# New Deal Timeline A chronological reference for the [[Great Depression]], the [[New Deal]] legislative program, and the political-institutional architecture [[Franklin D. Roosevelt]] built between 1933 and 1938 — with context reaching back to the 1929 crash and forward through the wartime economy that completed the recovery. Framed through the KB's analytical concerns: the New Deal created the American [[Administrative State]] — the federal regulatory-and-welfare architecture that every major right-wing project of the past 90 years has been designed to dismantle. The [[Heritage Foundation]]'s [[Mandate for Leadership]], [[Project 2025]], the [[Loper Bright v. Raimondo]] reversal of Chevron deference, the non-delegation doctrine revival, [[Schedule F]], and DOGE are all, structurally, New Deal rollback operations. This timeline documents what they are rolling back. --- ## 1929 — The Crash **October 24, 1929** — **Black Thursday**. The New York Stock Exchange experiences a massive sell-off; trading volume hits 12.9 million shares, nearly triple the normal level. Bankers organized by J.P. Morgan Jr. pool resources to stabilize the market, temporarily halting the decline. **October 29, 1929** — **Black Tuesday**. The stock market collapses. Roughly 16 million shares are traded — a record that stands for nearly 40 years. The Dow Jones Industrial Average falls 12% in a single day. Combined with the October 28 drop, the market loses roughly 25% in two days. The crash wipes out an estimated $30 billion in market value within two weeks — roughly equivalent to the entire federal budget for the preceding decade. The crash does not cause the Depression (the structural causes are deeper — credit overexpansion, agricultural collapse, global trade contraction, wealth concentration) but it triggers the cascade. ## 1930–1932 — The Descent **June 17, 1930** — [[Herbert Hoover]] signs the **Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act**, raising tariffs on over 20,000 imported goods to record levels. The act triggers retaliatory tariffs from trading partners, contracting global trade by roughly 65% over the next three years. Over 1,000 economists sign a petition urging Hoover to veto the bill. The act accelerates the global depression and becomes the canonical example of protectionist economic self-harm — a precedent directly relevant to the vault's documentation of contemporary tariff politics. **1930–1933** — The banking system collapses in waves. Approximately 9,000 banks fail between 1930 and 1933, destroying the savings of millions. Bank runs become self-fulfilling prophecies: fear of insolvency produces the insolvency. The absence of deposit insurance means that a bank failure wipes out depositors entirely. **1932** — The Depression reaches its nadir. Unemployment reaches approximately 24% (some estimates run to 25%). Industrial production has fallen 47% from 1929. GDP has contracted by roughly one-third. Farm income has fallen 60%. An estimated 2 million Americans are homeless. Hoovervilles — shantytowns named after the president — appear in every major city. **January 22, 1932** — Hoover signs legislation creating the **Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC)**, a federal lending agency to provide emergency loans to banks, railroads, and other large enterprises. The RFC represents Hoover's theory of recovery — stabilize institutions at the top, and recovery will trickle down. The theory fails: RFC loans go to large institutions while unemployment, bank failures, and farm foreclosures continue. The RFC's failure to produce visible relief becomes FDR's most effective campaign argument. **July 28, 1932** — The **Bonus Army** — roughly 17,000 World War I veterans camped in Washington to demand early payment of a promised war bonus — is routed by U.S. Army troops under General Douglas MacArthur, with Major Dwight D. Eisenhower and Major George S. Patton in support. MacArthur exceeds Hoover's orders and uses tear gas, bayonets, and tanks against the veterans and their families, burning their encampment. The spectacle of the U.S. Army attacking its own veterans devastates Hoover's remaining public support. ## 1932 — The Mandate Election **July 2, 1932** — FDR accepts the Democratic nomination at the convention in Chicago, pledging "a new deal for the American people." The phrase gives the program its name. **November 8, 1932** — [[1932 Presidential Election]]. Roosevelt defeats Hoover in a landslide: 472 electoral votes to 59, carrying 42 of 48 states. Democrats win massive congressional majorities. The election is the founding event of the **New Deal coalition** — the structural Democratic majority that governs American politics for the next 