Franklin Roosevelt succeeded in expanding the scope of public authority. The New Deal brought unprecedented government involvement in the lives of people, whether rich or poor. Businesses were subject to increased regulation even as they retained control over hiring and firing, production, and pricing. The federal government grew considerably during the 1930s, jumping from 605,000 employees to more than 1 million, and turned citizens’ attention from local and state authorities to officials in Washington, D.C. Yet the New Deal rescued the capitalist system, doing little to alter the fundamental structure of the American economy. It left corporations, the stock market, farms, and banks in the hands of private enterprise. Indeed, by the end of the 1930s large corporations had more power over markets than ever before. Income and wealth remained unequally distributed, nearly to the same extent as it had been before Roosevelt took office in 1933.
Roosevelt forged a middle path between reactionaries and revolutionaries at a time when the fascist tyrants Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini gained power in Germany and Italy respectively and Joseph Stalin ruthlessly consolidated his rule in the Communist Soviet Union. By contrast, the American president expanded democratic capitalism, bringing a broader cross section of society to the decision-making table. Big business no longer held unilateral authority but instead found its power balanced by big labor, big agriculture, and big government. Roosevelt’s “broker state” of multiple competing interests provided for greater democracy than a government dominated exclusively by business elites. This system did not benefit those who remained unorganized and wielded little power, but marginalized groups—African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans—did receive greater recognition and self-determination from the federal government. Moreover, in the coming decades these groups, too, would find ways to take advantage of the power of collective action and claim a place at the bargaining table.
President Roosevelt also solidified the institution of the presidency as the focal point for public leadership. His cheerfulness, hopefulness, and pragmatism rallied millions of individuals behind him. Even after Roosevelt died in 1945, the public retained its expectation that leadership came from the White House.
Through his programs and force of personality, Franklin Roosevelt convinced Americans that he cared about their welfare and that the federal government would not ignore their suffering. With his chin cocked upward, a fedora hat on his head, and a cigarette holder protruding from his smiling mouth, Roosevelt assured the depression-weary public that it had somewhere to turn for relief. He was not universally beloved: Millions of Americans despised him because they thought he was leading the country toward socialism, and he did not solve all the problems the country faced—it would take government spending for World War II to end the depression. Still, together with his wife Eleanor, Franklin Roosevelt conveyed a sense that the American people belonged to a single community, capable of banding together to solve the country’s problems, no matter how serious they were or how intractable they might seem.