Did the New Deal Improve Well-Being? A Historical Analysis of FDR's Programs

this is Jackson Pond playground it's in the north of Richmond Hill on the corner of Myrtle Avenue and Park Lane South on

the southern end of forest park right dab in the middle of Queens I spent many hours pushing my children on swings here

taking those slides down with my kids and otherwise just sitting around as the kids run around in summer or in Winter

of course here I'm recording it's in a very very cold day in the winter so I don't look like a weirdo recording a

child's playground the playground itself was actually built in

1935 and it was built as you can see here by unemployed workers during the Great Depression and in 35 our mayor at

the time F lag Gardia and Robert Moses the famous Parks commissioner christen this playground as another playground in

New York City they turned what was once a swampy area on the side of Myrtle Avenue into basketball courts spray

parks and walking paths for the elders L and young alike of course Jackson Pawn was just

one Playground in Queens among hundreds right here we are in Forest Park but as we zoom out we'll see dozens hundreds of

projects everything from playgrounds to schools right to the subway system if you ride the enf train or M&R you know

that the actual subway line that runs under Queens Boulevard was a program built by the government to hire unemploy

employed workers to give them jobs during the Great Depression as we zoom out here we can see New York City was

filled with public programs things that put people who do not have jobs otherwise to work so they could support

their families and in turn they built things things that we still rely on today to get educated to get across

rivers or to enjoy ourselves on a weekend or some time after school and of course it wasn't just the city while New

York City was heavily concentrated in terms of projects because it was the biggest city in America and there are

many unemployed workers here the reality is that the New Deal the programs and public programs created during the Great

Depression hired millions of people and sometimes at the height about 8 million people to build stuff all over the

entire country in fact every single County except for Three Counties in America 3,000 counties had at least one

or two projects that the government funded to help improve something like sidewalks parks playgrounds schools and

just as importantly to keep people employed at a time on unemployment at its peak hit one in four

workers one of the big questions students teachers and historians themselves ask is what was the purpose

of all these projects what was the purpose of the government hiring millions of people to work some people

say well maybe it was just to help people during a difficult time and that was all it was right there was high

unemployment during the Great Depression and people want work so the government created jobs to put people to work other

people argue that the New Deal on these projects were actually meant to revive the economy to kind of get us out of the

depression and create growth in America so that people have you know prosperity and the economy grows and the stock

market rallies and everything else other people make an argument that this was a very these project had a very different

purpose that they were to actually remake the country to kind of build roads airports dams provide electricity

to people who never had it before to create roads so then cars are suddenly more useful to create dams and irrigate

irrigation projects so that farms and rivers are no longer flooding and Farms have water to actually change the

infrastructure of the country and some people even go further they argue that these public projects actually remade

our relationship between us Americans and our government and just as importantly what we expect our

government to to do for us and the people and historians who are at the highest level argue that the New Deal

was actually Reviving democracy as one very famous historian put it it was Reviving people's faith that democracy

can work and that our government can actually meet our needs but in today's class what we're going to do is

investigate these questions we're a going to try to understand what the purpose of the new deal was but then B

whether depending on what we think our purposes did the New Deal actually accomplish that purpose did it meet

those kind of goals that we understand the New Deal to have tried to achieve and so today's lesson focuses on

a pretty simple Point did the New Deal which is a government kind of pro series of programs designed to kind of help

people as well as end the Depression did it end up improving people's well-being did people in 1940 were they better off

in 1940 than they were in 1933 or 1925 or 19 10 or 1890 and the New Deal is the last lesson for our first paper which

focuses on whether this period from the late 19th century to 1940 saw people's well-being improved and if so what was

responsible for it and today we're going to ask whether the New Deal was responsible or at least partially

responsible for people's improved well-being or whether the New Deal was either not responsible for their

well-being or was another example of failed efforts to actually improve people's well welfare their well-being

their prosperity their access to Prosperity so first you're probably asking well wait what was the New Deal

the New Deal was essentially the government response to depression and we know right when the Great Depression hit

and any kind of major economic problem hits people often turn to the state or sometimes to each other but especially

in a modern era of large states people turn to the state in some way and the reality is of course the Great

Depression was a global depression and across the world many people unfortunately turned turned to some bad

stuff meaning dictatorships in fact the Global Response around the world was to turn to dictators who promised to revive

the country you know and they were promis in many different ways we'll talk about when we get to World War II but

just let you know how bad it was during the 1930s there were 35 democracies in the world meaning uh countries where

people had the right to vote and choose the people who ruled over them in 1920 by

1935 they would drop to only 17 and it's especially during the early late 20s and early 30s that people and dictators

managed to take over countries with the promise of Reviving these economies and Reviving these societies but the United

States was fortunate our Democratic institutions remained but doesn't mean people were happy with the Democratic

institutions that exist in United States of course Americans first looked to their incumbent president Herbert Hoover

this guy right up here uh with the hopes that he could revive the US economy Hoover was a Republican and the

