Raymond Moley's New Deal

>> Jean Cannon: Was the New Deal good for America? Was it a progressive and successful program that saved the United States from economic ruin during the Great Depression of the 1930s? Or was it a misguided labor policy that would have utterly failed if America had not joined the ally war effort in 1941?

If you work in the archives founded by Herbert Hoover, US President from 1929 until 1933, you are constantly confronted by this looming what if question of American history. What if Herbert Hoover had been reelected in 1932 and America had faced the Great Depression with conservative economic policies instead of Franklin Delano and Roosevelt's expansive big government programs?

What would have been the fate of the New Deal if World War II had not dramatically shifted the US economy and made it thrive? There is perhaps no artifact that captures the controversy of the New Deal and the continuing questions about economic policy that it raises better than this document created by one of Roosevelt's most trusted aides in 1932.

Moley's name may not be as well known as Roosevelt's, but in many ways he was the man behind the curtain during FDR's administration. Moley was the leader of FDR's Brain Trust, a group of Columbia University professors who helped launch FDR to power first in New York in the 1920s and then on the national stage in the 1930s.

These trusted advisors weighed in on economic policy, national security issues, domestic social problems, and campaign strategies. FDR and Moley became good friends and close confidants, giving Moley a great deal of power. Often, staff members at the White House joked that visitors to the President's residence came mostly to ask FDR to get them an appointment with Ray.

Though Moley was influential in policy matters, he also had another skill that was prized above all else by FDR. He was a brilliant speechwriter. Roosevelt, both on the campaign trail and in the White House, relied heavily on radio speeches to swing public opinion toward his policies and executive decisions.

Talented wordsmiths were essential to his success, and Moley would coin many of FDA most famous phrases. This document is perhaps the crown jewel of Moley's manuscript drafts as it introduces the term the New Deal for FDR's July 2, 1932, acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. This artifact marks the moment that the New Deal is born as the name for FDR's ambitious plan to expand federal spending in order to rescue America from recession.

How did the archives of one of Roosevelt's most trusted advisors end up at a library founded by his political rival Herbert Hoover, whom FDR beat in a landslide election in 1932. The answer to that mystery is written on the document itself. If you look closely at this draft, you can see that Moley has annotated the document.

He has underlined New Deal, and he has written crap in the margin and written noted by me, July 19, 1937, at the top of the page. Why would Moley jocularly annotate such an important document and then spitefully send his archives to his former friend's rival? After helping create the New Deal, Moley quickly began to see the program as detrimental to the nation's economy.

Though he supported relief programs for workers, he did not support high taxes for corporations. The former Brain Trust leader finally broke with FDR and then became friends with Herbert Hoover. He agreed to deposit his papers at Hoover's library at Stanford so that students and scholars could better understand the crucial period of American history characterized by the New Deal he helped create.