traditional ideas oflaissez-faireand from the Supreme Court, which ruled
many of the key items of Roosevelt’s legislative programme (for example, the
National Industrial Recovery Act) unconstitutional. However, the policies
were popular with the electorate as a whole and the New Deal is usually seen as
a crucial period in American political history both because it precipitated a
partyrealignmentand because it greatly changed the nature of the US federal
system (seefederalism). As a result of the party realignment key groups in
American society such as blacks, labour unions and the poor became linked to
theDemocratic Party, which used this coalition to retain the presidency
from 1933–52 and to dominate congressional elections thereafter. Only with
the rise of the new politics of the 1960s did the Democratic coalition seem in
danger of losing its majority status, and even then the evidence of its break-up
is ambiguous.
The New Deal is sometimes divided into two periods. In the first period,
which lasted from 1933–35, the measures were generally exploratory and
moderate. In the second period President Roosevelt, assured of electoral
support after his re-election in 1936, felt able to act more radically and to
confront the Supreme Court over its attempts to challenge his legislative
programme.
New Economic Policy (NEP)
The New Economic Policy was introduced byLeninat the 10th Congress of
the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), later theCommunist Party of
the Soviet Union, in March 1921. It represented a considerable relaxation of
the strict ‘war communist’ economic policy introduced immediately after the
second (Bolshevik) revolution of 1917. The banking system, which had been
completely abolished, was reintroduced (though as state, nationalized banks),
internal trading was allowed much more freely and without state planning
controls on the movement and distribution of goods, and limited private
trading for profit was allowed. In other words, it allowed a slight movement
back towards a capitalist form of economics, and made sense to many who felt
that Russia had to go through the equivalent of a bourgeois capitalist revolu-
tion beforecommunismproper would have a foundation to build on. It was
largely forced on Lenin anyway, because of riots over food shortages and a fear
that the economy, and especially the agricultural economy, would collapse, and
with it would vanish revolutionary control over the country. It had always been
feared by many revolutionaries that, unless the rest of Europe went communist
almost immediately, the revolution would not be able to survive alone in
Russia. To doctrinaire Marxists, who had wanted to create total communism
overnight, abolishing even money, the policy was unacceptable. But it was not
untilStalinintroduced the first of his five-year plans in 1929, using force and
New Economic Policy (NEP)