New Deal
The New Deal was Franklin D. Roosevelt's program of state-led industrial recovery, social provision, and class compromise (1933–1945) — the high-water mark of the American System tradition and proof that America's own political tradition, imported Marxism aside, contained the resources for socializing the economy.
Content
- Financial regulation (Glass-Steagall, SEC), deposit insurance, abandonment of the gold standard.
- Mass public works and infrastructure: TVA, WPA, CCC, Hoover Dam, rural electrification.
- Labor rights (Wagner Act, 1935): the legal foundation of industrial unionism; union density tripled.
- Social Security (1935); wartime wage-price controls and the military-industrial mobilization that ended the Depression.
Infrared reading
Infrared claims the New Deal as American socialism avant la lettre — not a betrayal of capitalism but its sublation by the American state tradition of Hamilton, Clay, and Lincoln (the American System of protective tariffs, national banking, and internal improvements). FDR himself said in 1944 that true liberty required an "Economic Bill of Rights." The post-war settlement — high wages, strong unions, industrial peace — was the closest Anglo-America came to class peace until the neoliberal counter-revolution dismantled it from the 1970s onward.
The lesson Haz draws: the American people accept and demand economic patriotism and social provision when it is presented in American idiom. The task is not to import a foreign ideology but to complete what the New Deal started under conditions of monopoly decay (see Corporate Socialism under FDR, Left-Conservatism).