The New Deal wasn't just a product of Democratic super-majorities. Principled legislators in both parties were willing to work together to revive the economy.

The true conservative seeks to protect the system of private property and free enterprise by correcting such injustices and inequalities as arise from it. The most serious threat to our institutions comes from those who refuse to face the need for change. Liberalism becomes the protection for the far-sighted conservative. - Franklin D. Roosevelt

Republican Senator Olympia Snowe's recent announcement that she has decided to leave the Senate because of partisan gridlock is being widely viewed on both sides of the aisle as further confirmation -- as if we needed it -- of just how dysfunctional our political process has become. In good health and likely to win if she were to run, Senator Snowe said she had to consider how productive an additional term would be given the "polarized environment" in Congress. In light of this, and in light of the fact that she does not expect the intense partisanship of recent years to change over the short term, she reluctantly decided not to seek re-election. Her fellow senator, Republican Susan Collins of Maine, remarked that she is "devastated" by the news, while Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont called her decision a real loss, noting that he misses the days when "Republicans and Democrats worked together" for the good of the country.

Partisanship has been part of America's political process from the beginning. Why, then, is today's partisanship so much more destructive than in the past? The answer may lie in the makeup of the parties themselves. Many Americans, for example, assume that Franklin Roosevelt was able to get through such landmark pieces of legislation as the Social Security Act or the National Labor Relations Act because the Democrats held huge majorities in both houses of Congress. But the truth is that many of FDR's harshest critics came from the conservative wing of the Democratic Party, while some of his strongest supporters were progressive Republicans.

In the early days of the New Deal, for example, FDR teamed up with Republican Senator George Norris of Nebraska to create the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), our nation's first major regional supplier of public power. On May 8, 1933, also a part of the famous 100 days, Republican senators Robert La Follette Jr. of Wisconsin and Bronson Cutting of New Mexico joined forces with Edward Costigan of Colorado to sponsor a bill authorizing $6 billion in public works expenditures. Moreover, the director of one of the most important New Deal stimulus agencies, the Public Works Administration (PWA), which among other things built the Triborough Bridge and Lincoln Tunnel in New York, the Washington National Airport, the Bay Bridge in San Francisco, the Grand Coulee Dam, and thousands of miles of public highways, was led by the progressive Republican head of the Department of the Inferior, Harold Ickes. Progressive Republicans even supported legislation aimed at securing the rights of workers to join unions and secure better wages, hours, and working conditions -- the National Labor Relations Act and Fair Labor Standards Act -- and the vast majority of Republicans in both the House and the Senate voted for the Social Security Act and the establishment of the Social Security Administration, whose first head was the former governor of the state of New Hampshire, Republican John G. Winant.

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In the meantime, the Roosevelt administration's determination to expand the U.S. economy and put people back to work through compensatory deficit spending had raised the ire of many conservatives -- including conservative Democrats -- who denounced the New Deal as nothing more than a left-wing plot to take the United States down the path of socialism. One of the most outspoken critics was Al Smith, the former governor of New York and Democratic candidate for president in 1928. Smith's vehement opposition to Roosevelt's policies led him to join forces with other prominent conservative Democrats like John J. Raskob, the former chairman of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), Jouett Shouse, who had served as the Chairman of the Executive Committee of the DNC, and John W. Davis, the party's nominee for president in 1924, in forming the American Liberty League in August of 1934.

The Liberty League also received strong support from conservative Republicans and was largely financed by some of the most powerful business elites in the county, including the du Pont family and other prominent corporate Republican leaders, such as the heads of General Motors, General Foods, Chase National Bank, Standard Oil, and other major corporations. The League spent vast sums of money in an attempt to unseat FDR in the 1936 presidential election. They ruthlessly attacked the New Deal and characterized their efforts as being motivated by a desire "to defend and uphold the [U.S.] Constitution." The League also insisted that the growth of the national debt was a sign of permanent economic decline and argued that there was no difference between Roosevelt's policies and socialism, warning, as Al Smith did in the 1936 election, that there "can only be one capital, Washington or Moscow."

