The New Deal and the Great Society - Essay Example

Roosevelt believed that other matters were far more important than racial discrimination. Never willing to lose the support of Southern Congressional Democrats, he declined to support legislation making lynching a crime, while denouncing lynching in his speeches. He declined to advocate banning the poll tax, used by southern whites to deny the vote to southern blacks. He refused to use the relief agencies to challenge local patterns of discrimination; the NRA tolerated widespread practices of paying blacks less than whites, blacks were largely excluded from employment in the TVA; the FHA refused to provide mortgages to blacks moving into white neighborhoods; and the AAA was ineffectual in protecting the interest of black share croppers and tenant farmers.

Some liberal historians argue that the New Deal laid the groundwork for the “broker state” to be expanded a generation later, mostly through the work of the next wave of liberal reform – the civil rights movement and the Great Society – to embrace groups marginalized in the 1930’s – however, many African American historians insist that the civil rights movement owed everything to black activists and very little to the New Deal. Roosevelt was an idealist with a vision. He promised the American people a New Deal, but when he took office during his first term, he had no idea what that New Deal would consist of.

He knew the American people were in dire need of relief, and this could only be brought about through recovery, and that all aspects of the American system were in need of reform. need of reform. As a consequence, his initial foundation was premised on what has become known as the three R's.The first effort which he embarked upon was the providing of relief. Taking the remnants of an old Hoover program; the federal Emergency Relief Administration, which was a work relief program, Roosevelt scrapped what he considered to be viable and to it he added the civilian conservation corps.

He added auxiliary programs i.e., Works Progress Administration, and beginning in 1935, he introduced his most long standing and beneficial social security and unemployment insurance programs. It was obvious that rural America, albeit suffering from the same