Why the New Deal Failed to Help the Poor and Rural Workers

Introduction: The New Deal's Unfinished Promise

President Roosevelt's New Deal program failed to do enough for those hit hardest by the Depression: impoverished African American and white citizens working in rural areas of the United States, the elderly, and the working class. There are several reasons why these constituents remained outside the reach of the New Deal program. First, there had been very little focus on the needs of these groups in general. The New Deal created a state that brokered the competing claims of numerous groups — hence called a "broker state." Competition in political and economic life increased tremendously. To a degree never seen before, workers, farmers, consumers, and others were now able to press their demands on the federal government in ways that had previously been available only to the corporate world, and they competed with each other in doing so.

Racial Inequality and the Broker State

The New Deal set up numerous agencies to help impoverished white and Black farmers, but in the long run many were forced to move to the cities to become economically better off. Many members of the Roosevelt administration worked hard to ensure that Black Americans received at least 10% of welfare advance assistance payments, which would eventually lead to some economic uplift. Nevertheless, the New Deal did not do enough to undercut political segregation or change the second-class political status of the Black population in the South. As a result, rural African Americans had only very limited political influence over the allocation of relief funds. They received a disproportionately small share of monetary aid from the federal government and, in contrast to industrialists and middle-class citizens in the cities, endured tremendous hardship. From the perspective of rural African Americans, the New Deal was a compilation of biased laws, failed relief programs, and systemic racism.

Early supporters who soon became critics of the New Deal identified a further reason why the poor, the elderly, and the working class were largely kept out of the program's reach: the Roosevelt administration had been "falling captive to American business interests." The program did not do enough for the political rights of white or African American workers.

Labor Policy and the Exclusion of Black Workers

The National Recovery Administration (NRA) was intended to establish codes of fair competition between business and labor. It succeeded in helping poor white male workers but did little to relieve the situation of poor African American workers, because the labor provisions of the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) were designed in ways that purchased support from the growing ranks of organized labor unions rather than addressing the needs of the most marginalized workers. The program's structural biases thus reproduced rather than challenged the racial inequalities already embedded in American labor markets.