The Liberty League's efforts to roll back or halt the New Deal and defeat FDR in the 1936 election failed spectacularly. One of the main reasons for this failure was the widespread consensus that had emerged in Washington by this point among like-minded members of both parties that government action in the face of such an unprecedented crisis was critical -- not merely as a means to provide relief to the millions of unemployed, but also as a means to restore the American people's faith in liberal capitalist democracy. As FDR put it in his first inaugural, the onset of his administration was a "day of national consecration," a time when the nation was "calling for action and action now," and as the legislative record of his first administration in particular shows, most members of Congress -- be they Republican or Democrat -- understood this.

This is not to say that the two parties did not compete with one another. They most certainly did. But the partisan divide of the 1930s was based much more on political and economic philosophy than it was on party affiliation. One gets the sense that this not only made for a healthier and more natural political discourse -- a debate over ideas instead of party -- it also made it much more likely that the forces necessary to form a political consensus over a particular issue would form. All of this was helped along of course by FDR's political genius, but the major reforms of the New Deal were not solely of his making. He had a great deal of help from both Democrats and Republicans, many of whom joined hands in a common effort to provide the American people with Social Security, unemployment insurance, a minimum wage, protection from the avarice of an unregulated banking and financial sector, and a host of other programs designed to provide the average citizen with a measure of economic security within the capitalist system.

Today, in the wake of the Great Recession, one might assume that the U.S. Congress would respond in a similar fashion. But as Senator Snowe's decision reminds us, this is not to be the case. Senator Leahy is right. It is a sad day indeed when, in the face of a similar economic crisis, a consensus-seeking legislator like Olympia Snowe, who has dedicated much of her life to serving the public interest, now finds it impossible to serve that interest in the one national institution whose sole purpose is to do so.

David Woolner is a Senior Fellow and Hyde Park Resident Historian for the Roosevelt Institute. He is currently writing a book entitled Cordell Hull, Anthony Eden and the Search for Anglo-American Cooperation, 1933-1938.

FDR understood that balancing America's budget would be futile if the health, skills, and morale of its people were lost in the process.

Before we can think straight as a nation we have to consider, in addition to the old kind, a new kind of government balance sheet -- a long-range sheet which shows survival values for our population and for our democratic way of living, balanced against what we have paid for them. Judged by that test -- history's test -- I venture to say that the long-range budget of the present Administration of our government has been in the black and not in the red. - Franklin D. Roosevelt

As the debate over President Obama's proposed budget rages, we might do well to reflect on what Franklin Roosevelt had to say about the nation's "balance sheet" roughly three quarters of a century ago. Facing much the same criticism over government spending from the right that President Obama has faced, FDR insisted that it was time to develop a new kind of government balance sheet -- one that took into account what he called "the true and ultimate assets and liabilities of a nation." He eschewed the traditional definition of "capital" and instead argued that the "only real capital of a nation is its natural resources and its human beings." Moreover, FDR insisted that it was critical that "we take care of and make the most of" both of these fundamental assets so as to ensure that "we shall survive as a strong nation, a successful nation and a progressive nation -- whether or not the bookkeepers say other kinds of budgets are from time to time out of balance."

In keeping with this point of view, FDR also argued that it was government's responsibility to ensure that the nation's "capital structure" -- by which he meant its "natural resources and human beings" -- was maintained at all times. "The plant has to be kept up and new capital put in year by year to meet increasing needs," he said, for "if we skimp on that capital, if we exhaust our natural resources and weaken the capacity of our human beings, then we shall go the way of all weak nations."

For Roosevelt, investing in and maintaining the overall health of the nation took precedence over short-term demands to balance the federal budget. In this sense, FDR treated government less like a family that needs to meet its monthly obligations and more like a business -- a business that understands both the short-term capital requirements needed to maintain its competitive edge and the concomitant demand for well timed long-term investments to ensure continued growth and prosperity.

