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President Franklin Roosevelt Promises a "New Deal"

"Upon accepting Democratic nomination for president on July 2, 1932, Roosevelt promised 'a new deal for the American people,' a phrase that has endured as a label for his administration and its many domestic changes.... Unlike many other world leaders in the 1930s, however, Roosevelt entered office with no single ideology or plan for dealing with the depression. This "new deal" would often be contradicting, pragmatic, and experimental. What many considered incoherence of the New Deal's ideology might more accurately be characterized as the interaction of several competing ideologies, each based on programs and ideas whose precedents lay in U.S. political tradition.

The New Deal drew heavily on the experiences of its leaders; it reflected the ideas of, and was influenced by, the programs that Roosevelt and most of his original associates had absorbed in their political youths early in the progressive era, while serving in the Wilson administration, and while holding other offices in the 1920s. The New Dealers borrowed their opposition to monopoly and their move toward government regulation of the economy from ideas of the progressive era, and were influenced by the dispelling of age-old notions that poverty was a personal moral failure rather than a product of impersonal social and economic forces. Their ideas about government mobilization were shaped by the efforts of the Wilson administration to mobilize the economy for the Great War. And from the policy experiments of the 1920s, New Dealers picked up ideas from efforts to harmonize the economy by creating cooperative relationships among its constituent elements.

The New Deal consisted of many different efforts to end the Great Depression and reform the U.S. economy. Their success varied, but there were enough successes to establish it as the most important episode of the twentieth century in the creation of the modern United States....

Although the New Deal did not end the depression, all in all it helped to prevent the economy from decaying further by increasing the regulatory functions of the federal government in ways that helped stabilize previous trouble areas of the economy: the stock market, the banking system, and others. It also produced a new political coalition that sustained the Democratic Party as the majority party in national politics for more than a generation after its own end.

Also laying the foundations for the postwar era, Roosevelt and the New Deal helped enhance the power of the federal government as a whole. Roosevelt also established the presidency as the preeminent center of authority within the federal government. By creating a large array of protections for various groups of citizens—workers, farmers, and others—who suffered from the crisis, enabling them to challenge the powers of the corporations, the Roosevelt administration generated a set of political ideas—known to later generations as New Deal liberalism—that remained a source of inspiration and controversy for decades and that help shape the next great experiments in liberal reform, the civil rights movement and Great Society of the 1960s."
wikipedia, 7/29/05