Chapter 31 - Vocab

Brain Trust

Brain Trust

Specialists in law, economics, and welfare, many of them young university professors, who advised President Franklin D. Roosevelt and helped develop the policies of the New Deal

New Deal

The economic and political policies of Franklin Roosevelt’s administration in the 1930s, which aimed to solve the problems of the Great Depression by providing relief for the unemployed and launching efforts to stimulate economic recovery. The New Deal built on reforms of the progressive era to expand greatly an American-style welfare state.

Hundred Days

The first hundred days of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration, stretching from March 9 to June 16, 1933, when an unprecedented number of reform bills were passed by a Democratic Congress to launch the New Deal.

Glass-Steagall banking reform act

A law creating the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which insured individual bank deposits and ended a century-long tradition of unstable banking that had reached a crisis in the Great Depression.

Civilian Conservation Corps

A government program created by Congress to hire young unemployed men to improve the rural, out-of-doors environment with such work as planting trees, fighting fires, draining swamps, and maintaining national parks. The CCC proved to be an important foundation for the post–World War II environmental movement.

National Recovery Administration (NRA)

Known by its critics as the “National Run Around,” the NRA was an early New Deal program designed to assist industry, labor, and the unemployed through centralized planning mechanisms that monitored workers’ earnings and working hours to distribute work and established codes for “fair competition” to ensure that similar procedures were followed by all firms in any particular industrial sector.

Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA)

A New Deal program designed to raise agricultural prices by paying farmers not to farm. It was based on the assumption that higher prices would increase farmers’ purchasing power and thereby help alleviate the Great Depression.

Dust Bowl

Grim nickname for the Great Plains region devastated by drought and dust storms during the 1930s. The disaster led to the migration into California of thousands of displaced “Okies” and “Arkies.”

Indian Reorganization Act of 1934

Also known as the “Indian New Deal” and the Wheeler-Howard Act. Its major thrusts were to reverse the policy of forced assimilation that flowed from the 1887 Dawes Severalty Act, restore tribal autonomy, and promote the economic well-being of reservations.

Tennessee Valley Authority

One of the most revolutionary of the New Deal public works projects, the TVA brought cheap electric power, full employment, low-cost housing, and environmental improvements to Americans in the Tennessee Valley.

Social Security Act

A flagship accomplishment of the New Deal, this law provided for unemployment and old-age insurance financed by a payroll tax on employers and employees. It has long remained a pillar of the “New Deal Order.”

Wagner Act

Also known as the National Labor Relations Act, this law protected the right of labor to organize in unions and bargain collectively with employers and established the National Labor Relations Board to monitor unfair labor practices on the part of employers. Its passage marked the culmination of decades of labor protest.

Fair Labor Standards Act

Important New Deal labor legislation that regulated minimum wages and maximum hours for workers involved in interstate commerce. The law also outlawed labor by children under sixteen. The exclusion of agricultural, service, and domestic workers meant that many blacks, Mexican Americans, and women—who were concentrated in these sectors—did not benefit from the act’s protection.

Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO)

A New Deal–era labor organization that broke away from the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in order to organize unskilled industrial workers regardless of their particular economic sector or craft. The CIO gave a great boost to labor organizing in the midst of the Great Depression and during World War II. In 1955, the CIO merged with the AFL.

Court packing plan

Franklin Roosevelt’s politically motivated and ill-fated scheme to add a new justice to the Supreme Court for every member over seventy who would not retire. His objective was to overcome the Court’s objections to New Deal reforms.

Keynesianism

An economic theory based on the thoughts of British economist John Maynard Keynes, holding that central banks should adjust interest rates and governments should use deficit spending and tax policies to increase purchasing power and hence prosperity.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt

(1882-1945) The thirty-second president of the United States, Franklin Roosevelt was the only American president to be elected to four terms of office. He first won the presidency against Republican incumbent Herbert Hoover in 1932 in the depths of the Great Depression and was credited with having developed a program, called the New Deal, that shepherded the nation out of crisis. When World War II broke out in Europe, he steered the United States into the war, which in the end proved more effective than the New Deal in helping the nation recover from difficult economic times. His gallant struggle against polio and his enormous talents as a politician made him a beloved leader for a dozen difficult years in the nation’s history.

Eleanor Roosevelt

(1884-1962) The wife of Franklin Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt was the most active First Lady the United States had ever seen and was known for her devotion to the impoverished and oppressed.

Harry L. Hopkins

(1890-1946) A former New York social worker, Hopkins came to be one of the major architects of the New Deal, heading up the Federal Emergency Relief Administration and Works Progress Administration and serving as a personal confidant to President Roosevelt.

Father Charles Coughlin

(1891-1979) A Catholic priest from Michigan who goaded 40 million radio listeners with his weekly anti-New Deal harangues. He was a well-known opponent of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal policies.

Francis E. Townsend

(1867-1960) A retired physician who had lost his savings in the Great Depression and promoted a plan, popular with senior citizens, to pay every person over sixty years old $200 a month, provided that the money was spent within the month. One estimate had the scheme costing one-half of the national income.

Huey P. Kingfish Long

(1893-1935) Louisiana governor, later U.S. senator, whose anti-New Deal "Share Our Wealth" program promised to make "Every Man a King." Long was gunned down in 1935.

Frances Perkins

(1882-1965) The first woman cabinet member and secretary of labor under Roosevelt, Perkins helped draw labor into the New Deal coalition.

Mary McLeod Bethune

(1875-1955) The highest-ranking African American in the Roosevelt administration, Bethune headed the Office of Minority Affairs and was a leader of the unofficial "Black Cabinet," which sought to apply New Deal benefits to blacks as well as whites.

Robert F. Wagner

(1877-1953) A Democratic senator from New York from 1927 to 1949, Wagner was responsible for the passage of some of the most important legislation enacted through the New Deal. The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 was popularly known as the Wagner Act in honor of the senator. He also played a major role in the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 and the Wagner-Steagall Housing Act of 1937.