Republican Party had been dominating politics since the 1860s so we're talking here you know 60 years 70 years

at this point and Hoover of course was a republican believing the best way to get the economy Rising again is to kind of

leave the economy alone right let the market take care of itself he talked about families getting a stiff upper lip

learning to kind of make some sacrifices and if we all volunteer to make sacrifices we might be able to help kind

of you know end the Depression and the economy will again take off and in fact one of the things Herbert Hoover pushed

heavily for is what he called volunteerism this means he called on businesses not to cut workers he called

on businesses not to necessarily um you know let's just say cut production but keep their factories open and keep

producing and he called on private businesses not forcing them but asking them to just not cut pay not cut jobs

not cut production keep things open of course he invited people like Ford Motor Company and the Rockefellers to come to

white the white house and come come with plans to keep their factories open and their workers employed but even the most

well-meaning Factory owner or most well-meaning kind of railroad company couldn't deal with the fact that profits

were gone essentially and they couldn't keep paying people with money they didn't have the businesses couldn't run

the other solution Hoover and other Republicans pushed for were tariffs meaning their idea here was to kind of

raise the taxes on imports and exports but the reality here is what you do essentially is you create a trade War

where you raise taxes on imports from let's say Germany or Italy or England and then they raise their taxes on us

and then we can't sell stuff to them and this end up having a self-defeating reality long story short rather than the

economy Reviving under Hoover's presidency from 1929 to 1932 unemployment just got worse and worse

every single year of his presidency and he became deeply unpopular so long story short by

1932 the Depression was near nearly 4 years old unemployment is going over 20% and the Republican party's popularity is

tanking and of course 1932 is an election year and Herbert Hoover and his entire party are now facing a major

electoral defeat and in case you can't tell from this small graph on the right here right in 1932 the election of you

know the House of Representatives the Senate and the presidency come up in different you know different levels and

you could see here right the beginning in 1932 that Republican party in red after having 14-year dominance in the

Senate a 9-year dominance in the executive office of the presidency and 16-year dominance in House of

Representatives switches to the Democratic party running all three you know all three houses right minus the

Supreme Court but two branches of government by having 14-year dominance in the Senate a 14 and even more year

dominance in the presidency and a 14-year dominance in the House of Representatives and so in 193 32 the

Democratic party decided to put up a very popular governor of New York Franklin Roosevelt yes he is related to

Teddy Roosevelt just to let you know right and no surprise right Frank Roosevelt wins by a landslide and he

didn't even have to necessarily do much to win just to give you an idea of how much he wins by you could see here the

popular vote it's one of the biggest Landslide victories he wins almost 60% of the vote 57% of the vote he also wins

89% of the electoral votes the only states he don't win are essentially the old Republican strongholds back in the

early 1900s of the northeast Pennsylvania as well as New England but throughout Franken rosal's

campaign he promised Americans a new deal and just as importantly he said he would assemble a brains trust a bunch of

academics and think tank you know policy makers as well as social workers to try to accomplish what he called a new deal

so what the heck Did Franken Roosevelt mean by a new deal and as Franken Roosevelt put it he argued the country

demands bold and persistent experimentation it is common sense to take a method and try it if it fails

admit it frankly and try another but above all try something of course in reality the New

Deal is just a slogan no different than Trump's make America great again or for that matter Barack Obama's change change

we can believe in it's a slogan aspiring quote that tries to say something to everybody and kind of you know kind of

speak to everybody and they can kind of you know essentially insert their own meaning into it and therefore hopefully

elect the guy but Roosevelt actually left the kind of actual policymaking to what the group of people he called The

Brain Trust they included one of the earliest women to work in a executive Administration was Francis Perkins a

longtime um social worker Henry Morgan thou who become treasury secretary and get involved in politics many years

forward attorney general Homer Cummings Henry Wallace who was a very well-known agronomist so an agricultural Economist

who was hoping to deal with the plight of farmers Harry Hopkins was a a social worker from New York City and other

other cities he was kind of a Clint Eastwood or a chain smoking you know gambling Horse Track Betting uh kind of

uh social worker but he very much cared about the plight of the poor and believe the best thing we could do is employ

people give people a job so they can get through a depression now while reducing the New Deal to a political slogan it

didn't end up being that right these policy makers and Franklin Roosevelt as a ician as well as Congress members

especially of the democratic party do have a vision competing Visions for how they're going to change America and

improve it in their minds and Scholars today kind of conceive of the new deal as attempting three goals between 1933

and 1940 and these three and it can even go beyond 1940 in many ways are how we're going to think about and judge the

New Deal in today's lesson and that is these three simple points number one the new deal design was intended created

programs essentially designed to jump start growth again to get factories producing at a normal rate to get

Farmers a stable price for their crop so prices aren't dropping and fluctuating so much and to get Workers to have

consistent work and the idea is if they can kind of you know create programs that kind of revive the economy and

recover it the United States will be on a path to growth and a path back to Prosperity that had existed maybe in the

