LYCOS RETRIEVER 
New Deal
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One of the most vocal critics of the New Deal was Father Charles Coughlin (1891-1979), a conservative Roman Catholic priest and political activist. Coughlin broadcast his weekly radio show--"Golden Hour of the Little Flower"-- from Detroit which reached an audience of 40 million listeners at the height of its popularity. Father Coughlin's rhetoric was a curious combination of anti-communism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Semitism. At first, he supported the New Deal, calling it "Christ's Deal," but then he became increasingly upset at the slow pace of reform as well as his inability to play a major policy-making role in the Roosevelt administration. In addition, he viewed as criminally wasteful some of the tactics used under the AAA (Agricultural Adjustment Act) to limit overproduction: plowing under crops or slaughtering livestock. Coughlin launched the National Union for Social Justice to challenge the President, claiming that Roosevelt had "out-Hoovered Hoover."
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Among the major achievements of New Deal programs in Georgia was the work of the NYA. Pushed and guided by the first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, the NYA worked across racial lines to encourage the state's young women and African American teenagers of both sexes to pursue an education. Broad in scope and remarkably egalitarian, the NYA offered hard-to-find jobs to students who needed financial help to stay in school. Black and white administrators worked to fund students in high school, vocation training programs, and college. The American Youth Commission called Georgia's NYA program the best in the nation, largely because it benefited from the particular interest shown by Eleanor Roosevelt and Mary McLeod Bethune (director of the Division of Negro Affairs of the NYA) at the national level.
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The New Deal had other critics as well. Governor Floyd Olson of Minnesota declared himself a socialist and tried to build a third party that would "preach the gospel of government and collective ownership of the means of production and distribution." In Wisconsin, the Progressive politics of "Fighting Bob" LaFollette lived on in his sons, United States Senator, Robert LaFollette, Jr. and Governor Philip LaFollette. Membership in the Communist Party of the United States ... hit a high in 1935. Proclaiming that "Communism is 20th-century Americanism," domestic Communists were careful to distance themselves from the revolutionary policies of Soviet Bolsheviks. They did not call for an overthrow of the government, but instead began to work in cooperation with labor unions and student groups to transform American economics and politics. They set up Communist Party cells and Marxist study groups at many universities to attract students and professors to their cause.
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The New Deal ... had a particularly personal face in Georgia; Warm Springs was U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt's southern White House, where he met and worked with many different Georgians. From the 1920s and throughout the depression, he saw firsthand the poverty and disease from which the state was suffering, and he approached its problems much as a Georgia farmer-politician would. At the same time, the state's conservative politicians, voicing fears that the New Deal would destroy traditional ways of life, fought tooth and nail against what they saw as government meddling in local affairs, and many of Georgia's political battles of the 1930s revolved around opposition to new federal programs.
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While meager by international standards and disappointing to many on the Left, the New Deal marked a dramatic change in the role and responsibilities of the federal government. Before 1932, federal responsibilities extended little beyond foreign policy, trade and tariffs, and certain aspects of interstate commerce (such as railroads). By 1945 the federal state claimed extensive responsibilities as a regulator of economic activity, a provider of relief and social assistance, and a referee of labor relations. This "big bang" of institutional innovation was contested by many employers and states' rights conservatives (especially in the South) and remained on uncertain constitutional ground until the late 1930s. In 1935 the Supreme Court held that the New Deal's first major initiative, the National Recovery Act (NRA), violated the U.S. Constitution's commerce clause by overstepping the rights of states to regulate the economy. Facing similar legal challenges to the second New Deal, Roosevelt openly threatened to pack the Supreme Court with three additional justices.
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Opponents of the New Deal, complaining of the cost and increase in federal power, ended its expansion by 1937 and abolished many of its programs by 1943. The Supreme Court of the United States ruled several programs unconstitutional (some parts of them were ... soon replaced, with the exception of the National Recovery Administration). There are several New Deal programs still in operation, some of which still exist under their original names, including the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). The largest programs still in existence today are Social Security and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) - the primary regulator of publicly traded U.S. firms.
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