36 years — and the [[Party Realignment]] that defines modern American electoral geography. ## 1933 — The First Hundred Days **March 4, 1933** — FDR's **First Inaugural Address**: "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance." The speech reframes the crisis as a failure of confidence that government action can remedy — the philosophical inversion of the Hoover approach. **March 6–13, 1933** — FDR declares a national **bank holiday**, closing every bank in the country for four days to stop the bank-run cascade. The Emergency Banking Act (passed March 9 in a single day, some congressmen voting on a bill they had not read) authorizes the Treasury to inspect and reopen solvent banks, provides for federal assistance to troubled banks, and gives the president broad powers over gold transactions. When banks reopen on March 13, deposits exceed withdrawals. The bank panic is over. The episode establishes the template: decisive executive action in crisis, moving faster than institutional deliberation can follow. **March 31, 1933** — The **Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC)** is established. The program employs young unmarried men (ages 18–25) on conservation and reforestation projects — national parks, soil-erosion control, flood prevention, trail construction. Workers are housed in semi-military camps, paid $30/month (of which $25 is sent home to their families), and supervised by Army reserve officers. Over its nine-year life (1933–1942), the CCC employs approximately 3 million men. The program is segregated: Black enrollees serve in separate camps, and enrollment quotas initially limit Black participation. The CCC is the most popular [[New Deal]] program among both contemporaries and historians. **May 12, 1933** — The **Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA)** establishes federal management of agricultural production and prices. The government pays farmers to reduce crop acreage and livestock, destroying surplus production to raise prices. The program's operational paradox — paying to destroy food while millions go hungry — becomes one of the New Deal's most politically toxic images. The AAA disproportionately benefits large white landowners; Black tenant farmers and sharecroppers are frequently evicted when landlords take land out of production while pocketing the federal payments. **May 18, 1933** — The **Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA)** is established — a federal corporation for regional electrification, flood control, and economic development across the Tennessee Valley (parts of Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky, Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia). The TVA brings electricity to rural areas that private utilities had refused to serve, builds dams and power plants, and becomes the model for federal regional-development agencies. Conservatives denounce it as creeping socialism; it remains operational today. **May 27, 1933** — The **Federal Securities Act** requires registration and disclosure for new securities offerings — the first federal regulation of the securities markets. It is followed by the **Securities Exchange Act of 1934** (June 6, 1934), which creates the [[SEC]] (Securities and Exchange Commission) and regulates securities trading, exchanges, and brokers. The securities legislation establishes the principle of federal market regulation that the contemporary deregulation project targets. **June 16, 1933** — The **National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA)** creates the National Recovery Administration (NRA), which establishes industry-wide codes governing prices, wages, working conditions, and production quotas. The act also establishes the **Public Works Administration (PWA)** under Harold Ickes, with $3.3 billion for large-scale construction projects (dams, bridges, schools, hospitals). The NIRA is the most ambitious — and most constitutionally vulnerable — piece of First New Deal legislation. **June 16, 1933** — The **Banking Act of 1933** (Glass-Steagall Act) separates commercial banking from investment banking and creates the **[[FDIC]]** (Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation), providing federal insurance for bank deposits up to $2,500 (later increased). Glass-Steagall's separation of commercial and investment banking remains in effect until its repeal in 1999 (Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act) — a repeal that critics blame for contributing to the 2008 financial crisis. ## 1934–1935 — The Turn to Structural Reform **June 6, 1934** — The Securities Exchange Act creates the [[SEC]]. FDR appoints Joseph P. Kennedy (father of [[John F. Kennedy]]) as the SEC's