20s or even a better path of prosperity and that was with some new dealers Democratic party Congress people policy

makers and Franklin Roosevelt and others hoped would it be accomplished through various recovery programs the second

element of the new deal that's very important is relief because the reality is even if a factory can open up again

it'll take months and years to see the benefits of it of the of the workers finally getting employed of them

building things of them building up good wages and savings to maybe buy a house and then of course those cars to come

off the assembly line and get bought by people so there was a need for Relief meaning people are unemployed they're

starving they're homeless so relief was another major element of the New Deal to provide direct immediate help to the

unemployed and the homeless and the hungry via shelter via clothing food and of course above all money and this is

what we tend to think of as what we might call welfare or as we'll see largely the New Deal did it through

public jobs but lastly there's something that some new dealers were looking to do and that was didn't just want to recover

the economy as it used to exist they don't necessarily want child labor to return they don't necessarily want low

wages to accompany fast growth and so some new dealers Congress people again policy makers you know in the executive

cabinet as well as Franklin Rosevelt actually looked to change how America's American society was structured their

idea was to actually reform and reforming not just the way the progressive tried to Tinker around the

system but fundamentally change the system and so they were looking to change American society to actually

improve people's well-being to change the rules of the game essentially another way to look at this is to change

how capitalism functioned to better meet people's needs now one brief thing I want to mention most people who were new

dealers were not necessarily Communists although some of them did read communist literature and took some ideas from

communist and socialist thought but for the most part new dealers the people who are dominant in the Democratic party

dominant in Congress pushing for these policies many of them look to try and change

capitalism and even some socialists would criticize Franklin Roosevelt for saving capitalism and trying to hold it

up rather than what they wanted of course was Socialism or communism so we need to think of the new deal as a

reform program not maybe similar different than the Progressive Era but a reform program at least some people

argue that was trying to change American society so again these three goals recovery recover the American economy as

it is relief help people to kind of get through a day a month a year or reform and we're going to judge the New Deal on

whether it's focused on these things and did it accomplish these things first let's take a look at

Roosevelt's and the New Deal's efforts to recover the economy because after all this was the central element of

Roosevelt's campaign plank he would offer a new deal to Americans a new way in which the government relates to

people and as a result the economy would recover and in Roosevelt's first 100 today is in office he and his

administration as well as Congress passed more legislation than has ever been passed in such a short amount of

time and most of the early legislation was focused on trying to you know jump start growth first let's cover the

Agricultural Adjustment Administration otherwise known as a AAA now I'm going to warn you here a lot of the things

we're going to talk about in the next few minutes are acronyms a AA n um nlr f LSA it's kind of get your head spinning

however it's important to know that the AAA meant farming not the American you know Automobile Association or the

Automobile Association of America but instead the Agricultural Adjustment Administration so this was Roosevelt's

attempt passed very early in his administration 1933 to bring and raise Farm prices and this was a tricky thing

the problem in agriculture in America and don't forget almost half of all Americans were still Farmers or involved

in farm labor in some way right the problem with agriculture was not that farmers weren't producing stuff they

were producing more food than ever before in fact they were producing so much food that the price of food dropped

so low that when a farmer planted seeds by the time those seeds were harvested into full plants the price actually

dropped where they couldn't even pay off their debts so the problem for Farmers wasn't under or you know unemployment it

was over production leading to collapsing prices if farmers were producing too much food then the

solution at least says the government saw it was to try to incentivize Farmers to cut back in production without though

the other problem is without making them lose money and so the answer essentially was to pay Farmers to not Farm what the

government more or less did is it would buy extra produce from farmers in a few categories wheat cotton corn pigs rice

tobacco and dairy and when a farmer produce some they might buy 20% and give the farmer a basically a you know a

futures or kind of a check and say look we're going to hold on to this and you can get this at a future date and it

would be money essentially they're essentially paying Farmers throughout the country not to farm and the idea is

by paying Farmers not to farm the goal would be to raise the price of wheat cotton corn Hogs rice tobacco and dairy

up to what they called a parody level basically a price level from 1909 to 1914 what they what Farmers saw is the

good time of agricultural prices the second major program arguably the largest of all the programs that rot

passed in 1933 was a national industrial Recovery Administration essentially Nera or the

NRA sometimes as it was called was set up to set regulations for different Industries to stabilize prices

production and employment and what this meant is they'd actually call in big Factory owners in the automobile

industry for example GM and Ford and Lincoln and Buick they have them sit down at the table and hash out what they

called codes codes to determine all sorts of rules and regulations for each industry that all the factories had to

follow by law and these codes varied widely they included codes for things like what is the minimum wage for that

industry how many hours can a factory require its workers to work prices for some specific Industries like you know

you couldn't charge over a certain price for a car or they had to agree on some kind of limit to competition and even

quotas for employment meaning that the industry has to employ this many people it wasn't too much different than

