FDR's mandate as a first-term President was clear and challenging: rescue the United States from the throes of its worst depression in history. Economic conditions had deteriorated in the four months between FDR's election and his inauguration. Unemployment grew to over twenty-five percent of the nation's workforce, with more than twelve million Americans out of work.
A new wave of bank failures hit in February Upon accepting the Democratic nomination, FDR had promised a "New Deal" to help America out of the Depression, though the meaning of that program was far from clear. In trying to make sense of FDR's domestic policies, historians and political scientists have referred to a "First New Deal," which lasted from to , and a "Second New Deal," which stretched from to Some scholars believe that a "Third New Deal" began in but never took root; the descriptor, likewise, has never gained significant currency.
These terms, it should be remembered, are the creations of scholars trying to impose order and organization on the Roosevelt administration's often chaotic, confusing, and contradictory attempts to combat the depression; Roosevelt himself never used them. The idea of a "first "and "second" New Deal is useful insofar as it reflects important shifts in the Roosevelt administration's approach to the nation's economic and social woes. But the boundaries between the first and second New Deals should be viewed as porous rather than concrete.
In other words, significant continuities existed between the first and second New Deals that should not be overlooked. One thing is clear: the New Deal was, and remains, difficult to categorize. Roosevelt certainly believed in the premises of American capitalism, but he also saw that American capitalism circa required reform in order to survive. How much, and what kind of, reform was still up in the air. Upon entering the Oval Office, FDR was neither a die-hard liberal nor a conservative, and the policies he enacted during his first term sometimes reflected contradictory ideological sources.
This ideological and political incoherence shrank in significance however, next to what former Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes described as a "first class temperament," exemplified by the President's optimism, self-confidence, pragmatism, and flexibility.