In articulating this philosophy, FDR placed great stress on the need to properly manage and preserve our nation's natural resources. But he also insisted that we must "husband" the resources of the other half our capital by "conserving...[the] health, energy, skill and morale of our population, and especially...that part of our population which will be the America of tomorrow." It was critical that we addressed the serious issue of long-term unemployment, for in FDR's view it was vital to maintain "the fullest use and development of precious resources of ability which cannot be stored and will be lost if they remain unused." Indeed, he went on:

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No nation can meet this changing world unless its people, individually and collectively, grow in ability to understand and handle the new knowledge as applied to increasingly intricate human relationships. That is why the teachers of America are the ultimate guardians of the human capital of America, the assets which must be made to pay social dividends if democracy is to survive.

President Obama has frequently alluded to the important role that education must play in building what he calls "an economy that is built to last." And his budget, which calls for increased funding to rebuild our schools and hire more teachers, reflects this. The president has also called for an increase in spending on research and development, and on our nation's crumbling infrastructure, both of which are urgently needed. But his budget also calls for deep cuts in social spending that would adversely affect a number of programs designed to assist low-income families, as well as the slashing of $33 billion from the Superfund to clean up toxic waste, a $359 million reduction in the Environmental Protection Agency's funds for safe drinking water, and nearly $500 million in cuts in heating oil assistance for the poor at a time when oil prices are on the rise.

The president has argued that it is necessary to make these cuts -- even those to the poor -- in order to provide a balance between the expenditures needed to keep the recovery on track and the long-term requirement to reduce the federal deficit. As part of this effort, he has also called for an end to the Bush-era tax cuts for incomes over $250,000 a year and introduced his so-called Buffett Rule, a minimum tax of 30 percent for those whose annual income tops $1 million.

On the surface, these all appear as logical goals. But in fashioning a budget that includes only modest spending increases and lays great stress on the need to cut spending, the president runs the risk of amplifying the right's failed deficit logic -- the falsity of which has been thoroughly exposed by the shrinking of the European economy in the wake of Europe's embrace of budget austerity. The president also insists that in calling for new taxes he is not engaged in class warfare. Indeed, in introducing his new budget to the students at Northern Virginia Community College, he insisted that "we don't begrudge success in America. We aspire to it... I want everybody here to go out there and do great. I want you to make loads of money if you can."

Franklin Roosevelt had a different vision. For him, the measure of the restoration of the U.S. economy could only be found "in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit." And even in the midst of the worst depression in our nation's history, he was not afraid to remind the American people again and again that it was the forces of greed -- not class warfare -- that led to this great crisis. There were, in short, more important things in life than the accumulation of great wealth. As he observed in his first inaugural:

Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort. The joy and moral stimulation of work no longer must be forgotten in the mad chase of evanescent profits. These dark days will be worth all they cost us if they teach us that our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister to ourselves and to our fellow men.

As the fight over the budget continues, the president and Congress might do well to focus not on how to cut spending, but on the far more urgent need to restore and protect what Franklin Roosevelt called "the true and ultimate assets and liabilities of [the] nation." In particular, we have to invest in the "precious resources of ability" -- human capital -- that continue to suffer the devastating effects of long-term unemployment. Surely this is an asset on our national balance sheet that we cannot afford to lose if we hope to build a better future for ourselves and for our children.

David Woolner is a Senior Fellow and Hyde Park Resident Historian for the Roosevelt Institute. He is currently writing a book entitled Cordell Hull, Anthony Eden and the Search for Anglo-American Cooperation, 1933-1938.

President Roosevelt's transformative government not only saved the country from a Great Depression and the world from the grips of fascism, it crafted the country we live in today.

Government has a final responsibility for the well-being of its citizenship. If private cooperative endeavor fails to provide work for willing hands and relief for the unfortunate, those suffering hardship from no fault of their own have a right to call upon the Government for aid; and a government worthy of its name must make fitting response. - Franklin D. Roosevelt

January 30 marks the 130thbirthday of Franklin D. Roosevelt. For most of today's generation, FDR has become a somewhat distant figure, far removed from the day-to-day struggle to make ends meet at a time of slow growth and high unemployment. They know from their history books that FDR launched the New Deal in the midst of the Great Depression, and that he led the nation to victory in the Second World War. But aside from these basic facts, the average American knows very little about the extent to which the government -- and America's role in the world -- was transformed in the critical years between 1933 and 1945.