Hoover's idea of voluntarism the one difference being that this was now going to be enforced through federal law on

the industries so they invite the industries in and the the business owners in they agree on a code and then

the government's role is to enforce these laws across these industries as one can imagine these codes got

complicated these became laws and by 1934 just one year in there were 727 codes on the

books that is 10,000 pages of law to give you an idea of how long that is from 1787 the founding of the United

States under the Constitution to 1933 they were about 10,000 pages of laws for the entire history of America

and then in one year they doubled the number of laws under the federal government under this NRA it was a very

common complex gigantic system of laws and the goal was to regulate industry so that factories aren't over producing

they're paying decent wages and there are rules and regulations within the various industries of course the New

Deal also tackled the banking industry and stock markets and they did a number of pieces of legislation but the one we

can focus on is the glass deagle act this sounds super boring and in many ways it is but the glass deagle act

still affects your life today the glass deagle act at the time separated commercial Banks the kind of Bank you

walk into with your paycheck and cash and maybe have a savings account from investment Banks the JP Morgan Banks the

banks that take a lot of money and invest in corporations this doesn't exist anymore

but for from 1933 to 1999 there used to be a separation Chase Bank was different from JP Morgan after of course 99 JP

Morgan and Chase would merge again however during this period the idea was to separate these Banks so that regular

people's savings are not being used to make risky Investments and they also created the FDIC the Federal Deposit

Insurance Corporation still in existence that basically says guarantees your savings account up to a certain number I

think today it's $250,000 so if you put money in a bank and that bank collapses the government

will give you your money um because it's guaranteeing it through an insurance program that we and Banks uh uh apply to

to help cover the possibility of a bank completely collapsing and last but not least the federal housing Administration

as I mentioned last class the Foreclosure rate was incredibly high it's estimated almost half of all homes

were in foreclosure 1931 1932 and so how do you reduce foreclosures well the government created the modern mortgage

Market back in the day mortgages were typically 3 to 5 years in length but the government made it possible for banks to

loan for 30 years and they did this by the government basically telling Banks hey look if you make a loan for 30 years

and that person doesn't pay back that loan we will bail you out they basically guaranteed the banks that in the event

of foreclosure they will basically pay the bank back for that foreclosure and that made Banks able and willing to lend

out to people that they normally didn't lend out to and especially during the Depression didn't lend out to for fear

of foreclosure because now the fear of foreclosure is a lot less did these programs work

well the Agricultural Adjustment Administration for example never quite hit what they call the parity level

meaning the average Farm prices of various Farm Goods in America never hit the rate that they were or the price

they were in between 1909 and 1914 and this is the goal here the goal was to get the prices over to here but as you

can see here the prices during the Great Depression from 33 to 41 never hit that level and in fact if you notice here

without the government payments and you can even see here right they would have even been lower but as you also notice

the government payments were never really that high in addition Roosevelt and the New

Deal faced a lot of uh backlash and in 1934 the Supreme Court declared the Agricultural Adjustment admin act and

administration unconstitutional and the new new dealers and the Congress went back to the

drawing board and they made a new uh act called the soil allotment act that basically allowed them to to continue

the program but as you can see here it never quite brought Farmers back to that level of prosperity they had 20 years

prior even worse was the national industrial Recovery Administration which faced a number of Court battles and in

1935 the national industrial Recovery Administration was deemed unconstitutional for breaking First

Amendment rights for breaking interstate commerce Clauses however other elements of these recovery programs were much

more effective the biggest examp example being the glass steagle Banking Act by separating investment and Commercial

Banks and guaranteeing people who put savings their money into a bank account from the bank collapsing them losing

their money it did encourage people to put their money back in the banks and you could see here this is the number of

banking failures and includes before the glass deagle act and then after and if anyone can see in this graph the obvious

benefits here right before 1933 bank failures were very common and of course in 33 itself over 4,000 Banks

collapsed and people lost all their savings but you can see after 1933 bank failures basically disappeared and they

disappeared basically from 33 until the US government began deregulating the banks again first in the ' 80s and you

see these bank failures over here and then of course in the 2000s and even though there's only a small number here

these were gigantic Banks but you can see here that people felt savings were safe and they began reinvesting in Banks

the other success story could definitely be the FHA by regulating the mortgage market and you can see here right

foreclosures per 1,000 mortgages slowly Rose from 1926 and hit their peak in 33 but then by 1936 and 37 those

foreclosures began dropping of course a new deal would not have been popular if it didn't help regular people and the

reality is that no matter how much you do to help get businesses going again people are still starving they need to

eat every single day they need a roof over their heads every single night and they need clothing on their backs every

single day of the winter so therefore there was a need for immediate relief of regular people and Roosevelt and the

