Who created the New Deal?

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt created the New Deal, which he proposed during his 1932 presidential campaign and launched after taking office on March 4, 1933. Roosevelt, often called FDR, came from a wealthy New York family and had served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy during World War I and as Governor of New York from 1929 to 1932, where he experimented with state-level relief programs after the Depression hit. He won the 1932 Democratic nomination and defeated incumbent Republican Herbert Hoover by 472 to 59 electoral votes. In his nomination speech, Roosevelt promised a new deal for the American people, and the phrase stuck.

The actual programs of the New Deal were drafted by a group of advisers known as the Brain Trust, including Columbia University professors Raymond Moley, Rexford Tugwell, and Adolf Berle, and later figures such as Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Labor Secretary Frances Perkins (the first woman to serve in a cabinet), and Interior Secretary Harold Ickes. The New Deal was not a single plan but a flood of legislation that Roosevelt pushed through Congress in two main waves.

The First New Deal of 1933 to 1934 focused on emergency relief and recovery, including the bank holiday, the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Agricultural Adjustment Act, and the National Industrial Recovery Act. The Second New Deal of 1935 to 1936 emphasized lasting reform, with the Social Security Act, the Wagner Act protecting labor unions, the Works Progress Administration, and tax increases on high incomes.

Roosevelt used the new medium of radio to explain his programs directly to Americans in fireside chats. The first chat on March 12, 1933 reassured citizens that it was safe to put their money back in reopened banks, and the strategy helped restore public confidence.

Roosevelt was elected to four terms, the only president to serve more than two, winning in 1932, 1936, 1940, and 1944. He died of a cerebral hemorrhage on April 12, 1945, just months before the end of World War II. His leadership during the Depression and the war made him one of the most consequential presidents in American history. The 22nd Amendment, ratified in 1951, set a two-term limit partly in response.