As a result of the catastrophic economic and social crisis known as the Great Depression, the American people punished the Republican Party. In the 1932 presidential election, the Democratic Party candidate, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, won.
President Roosevelt initiated a program of radical reforms known as the New Deal to confront the chaotic social situation of the country. Roosevelt did not want to eliminate the capitalist system, much less implant a Marxist or communist economy; He was a strong supporter of the free market economy. But he believed that the state should have a much larger role than it had hitherto in the national economy, and its advisers believed in a certain central planning of the economy.
The president fought unemployment with massive programs of public works and making the state directly employ the unemployed in emergency plans (such as the Civil Conservation Corps). His main contribution was to start creating the American welfare state. His government had Congress pass legislation that established the right of all American workers to have a retirement pension financed by contributions from workers, employers and the State. Roosevelt greatly increased public spending to finance its many programs aimed at alleviating poverty, combating unemployment and stimulating the economy; and for it had to increase also the taxes, being the unique thing in which it seemed to the fiscal conservatives the fact that it did not like the fiscal deficit.
His successor, Harry Truman (1945-1953), continued many of Roosevelt's economic measures. Both Roosevelt and Truman, despite being Democrats, began to take measures to protect some rights of black people; what the Democrats of the South did not like.