Democratic party's Focus during the Great Depression was not only recovery the economy but also meeting the

immediate needs of people and they did it in a number of ways the first was the federal emergency relief Administration

and this is what we would call today in a common parland welfare this was emergency money sent out to to families

sent out to States and counties to help people who are starving to help people who are unemployed get back on their

feet and overall the government basically provided about $3 billion in emergency relief it was often called the

Dole Roosevelt had put Harry Hopkins kind of the Clint Eastwood of the new deal here who's a chains spoken kind of

Gambler um in charge of Farah and he had a long history of doing Social Work particularly in Lower East Side of

Manhattan in New York City and he spent about $88 million in about 2 hours and one of his colleagues said hey harry um

you know this program it's going to work out in the long run and it's Harry famously equipped look people don't eat

in the long run they eat every day so this program did the Farah got a lot of money out really quickly to help people

eat and survive but in reality the focus during the New Deal on helping people was not so much giving them checks but

instead giving them work and there were four major programs passed during the New Deal that created jobs for Americans

to do do and that included the Public Works Administration the pwa the Civilian Conservation Corps the CCC the

Civil Works Administration the CWA and the largest of all of them the WPA or the works progress administration which

was founded 1935 2 years after roselt was initially entered office so why the focus on jobs over just giving people

checks and it really came from a kind of philosophical background that came out of the New Deal itself the committee on

economic security for example which helped kind of formulate what we think of as the modern welfare state put the

idea of jobs over what they argued was unemployment compensation or kind of paying people just to survive as they

mention here the program for Economic Security which suggests follows no single pattern it is broader than

Insurance social insurance and does not attempt to just copy what they saw as European methods in placing primary

emphasis on employment rather than unemployment compensation we did differ fundamentally from those who see social

insurance as an all-sufficient program for economic security so what did these four job

programs do the pwa the Public Works Administration built big things things like the triau bridge the Lincoln Tunnel

um various high schools it built some parts of Jamaica High School Franklin late High School in the city the Golden

Gate Bridge and LaGuardia Airport and this is the marine terminal of LaGuardia Airport arguably at least in my opinion

the coolest part of lardi airport the Civilian Conservation Corps by contrast helped build a lot of our national parks

even state parks and local parks what the CCC did is it actually hired young men brought them out to national forests

and Parks provided housing and food for them didn't pay them a dime but instead sent money back to their families and

these young men and women mostly men though but some women as well built things like gazebos as you can see here

camp campgrounds hiking trails parking lots bathrooms and various infrastructure across our national parks

as you can see in this map here a lot of places in the country were touched by various CCC camps and those young men

helped support their families by doing the work and the checks then were sent home to their parents and their brothers

and sisters and anyone who needed the money back at home while they're taken care of at the CCC camp the Civil Works

Administration or the CWA meanwhile did a lot of smaller projects sidewalks Parks playgrounds pools things that are

local not big Bridges but small stuff and it was shortlived and eventually folded into the works progress

administration unlike the other programs mentioned the WPA didn't just build things about 60% of the funding for the

WPA went to building things like sidewalks and stuff even pools this is the atoria pool public pool still exists

today up in Historia but they also hired things people like photographers to take photographs and this is a cute kid in

Harlem or painters historians writers actors to put on plays write history books uh write novels and you know even

make movies and everything else they hired at 60% of the money went toward construction projects and about 40% went

to Services as well as Arts and Humanities and other kind of subjects so did these programs especially the jobs

programs did they provide relief to Americans well especially the WPA which started in 1935 and lasted till 1943

right employed between 1 and2 to 3 million Americans to give you an idea of how large that is 3 million Americans is

like two Amazon or two Walmarts the WPA and the government was the largest employer in America during the 1930s

basically the old joke was who isn't working for the WPA millions of people were employed by the government to do

all sorts of work across the country and what those people say they felt relief well it's it's hard to argue that they

wouldn't have at least felt the relief even if they didn't necessar like the job they were doing they probably like

the job more than not having a job but lastly there were some new dealers and when I say new dealers I mean Democratic

mainly Democratic party Congress members who saw the new deal as an opportunity to kind of win elections but also pass

legislation there were some new dealers who saw this dominance of the democratic party in Congress and the presidency to

kind of change the structure of the American state with the hopes that will improve people's well-being we can call

these reformers and they Ram through and when I say Ram they push through reforms that will in many ways shape the United

States that you live in today the first example is the Tennessee Valley Authority or the TVA we wouldn't have

Taylor Swift today if not for the TVA all maybe I'm exaggerating but Nashville and many of the hot you know kind of

really popular cities in Tennessee and other states around it would not have become come the state the cities they

are today and the kind of area where people are moving to and thriving in without the TVA and so what did the TVA

do well the te the the Tennessee Valley Authority essentially was a series of projects to build mainly electrical

electrical Grid in the Tennessee River Valley but also beyond that to build schools health clinics and carry job

opportunities and what was at the time the poorest part of America to give you an idea of how poor it was here is a

picture of a family and this woman is wearing a potato bag essentially made into a dress you can see his children

unbelievably poor this part of the country was so poor that families and children still suffered from a disease

called pelra and pelra is basically a disease of malnutrition when corn is basically the only part of your diet

because corn has no nutrients you end up becoming malnourished even though you're not hungry and so children and even

parents suffered from this disease that's how poor it was and you could see here they built a series of dams which

are those little red lines around here as well as a series of coal and oil power plants across the Tennessee River

