GDWW - Political Challenges Lesson

Political Challenges

Photograph of Eleanor Roosevelt at the United Nations

Eleanor Roosevelt

President Roosevelt's wife, Eleanor, was very influential in her own right. She was interested in humanitarian causes and social progress, and was very vocal about them during her husband's time in the White House. She traveled all over the United States to observe social conditions so she could keep the president informed as to the state of the nation. As a supporter of women's activism, she was also instrumental in convincing Roosevelt to appoint more women to government positions.

Roosevelt's Political Challenges

5 EVERY MAN A KING The slogan of the Louisiana senator Huey Long’s Share Our Wealth movement during the Great Depression. Long proposed to confiscate all fortunes of more than five million dollars and all incomes of more than one million dollars, and to use the money to give every American family a house, a car, and an annual income of two thousand dollars or more.During his 12-year presidency, President Roosevelt faced many challenges to his leadership, and many critics. Opponents of the New Deal came from all parts of the political spectrum. Some conservatives thought he had made the federal government too large and too powerful and that it did not respect the rights of individuals and property, while some liberals thought he had not gone far enough to socialize the economy and eliminate inequality in America. Perhaps Roosevelt's biggest critic was Senator Huey Long of Louisiana. Long originally supported the New Deal, but he changed his mind and set his sights on replacing Roosevelt as president. Long proposed for every American a home, food, clothes, and an education, among other things.

In Europe, World War II started long before America entered it. To prevent Roosevelt from involving America in what some saw as a European war, Congress passed a series of Neutrality Acts to make it illegal to sell arms or make loans to nations at war. The fourth of these acts, passed in 1939 in recognition of the Nazi threat to Western Europe's democracies, permitted the sale of arms to nations at war on a "cash and carry" basis. This meant that buyers would have to pay cash and send their own ships to American ports to pick up the supplies, thereby keeping American ships from being sunk by the Germans. View the presentation below on American Foreign Policy from 1920-1941.

The Judiciary Reorganization Bill of 1937, usually called the Court Packing Bill, was a law Roosevelt proposed to give presidents the power to appoint an extra Supreme Court justice for every sitting justice over the age of 70 1/2. Roosevelt planned to use this bill's powers to add more of his supporters to the Supreme Court to uphold his New Deal programs, but the version of the law passed by Congress weakened the power he had desired. 

Protesting Discrimination

In 1941, A. Philip Randolph, the founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, proposed a march on Washington, D.C., to protest discrimination in the military and in industry. He called on African Americans from all over the United States to come to Washington and join him. President Roosevelt, afraid the march might cause unrest among whites, summoned Randolph to the White House and asked him to call off the march. When Randolph refused, Roosevelt issued an executive order calling on employers and labor unions to cease discrimination in hiring practices in industries related to defense. As a result of Roosevelt's actions, the march was cancelled.

 

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