Rexford Tugwell Quotes

My aspirations for this country would be on the scope of what Franklin Roosevelt brought to this country in 1932 when he saw a nation that was broken economically.

The New Deal exists principally on an emotional plane for Obama. To him, the New Deal is something you play like a song, to make you or your constituents feel better.

Americans are conservative. What they want to conserve is the New Deal.

There was a direct jobs program from the Rooselvelt administration in the 1930s. The Justice Department has set up a task force to investigate the banks and the mortgage crisis but that's a little too late. Whenever they report they will report the obvious. It will be too late to impact the people who need the help the most.

Actually, the New Deal's central dedication was to business recovery rather than social reform.

The New Deal began, like the Salvation Army, by promising to save humanity. It ended, again like the Salvation Army, by running flop-houses and disturbing the peace.

The New Deal was a socialist revolution.

The big policy wins of the New Deal were actually offered as compromises. Because the alternative seemed to be revolution.

The whole New Deal was in a sense just a series of public options, some more optional than others, that offered government as an alternative to the often-flawed private market.

We certainly had an upheaval at the start of the Great Depression, and that resulted in a lot of financial reform, but it wasn't done in one stroke, and it wasn't done immediately. The Depression was in 1929 and resulted in the Securities and Exchange Act of '33, '34, '35, '37, '39, and '41.

Recovery measures work better when they raise confidence - as Franklin D. Roosevelt understood. His fireside chats, and his inaugural address proclaiming he would fight the Great Depression with the same resolve he would muster against a foreign foe, were aimed at reassuring Americans.

There was endless controversy as to whether the acts of the New Deal did actually move recovery or retard it, and nothing final could ever come of that bitter debate because it is forever impossible to prove what might have happened in place of what did.

My dad came out of the Roosevelt era and the Depression. One person and one party made a difference in his life. That's what everybody forgot when they called my father and other people political bosses.

By 1939, the Depression was back. Unemployment was huge. Roosevelt didn't have any quick fix. Remember, the New Deal, Works Progress Administration, and Civilian Conservation Corps - all that happened years before. Roosevelt was riding a storm.

The New Deal was going to redistribute the national income according to ideals of social and economic justice.

Why was there so much work-sharing in the 1930s? One reason is that government pushed for it. In his memoirs, President Herbert Hoover estimated that as many as two million workers avoided unemployment as a result of his efforts to promote work-sharing.

I don't want to go negative on Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but he didn't pass an economic deal in the first 100 days. We have passed the largest Recovery Act in the history of the country.

In the 1860s we used the national debt to save the Union. In the 1930s we used it to save the American economy. In the 1940s we used it to save the world.

Young people who have worked in NYA, boys who have worked on the CCC programs, saving our soil and improving our forests, men who have worked on WPA, and women too, will get little credit or thanks for the things which have come to be accepted as part of the landscape. These things would never have been done if it had not been for this period of depression and the necessity of putting people to work for the Government. This woman thinks an immense physical improvement has been made and a greatly added interest in government has begun to take hold on the people. This is the greatest gain which can be made in a democracy.

I ascribe the New Deal as important almost on a par with the French Revolution – not merely an important event in the history of the United States, but the most important event in the history of the United States.

I point out the Democratic party won two world wars and beat the depression, cut out the poverty by two thirds, and was responsible for the same sustained prosperity that we've had in the United States. What the hell do we have to apologize for?

President Franklin D. Roosevelt had to find a way to help the American people. In 1933, he created a relief program known as the New Deal. Two years later, he expanded the New Deal by adding the Works Progress Administration, which was renamed the Work Projects Administration in 1939.

The point about Roosevelt's New Deal was that it was visionary - for the 1930s.

I look back to the Great Depression, and what Roosevelt was able to do in very difficult times, to get Social Security through back in the time when it was seen as - well, it wasn't what it is today. It was sort of a last-ditch, if you really need it, you got it, but, today, it's much more a part of your retirement program.

What saved the economy, and the New Deal, was the enormous public works project known as World War II, which finally provided a fiscal stimulus adequate to the economy’s needs.