The downturn of 1929 becoming a severe depression, let alone the beginning of a decade-long period of economic decline and stagnation, was not immediately apparent or ev

Not until later in his term did he agree on a compromise with the Democratic Congress on these issues. By that time his critics had fixed firmly in the public mind the picture of a callous president who refused to act when local and state relief funds for the jobless were exhausted or utterly inadequate. Despite his unprecedented efforts to use the power of the central government to arrest the downturn, it defeated him. In desperation, voters turned away from the Republican Party in the election of 1932. (Himmelberg, 12)

As a further step toward economic revival, the Justice Department’s antitrust Division, under the leadership of Thurman Arnold, a former Yale law professor, initiated dozens of prosecutions under the antitrust laws against business practices that tended to prevent competition from lowering prices. Arnold’s aim was not “trust-busting” (the break-up of large, dominant corporations) but outlawing practices, formal or informal, which reduced competition within the consumer goods and construction industries, kept prices artificially high, and this caused a reduced consumption. These years, 1938-1940, are sometimes referred to as the Third New Deal.

Several other highly significant measures defined the shape of the Second New Deal that emerged from Congress during the summer of 1935. The Wagner Act (the National Labor Relations Act) responded to the militancy that had taken hold among workers during the New Deal years. The measure created the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to protect the right of workers to bargain collectively, and it spurred an immense growth of labor and the new industrial unions in the steel and automobile industries of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Another very important measure of the Second New Deal was the Social Security Act, which established a system of old-age pensions and unemployment insurance that endures to this day, and still another was the Public Utility Holding Company Act, which created the basis for a much more forceful federal regulation of the electric power industry.

Some topics in this essay:
Bowl” Himmelberg, World War, , Republicans Congress, Republican-dominated Congress, River Valley, Blue Eagle, Recovery Act, Force BEF, War II, himmelberg 8, world war, stock market, himmelberg 11, himmelberg 9, farm prices, supreme court, blue-collar workers, american exports, himmelberg 18, radical redistribution income, decline european economies, tennessee valley authority, national labor relations, farmers reducing acreage,