and the unscrupulous business class as forces united against him. He made it clear that he had the key to the White House with him, and that the White House had only the front door for entry. This shows that behind the scenes, the president was facing a lot of soliciting and presumed fallout with members of his social class. To fund his New Deal projects, the president increased taxation for the rich. It was a gamble he was willing to make as he made clear in his speech. The most contentious of issues was the introduction of unionization for wage earners and pensioning, all of which affected industry revenues and control.
The American employees had delivered the president his first term victory due to his pledge of service to them. Elite businessmen were a wary lot, with the president’s intentions of a second New Deal. However, Roosevelt might have made his remarks against economic royalists to align himself with the suffering working class. Whether or not that was a typical political move, the president got reelected and by a landslide. It is safe to assume those votes came from the poor working class. He did implement his second New Deal, which goes to show that it was not just political rhetoric.
President Franklin Roosevelt had some political ideologies regarding the American populace. He remarked that necessitous men were not free men. According to the president, a man’s measure of freedom was hinged on his economic security. He had proposed a second bill of rights that had a clause making a decent paying job a basic human right. It is such thoughtfulness for the unemployed and the working class that gained him high approval. If implemented, it would have been tough to grant this particular right given the state of the economy. Logistically, such a plan would require an overhaul of America’s capitalistic setup.
The president in his address to the Democratic National Congress on 27th July 1936 equated that year to the year 1776 when America won its independence. It might have seemed like a bit of a stretch, but given seven years under the crushing depression, Roosevelt had read the American psyche well to know the people felt depressed. This was perhaps expected, owing to the fact that four years earlier before getting elected, Roosevelt had declared ‘war’ against the Great Depression and had now analogized it to a foreign invader that needed to be combated. In 1776, the nation was beaming with optimism and a promise of better days to come. Franklin Roosevelt might have wanted just to encourage his countrymen and rally them up as troops for another push to ending the depression.
In his speech, Roosevelt touched on the issue of corporate greed as known today. However, back in 1936, he called it an industrial dictatorship. The privileged rich had created a set of rules regarding workers’ pay, working hours and work conditions that were not privy to any checks and balances. The president referred to this class as princes who sought legal sanctioning in protecting their impunity. This was one in a long series of back and forth between him and the business class, who had gone as far as accusing the president of acting downright un-American. This was of course after the president initiated changes in the law that allowed workers to unionize.
Roosevelt was convinced that economic tyranny had led to the stock market collapse of 1929. Unlike the twelve years of government before his tenure, he was going to be proactive and sensitive to the people’s suffering. Roosevelt wanted the control of wealth to be a fair fighting ground where every man was counting equally, as was the case in voting. Wealth and its management were not to be a reserve of the privileged few. In today’s world, his words might echo chants from an Occupy Wall Street rally, but it is easy to believe that Franklin Delano Roosevelt might have just planted and watered the seeds of the American dream.
Works Cited
Lichtenstein, Nelson. Walter Reuther: The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit. Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 1997. Print.
Roosevelt, Franklin D. , “Acceptance Speech for the Renomination for the Presidency,
Philadelphia, Pa.,” June 27, 1936, Course Reader. Print.
Smith, Jason Scott. A Concise History of the New Deal. New York: Cambridge
