Franklin D. Roosevelt: Campaign Address at Madison Square Garden

Questions for Further Study

• 1. Compare Roosevelt's speech on October 31, 1936, with his First Inaugural Address (March 4, 1933). Scholars describe two New Deals, a First New Deal that Roosevelt announces in his Inaugural Address and initiates during his first one hundred days in office, and a Second New Deal, involving more radical reforms enacted in 1935. Is there evidence of change in Roosevelt's thinking between the two speeches that is consistent with historians' demarcation? Did the policy shift take place primarily because of the demands of constituencies to which Roosevelt was responsive, because of challenges from opponents, or because of the evolution of thinking within the administration?
• 2. The Republicans claimed during the 1936 election campaign that New Deal legislation and the creation of numerous new federal agencies had fundamentally changed the character of the government and threatened the Constitution. Roosevelt commented infrequently on Supreme Court decisions declaring New Deal legislation unconstitutional in 1935 and in 1936 and refrained from addressing the issue in the election campaign. In 1937, however, he proposed adding members to the Supreme Court. Examine the debate over Roosevelt's “court-packing” proposal and consider the degree to which Republican charges from 1936 were more politically influential in 1937.
• 3. Compare the provisions of the Social Security Act with alternative plans for addressing social security in the 1930s, the Townsend plan for pensions for all persons aged sixty years old and older, and the Lundeen bill for unemployment and old-age insurance for all workers and farmers without regard for age, sex, race, or religious or political opinion.
• 4. While the old-age pensions provision of the Social Security Act became more comprehensive in coverage over time as well as more generous in terms of benefit levels, the provisions to aid dependent children, those with disabilities, and the needy elderly became vulnerable. In 1996 the basic New Deal commitment to the needy was ended by the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. Why do different provisions of the Social Security Act have such different trajectories?