If you’ve been tuning into Democratic presidential debates or campaign rallies, you’ve heard some bold proposals about universal health care, free college tuition, universal pre-kindergarten and affordable child care.
And it is not the first time that social change on such a massive scale has been proposed or implemented. Nearly a century ago, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt radically changed America with the New Deal.
During the painful years of the Great Depression, Roosevelt introduced a federal safety net that included Social Security and unemployment compensation. According to Eric Rauchway, a history professor at the University of California, Davis, and author of the book “Winter War: Hoover, Roosevelt, and the First Clash Over the New Deal,” we can still feel the impact of Roosevelt’s policies today.
“I think that we all, whether we know it or not, live inside the New Deal all the time,” Rauchway said.
From infrastructure to financial protection — due to a newly-created FDIC — Roosevelt's programs transformed the country, but the process was far from easy. According to Rauchway, in 1932, then-incumbent Republican President Herbert Hoover centered his reelection campaign — when he ran against Roosevelt — around the assertion that the New Deal was “inevitably going to be a disaster.”
“We underestimate Hoover’s sincere alarm at the potential of the New Deal to dramatically transform the United States,” Rauchway said. “He devoted himself to trying to reorient the Republican Party around this idea that it represented absolute opposition to any step in the direction of the New Deal.”
Having that kind of dissent from the start did not make it easy for these proposals to pass, but, despite the barriers, Roosevelt got his policies through — with some compromises along the way in areas like child care and health care.
“During the war years, there was an effort to provide child care for women war workers, but it wasn’t by any means successful or universal; it was more a gesture in a direction,” Rauchway said. “In the Social Security Act of 1935, the administration decided not to pursue public health care programs precisely because they’d been defeated by lobbyists in years prior,” he added.
Some of this narrative may sound strikingly familiar to what Americans are hearing today: radical ideas that could drastically change the country and staunch opposition to those ideas. Indeed, explicit comparisons to The New Deal have been drawn by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), sponsor of the House's Green New Deal proposal.
Rauchway said that he even sees similarities in tactics used by the programs' opponents.
“[Today’s criticism] does sound very similar to Herbert Hoover’s strategy of how to criticize the original New Deal, in terms of condemning it as socialist or communist, as both [Sen. Mitch] McConnell and [President Donald] Trump have done. The president and the senate majority leader have both brought out that same kind of rhetoric,” he said. “Now, the question, of course, today is: Do Americans have the same thinking about socialism and communism as they did back in those days?”
Opinions seem to have shifted. According to a 2019 Gallup poll, 43 percent of Americans now see socialism as a good thing, as opposed to 25 percent in a similar poll in 1942. Some politicians are even openly leaning into that socialist title.
The plans' parallels do not mean that today's proposals are exactly like the New Deal, said Rauchway, but the parallels are hard to deny.
“We’re looking at a United States where a sense of insecurity is pretty widespread,” Rauchway said. “We might be getting towards a time where people are more supportive of greater degrees of change … I think it would shift the balance in the same direction that the New Deal shifted the balance, which is to say, to give the average American working person a greater sense of security in their circumstances.”
It will ultimately be up to voters to decide just how much change they really want.
Sarah Leeson is an associate producer with Innovation Hub. You can follow her on Twitter @sarahbration.
