From Wagner To Taft-Hartley: The Rise And Fall Of Labor
...hence referred to as “Black Tuesday,” a record 16 million shares were traded and $30 billion vanished as the stock market collapsed. The event signaled the beginning of the Great Depression, the worst economic crisis in the nation’s history. The impact on American workers was immediate and devastating. An estimated 2.5 million people were jobless within the first two weeks of the crash, and by January 1931, the figure had risen to 8 million (Piven & Cloward, 1979, 45-46). In 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected President on the strength of his bold new vision of how modern government should operate, as well as its relationship with the individual. His philosophy of New Deal Liberalism sought to redefine the social contract between the individual and government. Appealing to the great masses of unemployed Americans, Roosevelt spoke of a new “economic constitutional order” whereby the government would guarantee the individual protection from an increasingly uncertain marketplace; thus, “security was to be the new self-evident truth of political life in the United States” (Milkis & Mileur, 2002, 3).
Did the policies and agencies that sprang from the Roosevelt administration, in fact, signify the “triumph of liberalism?” Were the institutional realignments within the American political landscape revolutionary, or, as Richard Kirkendall summed up, an “antirevolutionary response to a situation that had revolutionary potentialities?” (Milkis & Mileur, 2002, 25) Did the ensuing creation of a welfare state serve to benefit Labor or Industry? Despite its many work relief elements, the New Deal may be best understood as a defense of American capitalism because its main programs attempted to create a stable environment for private enterprise.
This paper will examine the policies and ideologies behind New Deal legislation. It will also take a...
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