The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

New Deal

a system of measures undertaken by the US government between 1933 and 1938 to mitigate the contradictions of American capitalism, which had been aggravated as a result of the economic crisis of 1929–33. The New Deal is associated with President F. D. Roosevelt.

During the first period of the New Deal (1933–34) laws advantageous to large-scale employers were passed. The National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), which was passed in 1933, provided for the introduction into various branches of industry of “codes of fair competition,” which fixed production costs and levels of output and allocated market areas. Basically, the codes supported the largest monopolies at the expense of small and middle-level employers. The Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA), which was passed in 1933, was designed to raise prices for farm products by paying monetary compensation to farmers who reduced sown areas and livestock herds. These and subsequent New Deal economic measures directed at state regulation of the economy constituted an important stage in the development of state-monopoly capitalism in the USA.

A number of laws were passed during the second period of the New Deal (1935–38), a time marked by the growth of the working-class and democratic movements: Among those passed in 1935 were the National Labor Relations Act (the Wagner Act), which reinforced NIRA provisions concerning the right of workers to organize trade unions and conclude collective agreements, and the law providing for social security and for aid to the unemployed, the first such law in the history of the USA. The Fair Labor Standards Act (1938) established minimum wages and the maximum length of the workday for certain categories of workers.

The labor and social laws of the New Deal expressed the government’s aim to deaden the class struggle and weaken the workers’ and mass democratic movement. Through their struggle to expand the framework of bourgeois democracy, the toiling masses forced the ruling circles of the USA to undertake reforms and compromises.

REFERENCE

Mal’kov, V. L. “Novyi kurs” ν SShA: Sotsial’nye dvizheniia isotsial’naia politika. Moscow, 1973.

D. G. NADZHAFOV

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References in periodicals archive

By 1935 there were several young black men who were granted positions in some of the cabinet departments and the New Deal agencies in general.

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But since the New Deal Court did not begin enforcing the Equal Protection Clause in earnest until the late 1940s, the payoff for African Americans was slow in coming.

Bad deal: how FDR made life worse for African Americans

New Left historians in the 1960s, like Stanford University's Barton Bernstein, reached similar conclusions about the New Deal's failure, for example, to address issues of black poverty (of course, Bernstein is also critical of Roosevelt for saving capitalism).

Raw deal

What attracted business and the rich to the "New Deal" was the significant decrease or elimination of property and business taxes in favour of user fees.

Glen Murray's failed New Deal

This year's New Deal awards for the Lanarkshire area, hosted by TV presenter Jackie Bird, will take place at the Hilton Strathclyde in Bellshill on Thursday.

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The Great Depression and the New Deal revealed deep conflicts in American society that had long been evaded and denied.

A new New Deal? (Comment)

Details of the New Deal should be available at JobCentres.

Scheme offers fresh hope to unemployed; New Deal could create 5,000 opportunities

"We are looking to build on the success of the New Deal by improving flexibility and having a greater focus on the needs of employers in crucial sectors of the economy, helping fill their vacancies and end their skills shortages."

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The presidency literature has its own "big bang theory." Throughout presidential studies, one finds the conceit that the modern American presidency, and thus the modern American state, begins in 1933 with Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and its attendant apparatus.

Designing a New America: The Origins of New Deal Planning, 1890-1943