The New Deal was a series of domestic programs, public work projects, and financial reforms and regulations enacted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the United States between 1933 and 1938, with the aim of addressing the Great Depression, which began in 1929.

During Roosevelt's first hundred days in office in 1933 until 1935, he introduced what historians refer to as the "First New Deal", which focused on the "3 R's": relief for the unemployed and for the poor, recovery of the economy back to normal levels, and reform of the financial system to prevent a repeat depression.

The final major items of New Deal legislation were the creation of the United States Housing Authority and the FSA, which both occurred in 1937; and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which set maximum hours and minimum wages for most categories of workers.

Assistant Attorney General Thurman Arnold led efforts that hearkened back to an anti-monopoly tradition rooted in American politics by figures such as Andrew Jackson and Thomas Jefferson.

Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, an influential adviser to many New Dealers, argued that "bigness" (referring, presumably, to corporations) was a negative economic force, producing waste and inefficiency.

The Federal Reserve would have had to execute an expansionary monetary policy to fight the deflation and to inject liquidity into the banking system to prevent it from crumbling—but lower interest rates would have led to a gold outflow.

The NRA brought together leaders in each industry to design specific sets of codes for that industry—the most important provisions were anti-deflationary floors below which no company would lower prices or wages and agreements on maintaining employment and production.

[87] That same year, the Railway Labor Act of 1926 was amended "to outlaw company unions and yellow dog contracts, and to provide that the majority of any craft or class of employees shall determine who shall represent them in collective bargaining".

[90] A resolution approved by the Senate, June 13, authorized the President to accept membership for the Government of the United States in the International Labor Organization, without assuming any obligation under the covenant of the League of Nations.

"[155] As noted by another study, "President Roosevelt's extraordinary legislative accomplishments between 1933 and 1938 owed much to his personal political qualities, but ideologically favourable large partisan majorities in the House and the Senate were a prerequisite of success.

[160] John Maynard Keynes did not think that the New Deal under Roosevelt single-handedly ended the Great Depression: "It is, it seems, politically impossible for a capitalistic democracy to organize expenditure on the scale necessary to make the grand experiments which would prove my case—except in war conditions.

Bill (Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944) was a landmark piece of legislation, providing 16 million returning veterans with benefits such as housing, educational and unemployment assistance and played a major role in the postwar expansion of the American middle class.

As noted by William H. Chafe, "with full employment, higher wages and social welfare benefits provided under government regulations, American workers experienced a level of well-being that, for many, had never occurred before".

Douglas's position, like many of the Old Right, was grounded in a basic distrust of politicians and the deeply ingrained fear that government spending always involved a degree of patronage and corruption that offended his Progressive sense of efficiency.

[208] Douglas, therefore, hated the relief programs, which he said reduced business confidence, threatened the government's future credit and had the "destructive psychological effects of making mendicants of self-respecting American citizens".

[235] Roosevelt's New Deal Recovery programs focused on stabilizing the economy by creating long-term employment opportunities, decreasing agricultural supply to drive prices up, and helping homeowners pay mortgages and stay in their homes, which also kept the banks solvent.

Friedman's arguments got an endorsement from a surprising source when Fed Governor Ben Bernanke made this statement: Let me end my talk by abusing slightly my status as an official representative of the Federal Reserve.

[250] According to Peter Temin, Barry Wigmore, Gauti B. Eggertsson and Christina Romer, the biggest primary impact of the New Deal on the economy and the key to recovery and to end the Great Depression was brought about by a successful management of public expectations.

The analysis suggests that the elimination of the policy dogmas of the gold standard, a balanced budget in times of crises and small government led endogenously to a large shift in expectation that accounts for about 70–80 percent of the recovery of output and prices from 1933 to 1937.

On the one hand, the eyes of the world were upon the United States because many American and European democrats saw in Roosevelt's reform program a positive counterweight to the seductive powers of the two great alternative systems, communism and fascism.

Their preliminary studies on the origins of the fascist dictatorships and the American (reformed) democracy came to the conclusion that besides essential differences "the crises led to a limited degree of convergence" on the level of economic and social policy.

[274] Contrary to that, historians such as Hawley have examined the origins of the NRA in detail, showing the main inspiration came from Senators Hugo Black and Robert F. Wagner and from American business leaders such as the Chamber of Commerce.

[276] Stanley Payne, a historian of fascism, examined possible fascist influences in the United States by looking at the KKK and its offshoots and movements led by Father Coughlin and Huey Long.

"[277] According to Kevin Passmore, lecturer in history at Cardiff University, the failure of fascism in the United States was due to the social policies of the New Deal that channelled anti-establishment populism into the left rather than the extreme right.

That changed in the 1960s when New Left historians began a revisionist critique calling the New Deal a band-aid for a patient that needed radical surgery to reform capitalism, put private property in its place and lift up workers, women and minorities.

In The New Deal (1967), Paul K. Conkin similarly chastised the government of the 1930s for its weak policies toward marginal farmers, for its failure to institute sufficiently progressive tax reform, and its excessive generosity toward select business interests.

[citation needed] Some hard-right critics in the 1930s claimed that Roosevelt was state socialist or communist, including Charles Coughlin, Elizabeth Dilling, and Gerald L. K. Smith,[281] The accusations generally targeted the New Deal.

[281] The Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) had been quite hostile to the New Deal until 1935, but acknowledging the danger of fascism worldwide, reversed positions and tried to form a "Popular front" with the New Dealers.

[295] Films of the late New Deal era such as Citizen Kane (1941) ridiculed so-called "great men" while the heroism of the common man appeared in numerous movies, such as The Grapes of Wrath (1940).

Thus in Frank Capra's famous films, including Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), Meet John Doe (1941) and It's a Wonderful Life (1946), the common people come together to battle and overcome villains who are corrupt politicians controlled by very rich, greedy capitalists.