page_title: Presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, first and second terms
section_title: Labor unions
hierarchical_section_title: Presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, first and second terms / New Deal political coalition / Labor unions
caption_attribution_description: English: Single page Franklin D. Roosevelt re-election campaign handbill entitled "Don' Be Fooled by Figures" issued by the Democratic National Campaign Committee for the November, 1936 General Election.
context_page_description: The first and second terms of the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt began on March 4, 1933, when he was inaugurated as the 32nd President of the United States, and ended with Roosevelt's third inauguration on January 20, 1941. Roosevelt, a Democrat from New York, took office after defeating Republican President Herbert Hoover, who had presided over the start of the Great Depression. Roosevelt led the implementation of the New Deal, a series of programs designed to provide relief, recovery, and reform to Americans and the American economy. He also presided over a realignment that made his New Deal Coalition dominant in the Fifth Party System.
  During his first hundred days in office, Roosevelt spearheaded unprecedented major legislation and issued a profusion of executive orders. The Emergency Banking Act helped put an end to a run on banks, while the 1933 Banking Act and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 provided major reforms in the financial sector. To provide relief to unemployed workers, Roosevelt presided over the establishment of several agencies, including the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Public Works Administration, and the Federal Emergency Relief Administration.
context_section_description: Roosevelt at first had massive support from the rapidly growing labor unions; one laborer summed up the feeling of many workers when he stated that, "Mr. Roosevelt is the only man we ever had in the White House who would understand that my boss is a sonofabitch." Beginning in the mid-to-late 1930s, labor would suffered from a bitter a split that weakened its political power. John L. Lewis, the head of the United Mine Workers (UMW), favored using the UMW's parent organization, the American Federation of Labor (AFL), to organize unskilled workers. After the AFL rejected his proposal, Lewis formed the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1935. Roosevelt pronounced a "plague on both your houses," but labor's disunity weakened the party in the elections from 1938 through 1946.  Roosevelt won large majorities of the union votes, even in 1940 when Lewis took an isolationist position on Europe, as demanded by far-left union elements. The durable connections established during the 1930s helped ensure organized labor's rejection of both socialism and communism, and labor become an important component of the Democratic Party.
caption: 1936 re-election handbill for Roosevelt promoting his economic policy.
exif: {"Image ImageWidth": "1701", "Image ImageLength": "2338", "Image BitsPerSample": "[8, 8, 8]", "Image PhotometricInterpretation": "2", "Image Make": "Canon", "Image Model": "CanoScan LiDE 25", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image SamplesPerPixel": "3", "Image XResolution": "200", "Image YResolution": "200", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS5 Macintosh", "Image DateTime": "2013:07:21 13:53:11", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Centered", "Image ExifOffset": "292", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "522", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "8004", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0221", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2013:07:21 13:46:46", "EXIF ComponentsConfiguration": "YCbCr", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "1433", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "2261", "EXIF FileSource": "Reflection Print Scanner", "EXIF WhiteBalance": "Auto"}