The new deal and the great society - Essay Example

1 The New Deal and the Great Society On October 29, 1929, the crash of the U,. S. stock market - known as Black Tuesday - setoff a world wide spiral in every part of the globe. In 1929-1933, unemployment in the U. S. increased from the original 4 per cent to 25 per cent. Manufacturing output plunged by approximately one third. Prices everywhere fell, making the burden of the repayments of debts much harder. Heavy industry, mining, lumbering, and agriculture were hard hit. The impact was much less severe in white collar and service sectors, but every city and state was hit hard. Upon accepting the democratic nomination for president, Roosevelt promised a new deal for the American people. Roosevelt entered office with no single ideology or plan for dealing with the depression. He was willing to try anything, and , indeed, in the first new deal (1933-34) virtually every organized group ( except socialists and communists) gained much of what they demanded. This first new deal was self- contradictory, pragmatic, and experimental. Relief was the immediate effort to help the one-third of the population hardest hit by the depression. Roosevelt expanded Hoover's Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) work relief program and added the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) Public Works Administration (PWA), and (starting in 1935) the Works Progress Administration (WPA). In 1935 the Social Security and unemployment insurance programs were also added. Separate programs were set up for relief in rural America, such as the Resettlement Administration (RA) and Farm security Administration (FSA). These work relief programs have been praised by most economists in retrospect.(Parker) Besides programs for immediate 'relief' the New Deal embarked quickly on an 2 agenda of long term 'reform' aimed at avoiding another depression. The New Dealers responded to demands to inflate the currency by a variety of means. Another group of reformers sought to build consumer and farmer co-ops as a counter-weight to big business. The consumer co-ops did not take off, but the Rural Electrification Administration used co-ops to bring electricity to rural areas. (As of 2007, many still exist.) Despite the dismal record in aiding marginal farmers and African Americans, among others - contrasted with its often frequent generosity toward certain business interests- the New Deal was to elevate and strengthen new interest groups so as to allow them to compete more effectively for the interests by having the federal government evolve into an arbitrator in competition among all elements and classes of society, acting as a force that could mediate when necessary to help some groups and limit the power of others. By the end of the 1930's, business found itself competing for influence with an increasingly powerful labor movement, one that was engaged in mass mobilization and sometimes militant actions. Thus, the strongest legacy of the New Deal, in other words, was to make the federal government a protector of interest groups and a supervisor of competition among them. As a result of the New Deal, political and economic life became politically more competitive than before, with workers, farmers, consumers, and others able to press their demands upon the government in ways that in the past had been available only to the corporate world. Hence, the description of the government the New Deal created as the "broker state", a state brokering the competition claims of numerous groups. 3 The Great Society was a set of domestic programs proposed and enacted in the United States on the initiative of President Lyndon B. Johnson (1963-1969). Two main goals of the great Society social reforms were the elimination of poverty and racial injustice. New major spending programs that addressed education, medical care, urban problems, and transportation were launched during this period. The Great Society in scope and sweep resembled the New Deal agendas of Franklin Roosevelt, but differed sharply in types of programs. Johnson's success depended on his own remarkable skills of persuasion, coupled with the democratic land slide in 1964 that brought in many new liberals. Anti-war Democrats complained that spending on the Vietnam war choked off the Great Society. While some programs have been eliminated or have had their funding reduced from the 1960's onward, many of them, including medicare, Medicaid, and federal education funding, continue to the present. Grave social crisis gripped the nation. Racial segregation existed throughout the south. The civil rights movement was gathering momentum, and in 1964 urban riots began within black neighborhoods in New York City and Los Angeles; by 1968 hundreds of cities had major riots that caused a severe political backlash. Foreign Affairs were generally quiet except for the Vietnam war, which grew from limited involvement in 1963 to a large scale military operation in 1968 that overshadowed the Great Society. Historian Alan Brinkley has suggested that the most important domestic achievement of the Great Society may have been its success in translating some of the demands of the civil rights movement into law(Brinkley) Four civil rights act were passed, including three laws in the first two years of 4 Johnson's presidency. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 forbade job discrimination and segregation of public accommodations. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 assured minority registration and voting. It suspended use of literacy or other voter-qualification tests that had some times served to keep African Americans off voting lists and provided for federal court law suits to stop discriminatory poll taxes. The most ambitious and controversial part of the Great Society was its initiative to end poverty. President Johnson launched an unconditional war on poverty in the first months of his presidency with the goal of eliminating hunger and deprivation from American life. The centerpiece of the war on poverty was the Equal opportunity Act of 1964, which created the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) to oversee a variety of community based anti- poverty programs. Alan Brinkley has suggested that the gap between the expansive intentions of the war on poverty and its relatively modest achievements fueled later conservative arguments that government is not an appropriate vehicle for solving social problems(Brinkley) The poverty programs were heavily criticized by conservatives like Charles Murray, who denounced them in his 1984 book "losing Ground" as being ineffective and creating an underclass of lazy citizens. One of Johnsons aides, Joseph Califano Jr. has contented that, "from 1963 when Lyndon Johnson took office until 1970 as the impact of his Great Society programs were felt, the portions of Americans living below the poverty line dropped from 22.2 per cent to 12. per cent, the most dramatic decline over such a 5 brief period in this century(Califano) The poverty rate for Blacks fell from 55 per cent in 19660 to 27 percent in 1968 (digital history). However, the poverty rate among black families fell dramatically from 1940 and 1960 (87 per cent to 47 per cent), suggesting poverty rates have continued falling without the war on poverty(Jewish world) Works Cited Brinkley, Alan, "Great Society" In readers Companion to American History, Eric Foner and John Arthur Garraty eds. Haughton Mifflin Books p. 472 Califano, Joseph A., Washington Monthly, Accessed on line on April 28, 2007, from www,washingtonmonthly.com www.digitalhistory.com Parker, Randall, E., (2002) Reflections of the great Depression, Interviews with 11 leading economists Read More