Chapter 31

Question 1

Specialists in law, economics, and welfare, many of them young university professors, who advised President Franklin D. Roosevelt and helped develop the policies of the New Deal.

Answer 1

Brain Trust

Question 2

The economic and political policies of Franklin Roosevelt’s administration in the 1930s, which aimed to solve the problems of the Great Depression by providing relief for the unemployed and launching efforts to stimulate economic recovery. The New Deal built on reforms of the progressive era to expand greatly an American-style welfare state.

Answer 2

New Deal

Question 3

The first days of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration, stretching from March 9 to June 16, 1933, when an unprecedented number of reform bills were passed by a Democratic Congress to launch the New Deal.

Answer 3

Hundred Days

Question 4

A law creating the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which insured individual bank deposits and ended a century-long tradition of unstable banking that had reached a crisis in the Great Depression.

Answer 4

Glass-Steagall Banking Reform Act

Question 5

A government program created by Congress to hire young unemployed men to improve the rural, out-of-doors environment with such work as planting trees, fighting fires, draining swamps, and maintaining national parks. The CCC proved to be an important foundation for the post–World War II environmental movement.

Answer 5

Civilian Conservation Corps

Question 6

This was an early New Deal program designed to assist industry, labor, and the unemployed through centralized planning mechanisms that monitored workers’ earnings and working hours to distribute work and established codes for “fair competition” to ensure that similar procedures were followed by all firms in any particular industrial sector.

Answer 6

National Recovery Administration

Question 7

A New Deal program designed to raise agricultural prices by paying farmers not to farm. It was based on the assumption that higher prices would increase farmers’ purchasing power and thereby help alleviate the Great Depression.

Answer 7

Agricultural Adjustment Administration

Question 8

Grim nickname for the Great Plains region devastated by drought and dust storms during the 1930s. The disaster led to the migration into California of thousands of displaced “Okies” and “Arkies.”

Answer 8

Dust Bowl

Question 9

Its major thrusts were to reverse the policy of forced assimilation that flowed from the 1887 Dawes Severalty Act, restore tribal autonomy, and promote the economic well-being of reservations.

Answer 9

Indian Reorganization Act of 1934

Question 10

One of the most revolutionary of the New Deal public works projects, they brought cheap electric power, full employment, low-cost housing, and environmental improvements to Americans.

Answer 10

Tennessee Valley Authority

Question 11

A flagship accomplishment of the New Deal, this law provided for unemployment and old-age insurance financed by a payroll tax on employers and employees. It has long remained a pillar of the “New Deal Order.”

Answer 11

Social Security Act

Question 12

Also known as the National Labor Relations Act, this law protected the right of labor to organize in unions and bargain collectively with employers and established the National Labor Relations Board to monitor unfair labor practices on the part of employers. Its passage marked the culmination of decades of labor protest.

Answer 12

Wagner Act

Question 13

Important New Deal labor legislation that regulated minimum wages and maximum hours for workers involved in interstate commerce. The law also outlawed labor by children under sixteen. The exclusion of agricultural, service, and domestic workers meant that many blacks, Mexican Americans, and women—who were concentrated in these sectors—did not benefit from the act’s protection.

Answer 13

Fair Labor Standards Act

Question 14

A New Deal–era labor organization that broke away from the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in order to organize unskilled industrial workers regardless of their particular economic sector or craft. They gave a great boost to labor organizing in the midst of the Great Depression and during World War II. In 1955, they merged with the AFL.

Answer 14

Congress of Industrial Organizations

Question 15

Franklin Roosevelt’s politically motivated and ill-fated scheme to add a new justice to the Supreme Court for every member over seventy who would not retire. His objective was to overcome the Court’s objections to New Deal reforms.

Answer 15

Court-packing plan

Question 16

An economic theory based on the thoughts of British economist John Maynard Keynes, holding that central banks should adjust interest rates and governments should use deficit spending and tax policies to increase purchasing power and hence prosperity.

Answer 16

Keynesianism

Question 17

The thirty-second president of the United States, Franklin Roosevelt was the only American president to be elected to four terms of office. He first won the presidency against Republican incumbent Herbert Hoover in 1932 in the depths of the Great Depression and was credited with having developed a program, called the New Deal, that shepherded the nation out of crisis.

Answer 17

Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Question 18

The wife of Franklin Roosevelt, she was the most active First Lady the United States had ever seen and was known for her devotion to the impoverished and oppressed.

Answer 18

Eleanor Roosevelt

Question 19

A former New York social worker, he came to be one of the major architects of the New Deal, heading up the Federal Emergency Relief Administration and Works Progress Administration and serving as a personal confidant to President Roosevelt.

Answer 19

Harry L. Hopkins

Question 20

A Catholic priest from Michigan who goaded 40 million radio listeners with his weekly anti-New Deal harangues. He was a well-known opponent of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal policies.

Answer 20

Father Charles Coughlin

Question 21

A retired physician who had lost his savings in the Great Depression and promoted a plan, popular with senior citizens, to pay every person over sixty years old $200 a month, provided that the money was spent within the month. One estimate had the scheme costing one-half of the national income.

Answer 21

Francis E. Townsend

Question 22

Louisiana governor, later U.S. senator, whose anti-New Deal “Share Our Wealth” program promised to make “Every Man a King.” Long was gunned down in 1935.

Answer 22

Huey P. Long

Question 23

The first woman cabinet member and secretary of labor under Roosevelt, helped draw labor into the New Deal coalition.

Answer 23

Frances Perkins

Question 24

The highest-ranking African American in the Roosevelt administration, she headed the Office of Minority Affairs and was a leader of the unofficial “Black Cabinet,” which sought to apply New Deal benefits to blacks as well as whites.

Answer 24

Mary McLeod Bethune

Question 25

A Democratic senator from New York from 1927 to 1949, was responsible for the passage of some of the most important legislation enacted through the New Deal. The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 was popularly known as the Wagner Act in honor of the senator. He also played a major role in the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 and the Wagner-Steagall Housing Act of 1937.

Answer 25

Robert F. Wagner