THE FIRST NEW DEAL ★^821The Columbia River project reflected broader changes in American life and
thought during the New Deal of the 1930s. Roosevelt oversaw the transformation
of the Democratic Party into a coalition of farmers, industrial workers, the reform-
minded urban middle class, liberal intellectuals, northern African- Americans,
and, somewhat incongruously, the white supremacist South, united by the belief
that the federal government must provide Americans with protection against
the dislocations caused by modern capitalism. “Liberalism,” traditionally under-
stood as limited government and free-market economics, took on its modern
meaning. Thanks to the New Deal, it now referred to active efforts by the national
government to modernize and regulate the market economy and to uplift less
fortunate members of society.
Freedom, too, underwent a transformation during the 1930s. The Depres-
sion had discredited the ideas that social progress rests on the unrestrained
pursuit of wealth and that, apart from unfortunates like widows and orphans,
most poverty is self-inflicted. The New Deal elevated a public guarantee of
economic security to the forefront of American discussions of freedom. The
1930s were a decade of dramatic social upheaval. Social and political activists,
most notably a revitalized labor movement, placed new issues on the political
agenda. When one writer in 1941 published a survey of democratic thought
beginning in the ancient world, he concluded that what distinguished his
own time was its awareness of “the social conditions of freedom.” Thanks to
the New Deal, he wrote, “economic security” had “at last been recognized as
a political condition of personal freedom.” Regional economic development
like that in the Northwest reflected this understanding of freedom. So did
other New Deal measures, including the Social Security Act, which offered aid
to the unemployed and aged, and the Fair Labor Standards Act, which estab-
lished a national minimum wage.
Yet while the New Deal significantly expanded the meaning of freedom, it
did not erase freedom’s boundaries. Its benefits flowed to industrial workers
but not tenant farmers, to men far more fully than women, and to white Amer-
icans more than blacks, who, in the South, still were deprived of the basic rights
of citizenship.
THE FIRST NEW DEAL
FDR and the Election of 1932
It is indeed paradoxical that Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had been raised in
privilege on a New York country estate, came to be beloved as the symbolic
representative of ordinary citizens. But like Lincoln, with whom he is often
What were the major policy initiatives of the New Deal in the Hundred Days?