Yet, if these same individuals were to pause for a moment to consider just how much Franklin Roosevelt's leadership continues to influence their lives, they might soon conclude, as the late Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. once observed, "that the world we live in today is Franklin Roosevelt's world."

Consider, for example, just a few of the major initiatives that were introduced under FDR's leadership: the banking and financial reforms that brought us the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Securities and Exchange Commission and, until the passage of the Graham-Leach Act in 1999, the separation of commercial and investment banking. These monumental pieces of legislation brought much needed stability and transparency to our financial system and helped restore the American people's faith in the banking and securities industries. What is more, they were not inspired by any deep-seated enmity for capitalism on FDR's part. Rather, they were based on common sense principles derived from the hard-won lessons of the 1920s, which, above all else, taught the American people that "heedless self-interest" represents not just "bad morals," as FDR put it, but also "bad economics."

FDR also acted swiftly and effectively to help troubled American homeowners through such programs as the Home Owners Loan Corporation, which refinanced approximately 20 percent of all urban mortgages in the country in less than three years; revolutionized the mortgage industry through the widespread use of the 30-year amortized mortgage; and led to the establishment of the Federal Housing Authority (FHA). His administration also pushed through the Social Security Act, which not only provided pensions for the aged, but also our nation's first national system of unemployment insurance, two programs that remain critical to our social and economic wellbeing. Then there was the passage of the National Labor Relations Act that established the National Labor Relations Board and guaranteed the rights of workers to form unions and engage in collective bargaining, and the Fair Labor Standards Act, which established maximum hours and minimum wages for all workers, unionized or not.

But that was not all. To put people back to work, FDR launched a series of efforts to improve America's woefully inadequate economic infrastructure. Between 1935 and 1943, the most famous of these programs, the Works Progress Administration (WPA), literally built much of modern America, including 572,000 miles of rural roads, 67,000 miles of urban streets, 122,000 bridges, 1,000 tunnels, and 1,050 airfields. The WPA also constructed thousands of schools, hospitals, water treatment facilities, firehouses, and nearly 20,000 other state and local government buildings, many of them adorned by murals painted by out of work artists. This infrastructure helped lay the basis for the massive economic expansion that took place during World War II and the post-war years. In the meantime, the Rural Electrification Administration "wired" the 90 percent of American farms that still had no electricity while the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and Soil Conservation Service restored America's forests and farmland. As a result, there is hardly a community in this nation that still does not enjoy the benefits of the public works ushered in under the New Deal.

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Finally, we should remember that prior to World War II the United States had turned inward and refused to play a leading role in world affairs. Convinced that the Second World War had come about in part from the global economic depravity that helped give rise to fascism in Europe and Asia, FDR used the war as a catalyst for the construction of a new political, strategic, and economic order. It was based in large part on the extension of American moral and military power through the United Nations and the extension of American economic power through the creation of the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and a new multilateral economic system that would open up the world's markets and natural resources to freer trade. Taken together, these measures resulted in a permanent restructuring of the world's social, economic, and strategic makeup. They formed the basis of the new world order that has given rise to the globalization of the world's economy and the American-led multilateral security system that the United States has played a leading role in since 1945.

In much the same way that FDR's wartime leadership expanded America's role in the world, the New Deal dramatically expanded the scope of the federal government's responsibilities in American life. Where Washington had previously been only a distant factor in the social and economic standing of the nation, it now became the federal government's responsibility to maintain economic prosperity, to mitigate the worst effects of unfettered capitalism, to spread industrial and agricultural development to impoverished regions of the nation, to guarantee workers' right to choose their unions, to protect the bargaining rights of those unions, and to conserve and develop the nation's vast natural and artistic resources. In less than a decade, the United States government had become the primary guarantor of social and economic justice for all Americans, rich and poor alike.