Valley and as a result they provided cheap electricity and the TVA still exists providing cheap electricity to

Tennessee Alabama Georgia and North Carolina and as you can see here electrification jumped from 2% of

households in the Tennessee Valley to 75% of households between 1933 193 2 in 1935 and the idea was to make cheap

publicly available electricity to everyone or as they said down below the TVA electricity for all probably the

most important legislation and maybe the one that just seems like a thing that's on your paycheck and that is of course

Social Security and the Social Security Act of 1935 so Social Security is a gantan

program and it included all this stuff at the time it included elderly poor assistants which meant money and checks

just to old people who are poor and people who can't work so they can't take advantage of WPA or other programs but

they also don't make enough money to survive so the government would just write them checks the most important one

that still exists to this day is the public pension system and this is the one that of course you're likely if you

have a job are paying into him partly right and this idea is you contribute money every paycheck into Social

Security and when you reach a certain age you will get that money back as a little joke uh the lady in the corner

over here Ida Fuller she was the first person in America to receive a social security check for having worked she

worked for 3 years on January 31st 1940 she received the first social security check in America for

$225 anyone want to take a guess of what her social security check number was yes it was

000000001 she was the first social security recipient but of course Social Security went beyond just the public

pension system when you pay social security taxes in your paycheck every two weeks you pay of course into the

public pension system but you also pay for unemployment insurance which is taken out of your paycheck as well as

your employer's payments and that funds the Unemployment Insurance Fund in case you ever lose your job you can access it

so unemployment insurance to cover people who lose their jobs was also included in addition they create a

program which no longer exists but existed up until the 1990s was called Aid to dependent children and the dis a

now there are elements of this that still exist but it was called ADC and this was primarily for what they called

fatherless households these were homes where it was basically a single mom or a widow or whatever it may be and she

couldn't work cuz she had to watch kids but because she couldn't work couldn't watch kids but the husband or whatever

isn't around or dead or whatever may be and therefore there's not a bread winner meaning a man there to provide through a

job payments and so this program is what we tend to think of as welfare it was checks for being alive and having kids

but of course it was only as we'll talk about later gender very very gender focused because it was mainly for uh

women and single mothers who were supposed to stay home whereas if they were married and had a man in their life

the man is supposed to go to work and earn money so therefore they you those kind of mothers who are married or have

a relationship are not can't qualify for this Aid to dependent children the last part of Social Security was actually the

WPA which actually technically was part of Social Security Act so what it was the Social Security Act well it was the

early form of what we call a cradle to grave welfare state what do I mean by Cradle to grave I mean the idea was the

government was supposed to help people from birth until death and you could see elements of that here right ADC would

help your mother as you were a child in case there was no one else to help support you right then you get a job and

you pay into a public pension system if you lose your job there's unemployment or a guaranteed job through the WPA and

when you get old enough you can get a public pension system so from the moment you're born to the moment you die

there's some kind of support for you to survive through the you know various courses of life and of course this is

the Bedrock of nearly all democracies today many countries have it much more robust in the United States like France

or Sweden or Norway but the United States has its own element of a welfare state then of course there's the

National Labor Relations Act of 1935 and this more or less finally fully legalized the right of Americans to

unionize but more importantly the right of unions to negotiate and bargain with their employers and it created an entire

new agency in the United States called the National Labor Relations Board which is basically a court that sits down and

helps the negotiation between union leaders who are elected by their members and employers and Factory owners and

companies and they determine the contract by which the workers will work lastly there's an act that shapes your

life and your working life every day and that is the fair labor standards Act of 1938 and this was supposed to shape not

just workplaces where there is a unionized Workforce but every single formal workplace in the entire country

so the fair labor standards act shapes shaped and continues to shape the workplace in a number of ways for one

it's set the minimum wage at the time was about 25 cents an hour but it's the first time there is a minimum wage and

of course today's money that's about $5.50 an hour low but not as low as it could be with there was no minimum wage

and this said a national and federal minimum wage beyond that they created an 8h hour work day and therefore if you

worked for more than eight hours you were entitled to overtime as you could see here or if you work more than 44

hours in a work week you were entitled to time and a half and anyone here has a job you know what that means if you work

over that time you get overtime essentially beyond that the fair labor standards Act was the first time that

the federal government permanently was able to ban child labor and it ban child labor under the age of 16 uh nationally

and there are some changes especially most recently that are happening where some states are getting around it but

federally speaking child labor is illegal under the age of 16 so did these reform efforts actually reform the

