Roosevelt's New Deal: Old Wine in New Bottles

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`Old wine in new bottles' is this an accurate description of the New Deal?

"I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a New Deal for the American people."

Franklin D. Roosevelt, accepting the Democratic nomination for President, July 2, 1932

With those words Roosevelt gave birth to an idea that gave the majority of the American people hope enough to elect him president, it also coined a phrase that will forever be synonymous with his administration as its flagship policy for the recovery and betterment of America. At the time Roosevelt did not outline his plan or further go into the minutiae of the New Deal, but if he had would people have seen it as a collection of imaginative and revolutionary responses to the crisis that beset America at the time? Or perhaps they would have seen it as the next step in an evolutionary process that found it origins earlier in time in populist and progressive doctrine. Or would they rather have seen it as change couched in reformist rhetoric to veil the true purpose of maintaining and preserving conservative institutions and values.

It is those questions which lay beneath the metaphor of the New Deal as `old wine in new bottles' the latter two leaning towards the positive while the first is clearly negative.

To determine where the ideas behind the New Deal fit this paper will examine core areas within the new deal ranging from American Politics to economic roles of the New Deal including `Big Government' and `Big Labour'. It will also examine the New Deal's ideas concerning the environment, states, agriculture and social welfare.

In terms of the New Deal in American politics there is the view that the New Deal is something of an original and daring act of reform on behalf of the...

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...ts Press, 2002 p.135

Ruth O'Brien, Workers Paradox (Book Review), Journal of Labor, 2000, vol. 21, issue 4. p. 1

Jerold Auerbach, New Deal, Old Deal, or Raw Deal; Some thoughts on left Historiography, The Journal of Southern History, Vol 35, no.1, (feb 1969) p.22

Jerold Auerbach, New Deal, Old Deal, or Raw Deal; Some thoughts on left Historiography, The Journal of Southern History, Vol 35, no.1, (feb 1969) p.22

Roger Biles, A New Deal for the American people, Northern Illinois university, press, 1991 p.226

Roger Biles, A New Deal for the American people, Northern Illinois university, press, 1991 p.226

Richard Kinderdall, The New Deal as Watershed: The Recent Literature, The Journal of American History, Vol 54, No.4 March 1968 p.845

Roger Biles, A New Deal for the American people, Northern Illinois university, press, 1991 p.226

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