The New Deal - American History, 1493-1945

Herbert Hoover criticizing President Roosevelt and the New Deal policies

8 July 1933

View the letter from Herbert Hoover to Henry L. Stoddard criticizing President Roosevelt and New Deal policies in the resource

The New Deal represented a period of social and economic reforms that remain at the heart of political debates in America to this day. Coming off the back of the Great Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt sought to overhaul the U.S. economy and government. Overwhelming popularity for New Deal policies meant that political opposition was limited in public, despite many conservatives believing those policies to be the antithesis of historic American government.

One person who clearly opposed the New Deal – although he avoided public appearances at the time – was Roosevelt’s predecessor Herbert Hoover. In this letter, Hoover expresses his dismay at what had been enacted and the public response to it. There is a touch of bitterness as he bemoans the American people for being fooled by false promises and misrepresented cures. He holds the press partly responsible, and attacks the federal government for thousands of "illusions" that they have presented to voters. Yet there is also an undercurrent of hostility to those Roosevelt supporters whom Hoover felt preferred the comfort of the illusions to the difficulties of reality.

The letter starts by criticizing Roosevelt’s actions at an international level, including taking the U.S. off the gold standard. It then proceeds to tear into recent legislation, which Hoover saw as prohibitive to competition and growth. The letter was written after the 100 days of the 73rd Congress, during which Roosevelt pushed through an immense amount of reforming legislation. Throughout his first two terms greater regulation and increased public works sought to get people back into employment. National Insurance and Social Security were introduced. The federal government grew and centralization increased. To achieve these aims Roosevelt was often forced to undertake significant political manoeuvrings to ensure that his rivals did not impede the New Deal’s progress. One of these tactics was "court packing". During his first term the Supreme Court was dominated by conservatives who had worked to block many New Deal reforms, many of them old men who refused to retire and thus free up their space for a new candidate. This meant that Roosevelt was unable to introduce candidates who would be supportive of his aims. Consequently, he proposed that he be able to appoint a member for every judge who refused to retire within six months of turning 70. Ultimately, his suggestion was rejected by Congress but, perhaps realizing that F.D.R. was not to be cowed, the high court began to be more supportive of his reforms and six justices also retired in the next few years, giving him more freedom to introduce reforms. This period was indicative of the many political difficulties Roosevelt faced in implementing his, often revolutionary, New Deal.

The New Deal ran against a current of thought present throughout American history that distrusted government involvement in everyday life, and overturned conservative approaches to the economy in favor of a Keynesian attitude. Hoover’s despair at the direction Roosevelt took was matched by other conservatives. Arguments over centralization and federal government involvement in labor markets and the economy remained a key political battleground into the twenty-first century. Yet the popularity of the New Deal among most Americans of the time cannot be doubted. In 1936 Roosevelt won a crushing victory to be re-elected, taking 523 of the 531 electoral votes after a campaign in which the Democrats continued to attack Hoover as a representative of all that could go wrong if the Republicans were voted back in.