Roosevelt and the New Deal "We must be the great arsenal of
democracy."In 1933 the new president, Franklin Roosevelt,
brought an air of confidence and optimism that quickly rallied
the people to the banner of his program, known as the New Deal.
"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself," the president
declared in his inaugural address to the nation. -- President
Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1941 In a certain sense, it is fair to
say that the New Deal merely introduced types of social and
economic reform familiar to many Europeans for more than a
generation. Moreover, the New Deal represented the culmination
of a long-range trend toward abandonment of "laissez-faire"
capitalism, going back to the regulation of the railroads in the
1880s, and the flood of state and national reform legislation
introduced in the Progressive era of Theodore Roosevelt and
Woodrow Wilson. What was truly novel about the New Deal,
however, was the speed with which it accomplished what
previously had taken generations. In fact, many of