The Fair Deal was a set of proposals put forward by U.S. President Harry S. Truman to Congress in 1945 and in his January 1949 State of the Union Address.
It offered new proposals to continue New Deal liberalism, but with a conservative coalition controlling Congress during most of Truman's presidency, only a few of its major initiatives became law and then only if they had considerable Republican Party support.
As Richard Neustadt concludes, the most important proposals were aid to education, national health insurance, the Fair Employment Practices Commission, and repeal of the Taft–Hartley Act.
However, the Brannan Plan was defeated by strong conservative opposition in Congress and by his unrealistic confidence in the possibility uniting urban labor and farm owners who distrusted rural insurgency.
The Korean War made military spending the nation's priority and killed almost the entire Fair Deal, but did encourage the pursuit of economic growth.
In September 1945, Truman addressed Congress and presented a 21-point program of domestic legislation outlining a series of proposed actions in the fields of economic development and social welfare.
Many of these proposed reforms, however, were never realized due to the opposition of the conservative majority in Congress, further solidified after the Republicans took control of both houses in the 1946 midterm elections.
The proposed measures included:[8] Despite a mixed record of legislative success, the Fair Deal remains significant in establishing the call for universal health care as a rallying cry for the Democratic Party.
As noted by one study This was the Congress that reformed the Displaced Persons Act, increased the minimum wage, doubled the hospital construction program, authorized the National Science Foundation and the rural telephone program, suspended the 'sliding scale' on price supports, extended the soil conservation program, provided new grants for planning state and local public works and plugged the long-standing merger loophole in the Clayton Act...Moreover, as protector, as defender, wielder of the veto against encroachments on the liberal preserve, Truman left a record of considerable success – an aspect of the Fair Deal not to be discounted.
[citation needed] The minimum wage had also been increased while Social Security benefits had been doubled, and eight million veterans had attended college by the end of the Truman administration as a result of the G.I.
The latter have been included because it is arguable that the progressive nature of these reforms (such as the Water Pollution Law, which was partly a Republican initiative) was compatible with the liberalism of the Fair Deal.
However, he used presidential executive orders to end discrimination in the armed forces and denied government contracts to firms with racially discriminatory practices.
Except for nondiscrimination provisions of the Housing Act of 1949, Truman had to be content with civil rights' gains achieved by executive order or through the federal courts.
Vaughan argues that by continuing appeals to Congress for civil rights legislation, Truman helped reverse the long acceptance of segregation and discrimination by establishing integration as a moral principle.