THE FIRST NEW DEAL ★^829Hoover’s administration established a federally sponsored bank to issue
home loans. Not until the New Deal, however, did the government systemat-
ically enter the housing market. Roosevelt spoke of “the security of the home”
as a fundamental right akin to “the security of livelihood, and the security of
social insurance.” In 1933 and 1934, his administration moved energetically
to protect home owners from foreclosure and to stimulate new construction.
The Home Owners Loan Corporation and Federal Housing Administration
(FHA) insured millions of long-term mortgages issued by private banks. At the
same time, the federal government itself built thousands of units of low-rent
housing. New Deal housing policy represented a remarkable departure from
previous government practice. Thanks to the FHA and, later, the Veterans’
Administration, home ownership came within the reach of tens of millions
of families. It became cheaper for most Americans to buy single-family homes
than to rent apartments.
Other important measures of Roosevelt’s first two years in office included
the ratification of the Twenty-first Amendment to the Constitution, which
repealed Prohibition; the establishment of the Federal Communications
Commission to oversee the nation’s broadcast airwaves and telephone com-
munications; and the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission
to regulate the stock and bond markets.
Taken together, the First New Deal was a series of experiments, some of
which succeeded and some of which did not. They transformed the role of
the federal government, constructed numerous public facilities, and pro-
vided relief to millions of needy persons. Public employment rescued millions
of Americans from the ravages of the Depression. But while the economy
improved somewhat, sustained recovery had not been achieved. Some 10 mil-
lion Americans—more than 20 percent of the workforce—remained unem-
ployed when 1934 came to an end.
The Court and the New Deal
In 1935, the Supreme Court, still controlled by conservative Republican judges
who held to the nineteenth-century understanding of freedom as liberty of
contract, began to invalidate key New Deal laws. First came the NRA, declared
unconstitutional in May in a case brought by the Schechter Poultry Company
of Brooklyn, which had been charged with violating the code adopted by the
chicken industry. In a unanimous decision, the Court declared the NRA unlaw-
ful because in its codes and other regulations it delegated legislative powers to
the president and attempted to regulate local businesses that did not engage
in interstate commerce. In January 1936, the AAA fell in United States v. Butler,
which declared it an unconstitutional exercise of congressional power over
What were the major policy initiatives of the New Deal in the Hundred Days?