Franklin D. Roosevelt - The “Second New Deal” | Britannica

The second term

1 of 2

2 of 2

Roosevelt ran for reelection in 1936 with the firm support of farmers, laborers, and the poor. He faced the equally firm opposition of conservatives, but the epithets hurled at him from the right merely helped to unify his following. The Republican nominee, Gov. Alfred M. Landon of Kansas, a moderate, could do little to stem the Roosevelt tide. Landon received fewer than 17 million votes to Roosevelt’s more than 27 million, and Roosevelt carried every state except Maine and Vermont.

Supreme Court fight

Declaring in his Second Inaugural Address that “I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished,” Roosevelt was determined to push forward with further New Deal reforms. With large Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, there remained only one obstacle to his objectives: the Supreme Court. During Roosevelt’s first term, the court, which consisted entirely of pre-Roosevelt appointees, had invalidated several key New Deal measures, and cases challenging the Social Security Act and the Wagner Act were pending. To make the court more supportive of reform legislation, Roosevelt proposed a reorganization plan that would have allowed him to appoint one new justice for every sitting justice aged 70 years or older. Widely viewed as a court-packing scheme (even by Roosevelt’s supporters), the reorganization bill provoked heated debate in Congress and eventually was voted down, which handed Roosevelt his first major legislative defeat. Meanwhile, the fight over court packing seemed to alter the Supreme Court’s attitude toward the New Deal, and both the Social Security Act and the Wagner Act were upheld.

End of the New Deal

By 1937 the economy had recovered substantially, and Roosevelt, seeing an opportunity to return to a balanced budget, drastically curtailed government spending. The result was a sharp recession, during which the economy began plummeting toward 1932 levels. Chastened by the recession, Roosevelt now began to pay more attention to advisers who counseled deficit spending as the best way to counter the depression. Late in 1937 he backed another massive government spending program, and by the middle of 1938 the crisis had passed.

By 1938 the New Deal was drawing to a close. Conservative Southern Democrats openly opposed its continuation, and Roosevelt’s attempt to defeat several of them in the 1938 Democratic primaries not only proved unsuccessful but also produced charges that the president was a dictator trying to conduct a “purge.” In the congressional elections that year the Republicans gained 80 seats in the House and 7 in the Senate. Despite continued Democratic majorities in both houses, an alliance of Republicans and conservative Democrats now blocked any further reform legislation.