The New Deal Era

Most Americans citizens feel as though they are a part of the greatest country in the world, but there have been particular decades in the country’s history that have been especially outstanding. For example, the New Deal era which lasted from 1929-1941, saw some of the darkest days in American history, like the Stock Market Crash of 1929 and the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. The foundation of society at the time was born in 1901-1924, and as the men and women became adults, the nation they knew, started to change dramatically. As novelists Winograd and Hais (2011) noted, the stock market crash was the “catalyst” of the generation’s troubles, and signaled the beginning of the Great Depression (p. 16). Frightening times challenged the American

New York. Winograd and Hais (2011) asserted that in 1905 Joseph Lochner, a bakery owner, violated a New York statute when he required “a worker in his bakery to work beyond the limit of sixty hours per week” (p. 72). The Supreme Court ruled the case in Lochner’s favor 8-1. The Supreme Court’s ruling upheld the principles of the laissez-faire approach, which supports government free intervention when it comes to private unions and the economy. Winograd and Hais (20110 declared that the decision in Lochner’s favor became the “standard on virtually every economic case that came before it [the Supreme Court] for the next three decades,” (p. 72). The Supreme Court used the Lochner case to battle minimum wage laws and deem them unconstitutional, which went against the New Deal. Winograd and Hais reported that the Court’s resistance was a result of, “the National Industrial Recovery Act, the Agricultural Adjustment Act, and the Guffey Coal Act, all of which attempted to regulate and set prices and working conditions in key segments of the economy” (p. 74). The Supreme Court was primarily made up of Republican Justices, and their biased behavior leads to their defiance against the New Deal and regulations that involved government interference. In the long run, the court ruling in Lochner v. New York established the economic basis for the next several decades and caused the separation between political parties to escalate as the Supreme Court Justices went against the President’s