first chairman — on the theory that it takes a market insider to regulate the market. **January 4, 1935** — FDR's **State of the Union Address** signals the pivot from emergency relief to structural reform — the transition from the First New Deal to the **Second New Deal**. FDR calls for social insurance, work relief (rather than the dole), and a new relationship between government and the economy. **May 27, 1935** — **Black Monday**. The Supreme Court, in *Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States*, unanimously strikes down the NIRA as an unconstitutional delegation of legislative power to the executive branch. The decision guts the First New Deal's centerpiece — and the "non-delegation doctrine" it invokes is the same constitutional principle that contemporary conservative jurists are attempting to revive to dismantle the modern administrative state. **July 5, 1935** — The **[[National Labor Relations Act]]** (Wagner Act) establishes the right of workers to organize unions and bargain collectively, creates the **National Labor Relations Board (NLRB)** to enforce these rights, and prohibits employer interference with union activities. The Wagner Act is the legal foundation of the American labor movement's mid-century power — and the target of every subsequent anti-union legislative effort from Taft-Hartley (1947) through contemporary right-to-work laws. **August 14, 1935** — FDR signs the **[[Social Security Act]]**, establishing old-age pensions, unemployment insurance, and aid to dependent children, the blind, and the disabled. The act creates the federal social-insurance framework that remains the backbone of the American welfare state. The initial exclusion of agricultural and domestic workers (categories that disproportionately employ Black workers) is a political concession to Southern Democrats who control key congressional committees — a structural compromise that shapes the New Deal coalition's racial politics for decades. **August 30, 1935** — The **Revenue Act of 1935** ("Wealth Tax Act") raises the top marginal income tax rate to 79% on income above $5 million (effectively targeting only John D. Rockefeller), increases estate taxes, and raises corporate tax rates. FDR frames the bill as a response to concentrated wealth — "an unjust concentration of wealth and economic power." The bill infuriates the wealthy and is modest in revenue impact, but it establishes the principle that the tax code should reduce inequality. ## 1936 — The Mandate Renewed **January 6, 1936** — The Supreme Court strikes down the AAA in *United States v. Butler*, ruling that the processing tax funding the program exceeds federal power under the Tenth Amendment. The decision is 6–3; Justice Owen Roberts switches from his earlier NIRA position. The Court has now gutted two major New Deal programs. **November 3, 1936** — [[1936 Presidential Election]]. Roosevelt wins the most lopsided Electoral College victory since 1820: 523 electoral votes to 8, carrying 46 of 48 states (Alf Landon carries only Maine and Vermont). The victory is interpreted as a massive popular mandate for the New Deal — and emboldens FDR to confront the Supreme Court directly. ## 1937 — The Court-Packing Crisis **February 5, 1937** — FDR announces the **Judicial Procedures Reform Bill** — the "court-packing plan." The bill proposes adding one new justice to the Supreme Court for every sitting justice over age 70 who does not retire, up to a maximum of six additional justices. The plan is transparent: FDR wants to appoint enough sympathetic justices to overcome the conservative majority that has been striking down New Deal legislation. **March 29, 1937** — The Supreme Court, in *West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish*, upholds a Washington State minimum-wage law — reversing a 1936 precedent. Justice Roberts's vote to uphold is the "**switch in time that saved nine**" — the doctrinal shift that begins the Court's acceptance of New Deal economic regulation. Whether Roberts's switch was influenced by the court-packing threat is debated; the timing is difficult to explain otherwise. **April 12, 1937** — The Court upholds the [[National Labor Relations Act]] in *NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp.*, finding that the Commerce Clause authorizes federal regulation of labor relations in industries affecting interstate commerce. The decision marks the constitutional turning point: the Court accepts the expansive Commerce Clause reading that sustains the entire post-New Deal regulatory state. This is the constitutional architecture that *Schechter Poultry*'s modern descendants are working to reverse. **July 22, 1937** — The Senate effectively kills the court-packing bill. FDR suffers his first major legislative defeat. But the constitutional battle is already won: the Court has begun upholding New Deal legislation, and retirements over the next four years allow FDR to appoint eight of nine justices. **1937–1938** — The **Roosevelt Recession**. FDR, believing recovery is underway, cuts federal spending and tightens monetary policy. The economy immediately contracts: unemployment rises from 14% to 19%, industrial production drops 33%, and the stock market falls 50%. The recession validates the Keynesian argument that premature austerity kills recovery — and haunts deficit-spending debates ever since. ## 1938 — The Last Major Legislation **June 25, 1938** — The **Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA)** establishes the first federal minimum wage (25 cents/hour), sets the standard workweek at 44 hours (later 40), requires overtime pay at 1.5x for hours beyond the limit, and restricts child labor. The FLSA is the last major piece of New Deal legislation. Like the Social Security Act, it initially excludes agricultural and domestic workers. **November 8, 1938** — Midterm elections. Republicans gain 81 House seats, 8 Senate seats, and 13 governorships. The "Conservative Coalition" — an informal alliance of Republicans and conservative Southern Democrats — solidifies in Congress and blocks further New Deal legislation for the next two decades. The New Deal's legislative phase is over. ## 1939–1945 — War Completes the Recovery **September 1, 1939** — [[World War II]] begins in Europe. American military mobilization, beginning with the 1940 defense buildup and accelerating after Pearl Harbor (December 7, 1941), accomplishes what the New Deal alone could not: full employment. By 1943, unemployment falls below 2%. The war economy demonstrates the Keynesian principle at scale — massive government spending produces full employment and economic growth — while also demonstrating that the New Deal's peacetime spending had been insufficient, not excessive. **1942–1945** — The war produces structural changes that extend the New Deal's effects: the GI Bill (1944) creates a massive federal education-and-housing benefit; wartime labor shortages accelerate Black migration to Northern industrial cities (the Great Migration's second wave); wartime production builds the industrial base and federal-private partnership model that becomes the [[Military-Industrial Complex]]; and wartime tax policy raises the top marginal rate to 94%, establishing the high-tax-rate norm that persists until the Reagan revolution. --- ## The Counter-Project The New Deal's institutional legacy — the federal regulatory agencies, the social-insurance programs, the labor-rights framework, the constitutional doctrines that sustain them — is the foundational target of the conservative counter-project the vault documents. The counter-project's phases: **1. The Old Right (1930s–1950s).** [[Robert Taft]], the American Liberty League, the early [[Heritage Foundation]] precursors — organized specifically around opposition to the New Deal as government overreach. **2. Buckley-fusionist conservatism (1955 onward).** [[Russell Kirk]]'s *The Conservative Mind*, William F. Buckley's *National Review*, the fusionist project (libertarian economics + traditionalist values + anti-communism) — built on a critique of the New Deal as the operational source of liberal institutional power. **3. The Reagan rollback (1981 onward).** The [[Mandate for Leadership]], the PATCO firing, the 1981 tax cuts, deregulation — the first operational attempt to reverse New Deal structures. **4. The post-2022 deconstruction.** The [[Loper Bright v. Raimondo]] reversal of Chevron deference, the major-questions doctrine, the non-delegation doctrine revival, [[Schedule F]], [[Project 2025]], and DOGE — doing 90-years-after the structural work of unmaking what this timeline documents. ## See Also - [[New Deal]] — the concept page - [[Franklin D. Roosevelt]] — the architect - [[Herbert Hoover]] — the foil - [[Great Depression]] — the crisis - [[Social Security Act]] — the most consequential single output - [[National Labor Relations Act]] — the labor-rights foundation - [[Party Realignment]] — the electoral transformation the New Deal produced - [[Gilded Age Plutocracy]] — what the New Deal partially displaced - [[Heritage Foundation]] — the institutional hub of the counter-project - [[Mandate for Leadership]] — the counter-project's operational blueprint - [[Project 2025]] — the contemporary iteration - [[Loper Bright v. Raimondo]] — the constitutional dimension - [[Schedule F]] — the civil-service dimension - [[Movement Conservatism Timeline]] — the counter-project's own chronology