Blog Post 3 Eric Rauchway

With his election, Roosevelt redefined the government’s role in the country with his New Deal policies. One such example is the government playing a more active role in jumpstarting the economy, assisting banks with policies such as the Emergency Banking Act and Public Works Administration. And for the people, welfare programs, organizations, and legislation that would ensure people didn’t deal with another depression as serious as the one America just went through. One such legislation, the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935, gave the president a large budget to use on large scale projects like infrastructure and recreation areas. This also led to the creation of one of Roosevelt’s more famous organizations, the Workers Progress Administration, which gave people, especially young workers, the chance to earn a wage that would assist them in getting them to become self-sufficient. As Eric Rauchway would describe in his book, “Great Depression and the New Deal”, the WPA defined a “security wage” as well as a “legitimacy to the once unorthodox idea that Americans deserved a certain degree of job security and a minimum standard of living as an essential part of their dignity. Americans, WPA’s “security wage” suggested, ought to earn a wage sufficient to provide them more than subsistence, enough to allow them pride and independence from their employers” (Rauchway, 8).

In previous history classes, my previous professors would present the idea that the New Deal “saved capitalism”; that the New Deal was something everyone was on board with. While Rauchway’s evaluation of the New Deal was generally positive, there were criticisms and points that he presents that I had not considered. As Rauchway showed with the 1939 Institute of Public Opinion poll, the worst thing the Roosevelt Administration did was the “relief and the WPA” while also being the best thing the Roosevelt Administration did (Rauchway, 8). For example, the agencies that Roosevelt created to help state economies were susceptible to mild political corruption. Big city mayors would be able to take advantage of their large voting populations to draw favor from the government and their funding (Rauchway, 8). Later in the New Deal did the government have to tighten their rules on who would have access to these relief programs in response to this potential corruption. For example, the government would narrow down the people who could get relief by such metrics such as their citizenship or their race/ethnicity (Rauchway, 8).