Transcript: FDR's New Deal

NARRATOR: March 4, 1933, Roosevelt's first day in office. 14 million Americans were out of work. Nine million had lost their life savings. The economy had collapsed. Americans everywhere waited for the president to tell them what he was going to do. Roosevelt could hope that the economy would repair itself, or he could try something that had never been done before in America-- intervene on a massive scale with the power of the federal government. In his first 100 days in office, Roosevelt managed to put tens of thousands of people back to work. He pledged billions to save their farms and their homes from foreclosure. He provided relief to the unemployed. He restored confidence in the banks, and guaranteed the savings of millions of Americans. And to sell the centerpiece of his program, the National Recovery Administration, he orchestrated an extraordinary publicity campaign. When the hundred days were over, Roosevelt had signed 15 major bills into law and created an alphabet soup of new government agencies. "We have had our revolution," one magazine reported, "and we like it." By 1934, Roosevelt had been president for a year. Yet in spite of all his New Deal programs, hard times persisted. The government had spent over $2 billion for relief, but thousands of new people were forced on the welfare rolls each day. Despair turned to anger. Violent protests and strikes swept across the country. Roosevelt's consensus was beginning to unravel. During the euphoria of his first hundred days in office, even Republicans had supported him. Now they turned against him.

HENRY B. FLETCHER: The New Deal is government from above. It is based on the proposition that the people cannot manage their own affairs...

NARRATOR: Republicans charged that government was becoming too big and too intrusive.

FLETCHER: We do not want to see these alphabetical bureaucratic agencies become permanent fixtures in our national political life.

NARRATOR: Roosevelt grew increasingly frustrated as business began to accuse him of meddling with free enterprise. When he regulated the stock exchange and the banks, the captains of American industry were outraged. Angry businessmen founded the Liberty League, dedicated to stopping further New Deal legislation. Then, on May 27, 1935, a day New Dealers would remember as Black Monday, the Supreme Court struck at the very heart of Roosevelt's hope to stimulate the economy. They declared the NRA-- the National Recovery Act-- unconstitutional. And it was just the first blow. The court was moving against Roosevelt's efforts to abolish child labor, establish a minimum wage, boost farm prices. Law by law, the court would attempt to dismantle the work of the first 100 days. But with millions still unemployed, Roosevelt continued to use the power of the federal government to relieve the suffering caused by the Great Depression.

WILLIAM LEUCHTENBURG: Congress, at Roosevelt's request, enacts the largest single peacetime appropriation in the history of this country or any country in the history of the world.

NEWSREEL NARRATOR: Federal jobs for thousands at the rate of a hundred a minute.

NARRATOR: Men and women hired by the government worked on more than 5,000 schools, 1,000 landing fields, 13,000 playgrounds. Even artists went to work for the WPA. But for Roosevelt, this was just the beginning. For millions of Americans-- impoverished children, the unemployed, the elderly with no savings, the disabled-- he offered the Social Security Act. He sold it as an insurance policy for everyone, but the poor, Roosevelt was saying, had rights too.

DAVID GINSBURG: The great tradition in the United States had been private charity, community charity. Families take care of their own. And so the notion that somehow the government would take care of the poor or the unemployed or the old-- this is something that was just not part of our tradition. We didn't know of it.

NARRATOR: In his first term, he had restored hope to a people who had lost hope, used the power of the presidency to ensure that the Great Depression could never happen again. Roosevelt had begun to shift the balance of power in America and forced government to accept the responsibility for the well-being of America's poorest citizens.