New Deal

The New Deal was the name President Franklin D. Roosevelt gave to the series of programs between 1933–1937 with the goal of relief, recovery and reform of the United States economy during the Great Depression.

Quotes by Roosevelt

• I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people.
  • Franklin D. Roosevelt, accepting the Democratic nomination for President - July 2, 1932.

• [Some People]...will try to give you new and strange names for what we are doing. Sometimes they will call it 'Fascism,' sometimes 'Communism,' sometimes 'Regimentation,' sometimes 'Socialism.' But, in so doing, they are trying to make very complex and theoretical something that is really very simple and very practical.... Plausible self-seekers and theoretical die-hards will tell you of the loss of individual liberty. Answer this question out of the facts of your own life. Have you lost any of your rights or liberty or constitutional freedom of action and choice?
  • Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1934 speech, quoted in David M. Kennedy,

Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945. (1999)

Quotes by others

• The New Deal also came to the rescue of mortaged farmers and city-dwellers by taking steps to prevent

foreclosures, then dreadfully common; the federal government, in essence, underwrote both the lenders and the borrowers.

• • Hugh Brogan, The Penguin History of the United States of America, 1990.

• Even today-in blithe disregard to his actual philosophy- Smith is generally regarded as a conservative economist, whereas in fact, he is more avowedly hostile to the motives of businessman then most New Deal economists.
  • Robert Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers, 1953.

• Woodrow Wilson's New Freedom promised our nation a new political and economic framework.

Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal promised security and succor to those in need. But the New Frontier of which I speak is not a set of promises--it is a set of challenges. It sums up not what I intend to offer the American people, but what I intend to ask of them. It appeals to their pride, not to their pocketbook--it holds out the promise of more sacrifice instead of more security.

• • John F. Kennedy, "The New Frontier" speech, 1960.

• At the end of February we were a congeries of disorderly panic-stricken mobs and factions. In the

hundred days from March to June we became again an organized nation confident of our power to provide for our own security and to control our own destiny.

• Walter Lippmann, quoted in Arthur M. Schlesinger, The coming of the New Deal, 1933–1935, Houghton Mifflin, 2003.

• Just as he was sensitive to the broad geographic appeal of the Corps, so too was Franklin Roosevelt aware that the

CCC could bring together often competing special interests under the banner of New Deal liberalism. The president consciously used the CCC's popularity among both the working and upper classes, on the local and the national levels, and on the political Left and political Right, to knit together an ideologically diverse political constituency that supported the New Deal.

• Neil. M. Maher, Nature's New Deal:The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Roots of the American

Environmental Movement, Oxford University Press, 2008.

• Fascism was really the basis for the New Deal. It was Mussolini's success in Italy, with his government-directed economy, that led the early New Dealers to say "But Mussolini keeps the trains running on time."
  • Ronald Reagan in May 17, 1976 Time Magazine.

• The New Deal is plainly an attempt to achieve a working socialism and avert a social collapse in America; it is extraordinarily parallel to the successive "policies" and "Plans" of the Russian experiment. Americans shirk the word "socialism", but what else can one call it?
  • H.G. Wells, The New World Order (1939).

External links

• New Deal quotes analyzed; study guide with analysis, timeline, trivia, primary sources