You are viewing a free preview of this lesson.
Subscribe to unlock all 10 lessons in this course and every other course on LearningBro.
The New Deal was fiercely contested from every direction, and its ultimate significance cannot be judged without weighing both the opposition it provoked and the limits it revealed. From the right came business hostility and a conservative Supreme Court that struck down key agencies; from the left came demagogues and reformers who thought Roosevelt had done far too little; and in 1937–38 the New Deal suffered a self-inflicted setback, the so-called Roosevelt Recession, that exposed the incompleteness of recovery. For a depth study, this lesson brings the analysis of the New Deal to its climax: it examines the sources and significance of the opposition, and then confronts the central evaluative question of the whole period — how effective the New Deal actually was in delivering relief, recovery, and reform.
This lesson is the most evaluative in the sequence. The central questions are matters of judgement: what the opposition from left, right, and the Court reveals about the New Deal's character and constraints; why the recovery faltered in 1937; and how, weighing achievement against limitation, the effectiveness of the New Deal should finally be assessed. The register must remain scholarly and balanced, giving due weight to the New Deal's genuine achievements and to its real failures.
By the end of this lesson you will be able to:
This lesson completes the New Deal phase of Edexcel 9HI0 Paper 2, Option 2H.1 (Route H depth study): "The USA, c1920–55: boom, bust and recovery." It covers opposition to the New Deal (the Supreme Court and the court-packing crisis, Huey Long, Father Coughlin, Dr Townsend, and business), the Roosevelt Recession of 1937–38, and the assessment of the New Deal's effectiveness. Within our own teaching sequence it forms a pair with Lesson 4, so that the two together constitute a complete analysis of the New Deal, and it closes the boom-bust-recovery arc that opened the course.
Because Paper 2 is a depth paper, the reward is for fine command of a short period and for source judgements set firmly in context. (For the precise weightings and question wording, consult the official Edexcel specification and sample assessment materials rather than any paraphrase.)
The New Deal's expansion of federal power and its regulation of business provoked determined opposition from conservatives and from much of the business community. Many business leaders regarded the New Deal as an unwarranted and even socialistic interference with private enterprise, resented the taxation, regulation, and empowerment of labour that it brought, and organised to resist it — most visibly through the American Liberty League, founded in 1934 by business figures and conservative politicians to oppose the New Deal as a threat to liberty and property. Their hostility hardened as the Second New Deal, with the Wagner Act and higher taxes on the wealthy, turned more directly against business interests.
The most formidable conservative opposition, however, came from the Supreme Court. Its conservative majority regarded much of the New Deal as an unconstitutional extension of federal authority, and in a series of decisions it struck down flagship agencies: the National Recovery Administration was invalidated in 1935 (in the Schechter case) and the Agricultural Adjustment Administration in 1936 (in the Butler case). These rulings destroyed central planks of the recovery programme and threatened the whole New Deal with judicial dismantling, and they provoked the constitutional confrontation examined below.
Frustrated by the Court's obstruction and emboldened by his landslide re-election in 1936, Roosevelt in early 1937 proposed a Judicial Reorganisation Bill — the so-called court-packing plan — which would have allowed him to appoint additional justices, up to a maximum of six, ostensibly to ease the workload of elderly judges but in reality to secure a majority sympathetic to the New Deal.
The plan misfired badly. It provoked fierce opposition across the political spectrum, including from many of Roosevelt's own supporters, who saw it as an assault on the independence of the judiciary and the separation of powers. The bill was defeated in Congress, and the episode damaged Roosevelt's authority and emboldened a conservative coalition of Republicans and Southern Democrats that would obstruct further reform. Yet the outcome was paradoxical. During the crisis, Justice Owen Roberts shifted his voting pattern — the change nicknamed "the switch in time that saved nine" — and the Court began upholding New Deal legislation, including the Wagner Act and Social Security; and through subsequent retirements Roosevelt was eventually able to appoint a majority of the justices. The court-packing crisis is therefore a classic study in the limits of presidential power: Roosevelt lost the legislative battle but effectively won the constitutional war, as the Court ceased to obstruct the New Deal.
Opposition from the left is analytically important because it reveals a New Deal criticised not for doing too much but for doing too little, and because the pressure it exerted helped to shape the Second New Deal. Three figures stand out, each with a mass following built through the new medium of radio or through populist campaigning.
| Critic | Position | Programme and significance |
|---|---|---|
| Huey Long (Senator, Louisiana) | Radical populist | His "Share Our Wealth" campaign promised to cap great fortunes and guarantee every family a decent income and home; immensely popular and a potential rival to Roosevelt until his assassination in 1935 |
| Father Charles Coughlin | Populist / increasingly extreme | A "radio priest" with a vast audience who at first supported the New Deal, then turned against it, demanding monetary reform and drifting into anti-Semitism and sympathy for fascism |
| Dr Francis Townsend | Pension reformer | Proposed a generous monthly pension for the elderly, funded to be spent quickly to stimulate the economy; his movement built pressure that helped shape the Social Security Act |
The significance of this opposition is twofold. First, it demonstrates that the New Deal operated within a genuinely contested political field, in which more radical redistribution had real popular appeal — a reminder that Roosevelt's programme was, from the left, a cautious rescue of capitalism rather than a transformation of it. Second, the pressure of Long, Coughlin, and Townsend is widely credited with pushing Roosevelt leftward in 1935, contributing to the more reform-minded Second New Deal, including Social Security itself. The left opposition thus shaped the New Deal even as it attacked it.
