The first Hundred Days of the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt marked the beginning of what scholars have come to call the First New Deal of 1933, which emphasized economic recovery from the Great Depression and relief assistance to the unemployed.
Historians have long used a “two New Deals” framework to impose order on the myriad agencies and pieces of legislation of the New Deal, and to understand the changes in the policies and legislative agenda of between the First New Deal of 1933 and the Second New Deal of 1935, which emphasized social reform. Although the first and second New Deal model tends to exaggerate change in policy and ideology between 1933 and 1935 while often overlooking continuities, it has nonetheless proven a useful conceptual framework. (Recently scholars have also identified a Third New Deal in Roosevelt’s second and third terms.)
Unlike his predecessor, Herbert C. Hoover, Roosevelt, counseled by members of his Brain Trust, attributed the causes of the Great Depression to structural flaws in the American economy and to a failure to regulate business. The Roosevelt administration thus turned toward an enlarged role for the federal government in regulating and stabilizing the economy. In addition to programs designed to provide relief, the most prominent of which was the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, the administration implemented programs to use national government planning to prevent further economic decline and promote recovery through the coordination and regulation of private industry and agriculture.
The two key agencies that embodied this philosophy behind the First New Deal were the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) created by the Agricultural Adjustment Act and the National Recovery Administration (NRA) developed in 1933 to carry out the provisions of the National Industrial Recovery Act. The AAA used subsidies and taxes to control farm production and raise prices on agricultural goods. The NRA suspended antitrust laws for those companies that complied with its codes for production, prices, and employment practices. By 1935, however, after the Supreme Court decision in Schechter Poultry Corporation V. United States declared the NRA unconstitutional, policymakers began to turn away from efforts to advance recovery through planning and controls, and looked toward social reform to provide both immediate relief and longterm security during the Second New Deal.
Further reading: William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932-1940 (New York: Harper, 1963); William H. Wilson, “The Two New Deals: A Valid Concept?” The Historian 28 (February 1966): 268288.
—Shannon L. Parsley
World History
