Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

During his first term as president, from 1933 through 1936, Franklin Delano Roosevelt ushered through Congress a vast array of legislation meant to rescue the country from the devastating effects of the Great Depression, the worst economic crisis in American history. In his Inaugural Address, he promised the people action, and immediately upon taking office he began the process of creating programs to give relief to the unemployed, to assist American agriculture and industry to recover, and to initiate reforms to the financial system. These programs, collectively called the New Deal, marked both an expansion of federal power and a transformation in the relationship between the government and the American people. Consequently, it stimulated a great deal of criticism. Contemporary critics attacked the president both from the right and the left. Some, such as Brain Trusters Rexford Tugwell and Raymond Moley, who had more radical ideas than the president, argued that he did not go far enough in exercising the power of his office to protect all Americans from the dangers lurking in untrammeled capitalism. Others, such as Republican congressmen Martin Dies (Texas) and Hamilton Fish (New York), attacked him for stretching the limits of the Constitution and veering toward socialism. Georgia Governor Eugene Talmadge was horrified at the assistance African-Americans received in the South. ... log in or subscribe to read full text