Any assessment of the New Deal's effectiveness must weigh its deeply ambiguous record on race, which illustrates both its genuine reach and its structural limits. The evidence points in both directions and must be held in balance.
| Genuine advance | Real limitation |
|---|---|
| The informal "Black Cabinet" of African American advisers, including Mary McLeod Bethune, gave African Americans a presence in the administration | Roosevelt refused to support federal anti-lynching legislation, fearing the loss of Southern Democratic support |
| Relief and employment agencies such as the CCC and WPA employed large numbers of African Americans | The Social Security Act excluded agricultural and domestic workers — categories that included most African American workers |
| African American voters shifted decisively from the Republican to the Democratic Party, a historic realignment | The AAA disproportionately harmed Black sharecroppers, who were evicted when landowners took land out of production |
| Eleanor Roosevelt was a prominent and vocal advocate of civil rights | Many New Deal programmes were administered on a segregated basis, especially in the South |
The historian Ira Katznelson, in When Affirmative Action Was White (2005), argues that the New Deal's exclusions were not incidental but structural — that by design the great benefits of the programme flowed disproportionately to white Americans, deepening rather than narrowing racial inequality even as some African Americans gained. Others emphasise a real, if limited, shift in federal attention to African American concerns. The balance of the evidence supports the view that the New Deal both advanced and constrained African American prospects, and that its dependence on Southern Democratic votes set the limits. This ambiguity is essential to a fair evaluation of the New Deal's effectiveness.
The most revealing episode for judging the New Deal's economic effectiveness is the Roosevelt Recession of 1937–38. By 1937, believing that recovery was secure, Roosevelt cut federal spending in an effort to balance the budget, and the Federal Reserve tightened credit. The result was a sharp slump: industrial production fell, and unemployment, which had been declining, rose steeply again. The recession was only reversed when Roosevelt resumed federal spending in 1938.
The episode is analytically decisive for two reasons. First, it demonstrated that the recovery achieved by 1937 was fragile and incomplete, and that the economy remained dependent on federal spending to sustain demand. Second, it is often read as inadvertent confirmation of the Keynesian case — that it was sustained government spending, rather than the structural reforms alone, that drove recovery — a lesson borne out when the vast deficit spending of the Second World War finally restored full employment. The Roosevelt Recession thus stands as the strongest single piece of evidence that the New Deal, for all its achievements, did not by itself end the Depression.
It is worth drawing out why the episode happened, because it illuminates the New Deal's economic thinking. Roosevelt was never a convinced deficit-spender; like most politicians of his generation he regarded a balanced budget as a virtue and the large deficits of the mid-1930s as a regrettable emergency measure. When recovery seemed established in 1937, he acted on this instinct and cut back, with the results described. The lesson that many economists later drew — that in a depressed economy government spending sustains the demand that private spending cannot — was not yet the orthodoxy it would become, and the New Deal had stumbled towards deficit spending pragmatically rather than adopting it as a theory. The Roosevelt Recession therefore reveals not merely that recovery was incomplete but why: the New Deal lacked, until the war forced it upon them, a settled commitment to the sustained public spending that the depressed economy required. This point separates a description of the recession from a genuine explanation of it.
The episode also sharpens the crucial analytical distinction between the New Deal's three aims, and a strong answer will press it here. The recession damaged recovery without undoing the achievements of relief and reform, and this asymmetry is itself the key evidence for a layered verdict on the whole programme. The reforms of 1935 — Social Security, the Wagner Act, the regulatory architecture — were structural and permanent, wholly untouched by the downturn of 1937; the relief agencies continued to employ millions once spending resumed in 1938. It was recovery alone — the restoration of full employment and self-sustaining growth — that proved fragile, precisely because it depended on a continuing federal stimulus that Roosevelt's fiscal orthodoxy withdrew too soon. The recession thus demonstrates that the New Deal's shortfall was specific and explicable, confined to the one aim that its economic thinking was least equipped to secure, rather than a general failure of the programme. To collapse relief, recovery, and reform into a single undifferentiated verdict is to miss exactly what the 1937 downturn teaches.
By the late 1930s the reforming energy of the New Deal was largely spent. The court-packing debacle, the Roosevelt Recession, and Roosevelt's unsuccessful attempt to unseat conservative Democrats in the 1938 primaries had combined to strengthen a conservative coalition of Republicans and Southern Democrats in Congress that could block further reform. Little major New Deal legislation passed after 1938, and the administration's attention turned increasingly to the deteriorating international situation and, from 1939, to the war in Europe. The New Deal as a reforming programme therefore reached its limits well before American entry into the Second World War, and the recovery it had sought so hard to achieve was ultimately delivered not by domestic reform but by wartime mobilisation — the subject of Lesson 6. This chronology matters for evaluation: the New Deal's incompleteness on recovery was not simply a matter of insufficient time but of a reform impulse that had exhausted its political momentum by 1938.
The central evaluative question of the whole period is how effective the New Deal was. The disciplined approach is to judge it separately against its three aims — relief, recovery, and reform — and then to reach an overall judgement.
Subscribe to continue reading
Get full access to this lesson and all 10 lessons in this course.