The New Deal

From first to last the New Deal was a work in progress, a patchwork of often contradictory ideas.

This book provides a history of the New Deal, exploring the institutional, political, and cultural changes experienced by the United States during the Great Depression.

A riveting story about change in the Obama era--and an essential handbook forvoters who want the truth about the president, his record, and his enemies by"TIME" senior correspondent Grunwald.

When President Franklin Roosevelt formed the National Youth Administration (NYA) in June 1935, he declared that it would address "the most pressing and immediate needs" of American young people. In this book Richard A. Reiman explores the various, and sometimes conflicting, ways in which the NYA planners and administrators defined those needs and attempted to answer them. As Reiman notes, the NYA was established to assist the millions of youth who, during the Depression years, were out of school, out of work, and ineligible for the New Deal's own Civilian Conservation Corps. Contrary to popular belief, he argues, New Dealers did not envision the NYA primarily as a "junior WPA," a trigger for civil rights reform, or a springboard for the careers of liberal administrators. Rather, its designers saw it as a reform agency that would advance and protect democracy by countering totalitarian appeals to young people and by equalizing educational opportunities for rich and poor. Woven into the successive drafts establishing the NYA, these twin purposes united the programs of planners as disparate as Aubrey W. Williams, Mary McLeod Bethune, John Studebaker, Eleanor Roosevelt, Charles Taussig, and FDR himself. Like their separate agendas, Reiman shows, the planners' shared concerns for democratic values were the products of thinking that had arisen during the Progressive Era - a time when an awareness of the social effects of child development first occurred. During the 1930s, fears of fascism and totalitarianism added fuel to these concerns and shaped much of the nature of the NYA's prewar appeal. Based on a wide range of sources, including NYA-related documents at the National Archives and at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, The New Deal and American Youth is the first full-length study of this important agency. By showing how the NYA served as an instrument for realizing so many New Deal ambitions, it offers rich insights into both the NYA and the New Deal.

When the stability of American life was threatened by the Great Depression, the decisive and visionary policy contained in FDR's New Deal offered America a way forward. In this groundbreaking work, William E. Leuchtenburg traces the evolution of what was both the most controversial and effective socioeconomic initiative ever undertaken in the United States—and explains how the social fabric of American life was forever altered. It offers illuminating lessons on the challenges of economic transformation—for our time and for all time.

ultimately elevating public opinion of his administration but falling flat in achieving the economic revitalization that America so desperately needed from the Great Depression. Folsom takes a critical, revisionist look at Roosevelt's presidency, his economic policies, and his personal life. Elected in 1932 on a buoyant tide of promises to balance the increasingly uncontrollable national budget and reduce the catastrophic unemployment rate, the charismatic thirty-second president not only neglected to pursue those goals, he made dramatic changes to federal programming that directly contradicted his campaign promises. Price fixing, court packing, regressive taxes, and patronism were all hidden inside the alphabet soup of his popular New Deal, putting a financial strain on the already suffering lower classes and discouraging the upper classes from taking business risks that potentially could have jostled national cash flow from dormancy.

The first history of the new deal in global context The New Deal: A Global History provides a radically new interpretation of a pivotal period in US history. The first comprehensive study of the New Deal in a global context, the book compares American responses to the international crisis of capitalism and democracy during the 1930s to responses by other countries around the globe—not just in Europe but also in Latin America, Asia, and other parts of the world. Work creation, agricultural intervention, state planning, immigration policy, the role of mass media, forms of political leadership, and new ways of ruling America's colonies—all had parallels elsewhere and unfolded against a backdrop of intense global debates. By avoiding the distortions of American exceptionalism, Kiran Klaus Patel shows how America's reaction to the Great Depression connected it to the wider world. Among much else, the book explains why the New Deal had enormous repercussions on China; why Franklin D. Roosevelt studied the welfare schemes of Nazi Germany; and why the New Dealers were fascinated by cooperatives in Sweden—but ignored similar schemes in Japan. Ultimately, Patel argues, the New Deal provided the institutional scaffolding for the construction of American global hegemony in the postwar era, making this history essential for understanding both the New Deal and America's rise to global leadership.

“A powerful argument, swept along by Katznelson’s robust prose and the imposing scholarship that lies behind it.”—Kevin Boyle, New York Times Book Review A work that “deeply reconceptualizes the New Deal and raises countless provocative questions” (David Kennedy), Fear Itself changes the ground rules for our understanding of this pivotal era in American history. Ira Katznelson examines the New Deal through the lens of a pervasive, almost existential fear that gripped a world defined by the collapse of capitalism and the rise of competing dictatorships, as well as a fear created by the ruinous racial divisions in American society. Katznelson argues that American democracy was both saved and distorted by a Faustian collaboration that guarded racial segregation as it built a new national state to manage capitalism and assert global power. Fear Itself charts the creation of the modern American state and “how a belief in the common good gave way to a central government dominated by interest-group politics and obsessed with national security” (Louis Menand, The New Yorker).