Democracy and the New Deal

Progressivism Resurgent.

In the 1932 presidential election Hoover was easily defeated by the Democratic governor of New York, Franklin D. Roosevelt. Roosevelt's political program called for a vastly expanded role for the federal government. Under this "New Deal" a broad array of modern liberal reforms—from government regulation of industries to social security for the elderly, young, and handicapped—were implemented. The ideas of these and other like-minded reforms was not wholly new to the American political landscape. The New Deal was the politics of progressivism resurgent. From 1900 until 1917 political progressivism had galvanized American politics. Progressivism had its heyday in 1912, when, under the banner of Franklin Roosevelt's distant cousin Theodore Roosevelt, the Progressive Party had placed second in the presidential election—behind Woodrow Wilson and the Democrats but ahead of incumbent president William Howard...

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