To me, the most prominent feature of this reading was the immense amount of legislation that FDR managed to push through Congress in such a short period of time. It is no wonder that the New Deal is often termed the Alphabet Soup of FDR — so many bills with three letter names were churned out in so few years. The national crisis clearly called for extreme relief measures, but the volume of legislation that Congress merely accepted from the administration is shocking. Which calls to attention even more the abrupt skepticism Congress seemed to catch after 1936, when even Democrats began to be disillusioned by the New Deal results. It is also questionable why FDR continued to push public job creation when two additional economic crises occurred under his administration following the Great Depression.

Criticisms of the WPA also make it seem that FDR was using the US as an economic lab. Conservatives, particularly southerners, cited the urban centralization that the WPA caused (since workers would leave rural areas to get city jobs for higher pay). It seemed strange to me that this effect was totally the opposite of what FDR’s “relocation plan” of sending urban families to subsistence farms would’ve had. The WPA did, however, on an individual scale, make voters happy about what their president was doing for them.

In light of these two points, it seems that the biggest legacy the New Deal left the US’s consciousness is one of a feeling of job entitlement and deficit spending.