United States and especially the well improve the well-being of Americans the National Labor Relations Act or the nlr

absolutely encouraged unionization and you can just see it in this graph whereas in 1900 about 5% of workers

belong to unions and at its height about 1919 about 15% of workers belong to unions after the passage of the nlra the

union rates skyrocketed to almost a over a third of all workers during World War II in the early 1940s the most famous

strike that really kind of set the standard for the automobile industry was the Flint strike of 1936 and 1937 where

workers decided they just sit down the factory and refuse to leave until they got the demand their demands are met and

in this instance unlike in previous examples Franken Roosevelt sent in the National Guard to actually protect the

workers in the factory instead of protect the factory from the workers and it helped them along with getting their

demands met and as a result workers were able to you know meet contracts have better working conditions have better

pay uh benefits retirement and everything else out of that and they created the modern labor movement thanks

to the nlra in addition thanks to union rights as well as the fair labor standards Act Right wages among various

you know Industries and everything else definitely went up as a simple example here in 1926 automobile workers made 46

cents an hour or in today's money about $7 89 an hour on average but you can see by 1940 that number jumped to $22 in

today's money almost $23 an hour which is actually more than a starting wage at a autoa factory literally today so

they're making more back in 1940 than they are uh today as you can see here the average industrial worker generally

of course made less money uh automobiles were kind of the high standard at 720 but by 1940 they were making $16 an hour

in today's money so no doubt minimum wage plus union rights allowed workers to see big gains in their well-being

through higher pay in addition both so Social Security Act and the fair labor standards act reduced both elderly

poverty and more or less at least up until very recently eliminated child labor and we don't have great data going

back to the 30s but the 1950s we could actually show that the more that Social Security spending happens the lower the

elderly poverty rate and you know in the United States elderly poverty has been severely reduced thanks to the Social

Security program because before that people were on their own and as they get old if they can't work anymore they have

to rely on family members or sometimes poor houses to survive or they just die but Social Security made retirement a

possibility and a retirement that was comfortable at least you have some money was possible for the first time thanks

to the Social Security Act however there were major limits to the reform efforts of the new deal and the most important

was the fact that the New Deal did not include all workers within its you know protections and for example the most

important may be Social Security did not cover Farm labor or domestic service meaning nannies Maids cleaners

everything else and because African-Americans mostly worked in either Farm labor as sharecroppers or in

domestic service cleaning people's homes feeding children and doing all this kind of work as a result 65% the majority of

African-Americans Living in America were excluded from Social Security they could not collect retirement if they got

laid off or couldn't find work they couldn't get unemployment um they you know essentially couldn't get elderly

poverty assistance necessarily but even just as importantly about over a third of white Americans were also excluded

because plenty of white Americans worked as domestic servants and farm laborers as well so they're not covered and

therefore what you're going to have is very different levels of poverty whereas white families who access Social

Security when they get old they won't be poor black families are more likely to have elderly poor people in their homes

because there is no social security for them there's no retirement but it wasn't just Social Security the nlr the

National Labor Relations Act only covered 65% of the workforce that meant if you worked in government in public

sector if you're a farm worker if you're a domestic servant if you worked in public transportation if you're an

independent contractor or a supervisor at the time you could not have uh could not unionize and could not strike and

therefore you could not demand better wages in working conditions at least legally and that did not wasn't change

till 1960s 7s and 80s and last but not least the fair labor standards Act only covered about half the workforce when it

was founded so workers in construction in domestic service again and farm labor again and restaurants nursing homes

hospitals government and Retail were not guaranteed a minimum wage now as anyone here who's worked in a store retail you

know that's changed a bit changed in the' 60s but nonetheless for about 30 25 to 30 years an entire generation of

people were not covered by all these benefits from the New Deal itself and therefore they did not have the right to

a union the right to a minimum wage or the right to a retirement or unemployment even though this was being

written into law there were major exclusions written into this law and therefore produce an inequality that

didn't exist before because everyone didn't have this stuff but now some people have it and other people don't so

given everything I've talked about the question remains did the New Deal improve people's well-being did it

revive the economy did it reform the country did it kind of create a whole new infrastructure for Americans to use

did it revive democracy it's actually really difficult to answer these basic questions

something as simple as did the New Deal produce economic recovery is kind of hard to answer for example this simple

graph is about GDP and GDP is a measurement essentially of all the wealth that a economy creates it's a way

to describe economic growth right so if GDP changes over time that shows that e the economy be growing or shrinking the

other line here that's the Blue Line the red line is personal consumption meaning how much money people have to buy stuff

as you see here from 1929 till 1932 both the GDP in America goes down and of course consumer expenditure spending

goes down and then once Franklin Roosevelt's elected you do see a rise but it's a small rise there's a brief

recession in 37 and then it rises however not until 1940 does the uh economy basically

returned to its pre-depression level and consumer spending returned to its pre-depression level what really takes

off in the economy is not the new deal but instead World War II a similar problem exists for how well the New Deal

reduced unemployment and this is unemployment during the Depression from 1929 when the ression starts until World

