State Capacity and Economic Intervention in the Early New Deal

TLDR

The New Deal represented a major watershed in U.S. history, introducing unprecedented economic intervention without a shift to authoritarian rule, unlike the Nazi rise in Germany. The paper investigates the early launch of two major New Deal interventions, one short‑lived and one lasting.

Abstract

descent from parliamentary democracy into the Nazi dictatorship. No such radical change of regime occurred in the United States. Yet the Deal of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's first two presidential terms (1933-1940) was one of the most innovative sets of measures put through by any of the liberaldemocratic governments caught up in the maelstrom of the Great Depression. In the context of U.S. history, moreover, the New Deal-along with the national mobilizations for World Wars I and II-was a major watershed in the establishment of an economically interventionist national state. Two of the New Deal's most ambitious efforts at economic intervention -one destined to be shortlived and the other to prove more enduring -were launched right at the start. Both the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) and the Agricultural Adjustment Act were passed by Congress in the spring of 1933, during the heady Hundred Days of intense legislative activity that followed FDR's inauguration amidst the depths of the depression. These acts were an extraordinary new departure for the U.S. national government, which abandoned