Today's right-wing extremists, much like the conservative critics in FDR's own day, call this "socialism." But the New Deal did not set out to radically change the foundations of American capitalism. On the contrary, it revised that system in order to save it. While Roosevelt did foresee and support the increased socialization of the American economy and society -- insofar as that meant greater government responsibility for the people's welfare -- he took for granted that the system would remain rooted in free market principles, and he was no socialist.

The overall result was to create a domestic social and economic structure that allowed capitalism to flourish even as the government put in place the means by which it might be regulated. This new "philosophy," which included the embrace of Keynesian economic policy, stood at the root of what President Obama has correctly called the post-1945 creation of the "strongest economy and middle class the world has ever known."

President Obama is right to call for more action on the part of the federal government to stimulate the struggling U.S. economy. He is also right to demand a return to an America where "everyone gets a fair shot, ...everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules." But thanks to the mythology perpetuated by the same right wing that attacked FDR, the New Deal and the philosophy behind it has been largely forgotten. Instead, we are told time and time again that the free market will provide all we need -- excessive wealth for some and well paying jobs for everyone else -- so long as government, with its nasty habit of deficit spending, gets out of the way. This free market myth ignores the overwhelming evidence from the 1920s, '30s, and '40s that the free enterprise system can fail and that there are times when the government must step in to restore the economic health of the nation. Yet it has become so pervasive that even in the wake of the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression, our political discourse remains fixed not on how much the government should spend to restore the economy, but on how to reduce the deficit; not on how we might use government to restore basic fairness to our economic system, but on how we might reduce government involvement in the economy at a time when we can least afford it. In such a political environment, is it any wonder that even President Obama's effort to pass his modest jobs bill faces an uphill battle?

Franklin Roosevelt once said that there was nothing he loved so much "as a good fight." Perhaps, in this critical election year, it is time for the president and the leaders of the Democratic Party to take on the right-wing soothsayers of doom and make the case clearly and unequivocally for the one instrument strong enough to take on the forces of greed and avarice that have hijacked our democracy. Perhaps they should remind the American public, as Franklin Roosevelt did, that there comes a time in the life of every people when the only way to take on the forces of "economic tyranny" -- whose callous behavior has twice in the past century nearly brought our country to ruin -- is to turn to "the organized power of government."

David Woolner is a Senior Fellow and Hyde Park Resident Historian for the Roosevelt Institute. He is currently writing a book entitled Cordell Hull, Anthony Eden and the Search for Anglo-American Cooperation, 1933-1938.

An examination of the position of chief of staff reveals how crucial the role was to FDR's tenure as president.

The recent news that President Obama's chief of staff has decided to step down after just a year in office has drawn attention to the role that senior advisors play in the White House and the impact they may have -- or not -- on directing policy and achieving a president's agenda. The role of senior advisor has a long history, dating back to President Woodrow Wilson's use of Colonel Edmund House as an "unofficial" advisor. House was offered an official cabinet position, but turned it down so that he would be at liberty to advise the president on a host of matters. Unlike many of his predecessors, House actually lived in the White House and, thanks to his close relationship with President Wilson, became something akin to what we might think of as a modern-day chief of staff or National Security Advisor, as he played a major role in shaping U.S. wartime diplomacy. Due to the complexity of the issues confronting the United States in trying to shape the eventual peace that would come after World War I, Wilson also asked House to lead a special team of experts called "The Inquiry" that was to help formulate U.S. policy at the peace negotiations. The use of The Inquiry, which included many experts drawn from academia, may have served as a model for a far more influential group of expert advisors that came a generation later under what FDR called the "Brains Trust."

The fact that FDR may have modeled this group of advisors on Wilson's use of Colonel House and The Inquiry should come as no surprise. After all, FDR served as Under Secretary of the Navy in the Wilson administration and was a great admirer of the latter. The immediate inspiration for this group of advisors, however, came not from FDR, but from his legal counsel and speech writer, Samuel Rosenman, who suggested the idea in the course of FDR's 1932 run for the White House. With the country in the midst of the worst economic crisis in its history, which seemed to defy common understanding, the idea of putting together a group of experts to advise the president during the campaign seemed to make a great deal of sense. Moreover, as Roosevelt had already made use of expert advice during his term as Governor of New York, he readily embraced the idea.

