apush ch 22

• The New Deal's impacts on women, african-americans, and Native Americans are well known.
• Voting patterns shifted during the Great Depression.
• Critics of the Great Depression were on the right, on the left, and in the Supreme Court.
• FDR's response to the Great Depression was the New Deal, which included about four or five programs that are still familiar today.
• Early responses to the Great Depression from 1929 to 1932 included Herbert Hoover's belief in volunteerism and hard work to get out of the depression, not taking the United States off the gold standard, and establishing the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC).
• Herbert Hoover did not take the United States off the gold standard like many European countries did, leading to retaliatory tariff rates from other countries.
• The Smoot-Hawley Tariff, also known as the Hawley-Smoot Tariff, significantly raised tariff rates and led to retaliatory tariff rates from other countries.
• Herbert Hoover established the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) which provided federal loans to businesses, but it spent too little money and was not enough to alleviate the problems of the Great Depression.
• Hoovervilles and Hoover blankets, mockingly named after Herbert Hoover, began to develop during the Great Depression.
• The Bonus Army, consisting of 15,000 World War I veterans, demanded an early bonus payment that wasn't due to them until the 1940s, leading to their camp being burned by current military personnel.
• Herbert Hoover ordered the army to disperse the Bonus Army, leading to a significant decrease in his popularity.
• Franklin Roosevelt promised the American people a New Deal and in his first hundred days, he passed an incredibly high amount of legislation.
• The fireside chats were presidential addresses via the newly popular radio in which FDR would talk to the American public and encourage them to put their money back in banks.
• The brains trust was a group of unofficial advisors that helped draft legislation.
• The first 100 days of legislation focused on banking reform, agriculture, business, and unemployment.
• The bank holiday in the emergency Banking Act legislation closed banks and prevented them from reopening until they proved to be sound.
• The Glass-Steagall Act created the FDIC of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and insured bank deposits up to $2,500.
• The Agricultural Adjustment Act sought to rectify overproduction of goods by paying farmers not to grow crops, benefiting large landowners not sharecroppers because the money was given to whoever held the title of the land.
• The National Recovery administration was set up by the Nira and industry's agreed on prices and production quotas, but both the AAA and then RA were declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.
• The Federal Emergency Relief Administration provided federal relief to the unemployed.
• The New Deal redefined the role of the federal government for most Americans and it led to a re-alignment of the constituents in the Democratic Party, the so-called New Deal coalition.
• Regardless of whether you think the New Deal meant more freedom for more people or was a plot by red shirt wearing Communists, the New Deal is extremely important in American history.
• Herbert Hoover did not have any chance of winning the presidential election of 1932, but he also ran like he didn’t actually want the job.
• Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was as close to a born politician as the United States has ever seen, won 57% of the vote and the Democrats took control of Congress for the first time in a decade.
• The phrase New Deal came from FDR’s campaign, and when he was running FDR suggested that it was the government’s responsibility to guarantee every man a right to make a comfortable living, but he didn’t say HOW he meant to accomplish this.
• FDR won the presidential election of 1932 by promising to end Prohibition, which he did, and the government sought tax revenue, so no more Prohibition.
• The New Deal was a set of government programs intended to fix the depression and prevent future depressions.
• Many economic historians believe that the New Deal is inaccurate to say that government spending failed to end the Depression because in the end, at least according to a lot of economists, what brought the Depression to an end was a massive government spending program called World War II.
• The best evidence that government spending was working is that when FDR reduced government subsidies to farms and the WPA in 1937, unemployment immediately jumped back up to almost 20%.
• The New Deal brought transformative changes to American politics, uniting urban progressives who would have been Republicans two decades earlier, with unionized workers, left wing intellectuals, urban Catholics and Jews.
• The New Deal also changed our way of thinking, introducing the concept of liberalism as “greater security for the average man” and associating all government policy with the president.
• The New Deal changed the shape of the American Democratic Party, making African Americans and union workers reliable Democratic votes.
• The New Deal also gained the support of middle class homeowners and brought African Americans into the Democratic Party.
• Despite the changes brought by the New Deal, it failed to end the Depression, with over 15% of the American workforce remaining unemployed by 1940.
• The New Deal changed the expectations that Americans had of their government, making them expect the government to do something when things go sour.
• The New Deal is often categorized as three R’s: relief programs for the poor, recovery programs to fix the economy, and reform programs to regulate the economy in the future to prevent future depression.
• Roosevelt responded to the Supreme Court invalidating acts left and right by proposing a law that would allow him to appoint new Supreme Court justices if sitting justices reached the age of 70 and failed to retire.
• The Agricultural Adjustment Act, which gave the government the power to try to raise farm prices by setting production quotas and paying farmers to plant less food, was a part of the First New Deal.
• The Civil Works Administration, launched in November 1933, employed 4 million people building bridges, schools, and airports during the First New Deal.
• The Supreme Court struck down the Agricultural Adjustment Act in U.S. v. Butler and the National Industrial Recovery Act in Schechter Poultry case.