War II and you can see here unemployment of course was about 3 4% really good pretty strong economy obviously it goes

really high until Franklin Roosevelt's elected and it goes from a high of 25% to a low of about

14% however by any measure this entire period is considered a depressed economy even though the New Deal begins in 33 by

1940 the US economy is still having unemployment employment rates of 14 and 15% which is much higher than a rate you

want typically in an economy you want a rate of three 4% maybe even 2% and it had not been that during the entire

Great Depression however the real weird thing about unemployment is how they record it

in the 1930s they didn't count anyone working for a public jobs program if you work for the WPA the pwa the CCC the TVA

and all the other programs we talked about you were counted as unemployed and not employed they only count to people

who work for private companies or regular government jobs as employed so if you actually include them in the

calculations and that's this line here you see the unemployment rate is actually a bit lower it goes to 8 or %.

still not in prosperous times but much much better and that's up to you to judge whether you count someone building

a park in New York City as working or not as you see it's really hard to measure these things right recovery

depends on how one looks at it what one counts as a kind of a job for example so therefore it's very subjective and

that's why your opinion matters here and mean it's similar with the idea that did the New Deal relieve Misfortune well it

kind of depends on who you ask is it someone who has a WPA job building a bridge they would say yes if it's a

black Farm worker in the South they may say the New Deal hasn't touched me so it really does depend but we did see

definitely some people's kind of well-being was kept up during a horrific depression where they cannot find a

private sector job one thing that's hard to deny is that the New Deal definitely did build a lot of stuff and when I say

a lot of stuff I mean a lot of stuff the WPA pwa CCC CWA built infrastructure and put millions of people to work creating

art you know playgrounds Parks schools and of course Services across the US just as some random stats funds went to

every County United States except for three that's 371 counties in all the United

States they built over 1 million miles of Road 3500 Parks 1500 airports 78,000 Bridges 25 200 hospitals and more than

6,000 schools that's not even including 40,000 other public buildings across the entire country chances are between you

know when you if you come to campus in Queensboro or you're traveling on a bus you are passing a new deal built post

office School train station something especially in New York artists meanwhile painted over 2500 murals sculpted 70,000

statues they put on plays and concerts and murals films and photography shoots Across America and lastly the most kind

of extreme or most radical um interpretation of the new deal is that the New Deal didn't just wasn't really

necessarily even about recovering the economy or about helping people get through hard times it was about

reforming the country remaking democracy itself and and we can assess did the New Deal revive democracy meaning did it

give people Empower people with Choice over their lives and you can look in two multiple ways at this question let's

take a look at a simple thing like presidential elections in 1932 of course Franklin rosart won his first Landslide

Victory however four years later in 1936 he won even more votes and that's very rare for a president usually when they

go up for their reelection they don't get as many votes as the first time people are disappointed people were so

happy that Franklin revelt was running again they voted for him in much higher numbers and he only lost as you can see

here two states right Vermont and New Hampshire he won every other electoral vote in every other state and that's

despite the fact that African-Americans were excluded from the Social Security Act and the fair labor standards act in

many ways while entire categories of workers weren't included in the National Labor Relations Act or Social Security

Act obviously millions of people are still unemployed even with the WPA CCC and other jobs programs people

nonetheless still voted for Roosevelt in fact he was so popular that when he ran for an unprecedented third election he

won again but as you can see he was challenged a little more effectively here but he still won this election

what's so important about the New Deal and you can't argue with this even whether you like it or hate it is that

it absolutely led to democratic party dominance meaning the Democratic party came to dominate politics for years

beginning with the new deal until really the late 1960 s and what's weird about the Democratic party it was it was a

really weird Coalition of white supremacist Southerners the guys who built Jim Crow in the South and then

alternatively African-American voters in the South and the north Progressive Farmers the kinds who are the populace

in the 1890s obviously union workers and lastly City residents who benefited from the parks and playgrounds of the New

Deal built it's a weird Coalition how could white supremacists and black voters both vote for the same party well

well it's because the Democratic party delivered different things to different people it gave white supremacist

Southerners it promised hey we're not going to touch Jim Crow down there right we'll make sure your Farm Workers don't

get included by the new deal but black workers in the South who do work for the WPA like those jobs and therefore they

vote Democrat you can see here just in this last recording right the Democratic

party dominant ex dominance existed in America from the 1930s really till the 1960s and the House of Representatives

until the 1990s and it's only in the 1970s and 80s that the Republican Party remakes its Resurgence in America and so

did the New Deal improve people's well-being well that's for you to decide this week but just as importantly the

most important thing to consider is the New Deal did create what we think of as the welfare state a government committed

to the well-being of Americans whether it accomplish that goal is a different story but it did create that and up to

you to answer what that actually meant