The term Brains Trust -- which was first coined in 1932 by James Kieran of the New York Times -- would come to represent the entire coterie of advisors that surrounded FDR during the New Deal. But the original Brains Trust was actually made up of just three individuals drawn from the ranks of Columbia University: Raymond Moley, Rexford Tugwell, and Adolf A. Berle. All three of these men would play an important part in shaping the New Deal, but it was Moley who had perhaps the greatest initial impact.

Moley was a professor of law and government who had supported FDR's 1928 gubernatorial campaign and was active in the field of criminal justice. He also had a knack for organization and for gathering support for his progressive ideas which, along with his innate ability as a speech writer, led Rosenman to suggest him as the person to both recruit and head up the inchoate group of advisors. Moley was only too happy to do so, and it wasn't long before both Tugwell and Berle agreed to join him.

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In April 1932, Moley undertook his first major assignment for the would-be president, helping draft one of FDR's first major national addresses of the campaign: his famous "forgotten man" speech that focused on rural and urban poverty. In the speech, Roosevelt publicly proclaimed his firm belief in the responsibility of the federal government to come to the aid of ordinary citizens. In doing so, FDR rejected the trickle down approach taken by the Hoover administration in response to the economic crisis and instead called for economic mobilization that focused on the lower -- as opposed to upper -- echelons of American society. As Roosevelt put it:

These unhappy times call for the building of plans that rest on upon the forgotten, the unorganized, but the essential units of economic power, for plans like those of 1917 that build from the bottom up and not from the top down, that put their faith once more in the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.

Moley played a significant role in both drafting the speech and in giving it its populist appeal. It was Moley, for example, who suggested the phrase "forgotten man" (which stemmed from an essay written in the 19th century by the sociologist William Graham Sumner). The line stuck a chord with the public and came to symbolize FDR's support for the millions of poor and powerless Americans that had been victimized by the Depression. Moley also supported the theme of economic mobilization, another concept that would reappear in Roosevelt's rhetoric as the years progressed -- most famously in his First Inaugural.

Perhaps most importantly, Moley may also be responsible not only for the use of the phrase "New Deal" to describe FDR's social and economic agenda, but also -- at least in part -- for some of its most famous components. It is in a May 1932 memorandum written by Moley, for example, that we first see the phrase New Deal. Moreover, the same document also calls for FDR and the Democratic Party to reject the more orthodox and conservative elements of both major parties and embrace instead a much more progressive agenda. He advocated such ideas as a massive federal program of public works to relieve unemployment, the regulation of the utility industry, greater transparency in the financial sector, and the separation of commercial and investment banking -- all issues that would be covered under the reforms of the New Deal.

Ironically, in spite of Moley's strong influence over FDR's policies in the early months of the New Deal, his tenure as a presidential advisor, like that of Bill Daley, would be relatively short lived. It was shorter, in fact, than Daley's or his two fellow members of the original Brains Trust. Under pressure in part from FDR's Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, who was diametrically opposed to the protectionist aspects of Moley's economic agenda, as well as from FDR's long-time political advisor Louis Howe, who began to see Moley as something of a rival, Moley was forced to resign from public service in September 1933.

Still, there is no question that during the first critical months of the New Deal Raymond Moley wielded a great deal of power and influence in Washington. The fact that he was able to do so, and to rise to the upper echelons of the government so quickly, serves as a reminder of just how important presidential advisors can be. This is surely something the press and public should keep in mind as we move further into this election year.

David Woolner is a Senior Fellow and Hyde Park Resident Historian for the Roosevelt Institute. He is currently writing a book entitled Cordell Hull, Anthony Eden and the Search for Anglo-American Cooperation, 1933-1938. He is also the co-author with Henry Henderson ofFDR and the Environment.