What was President Harry Truman's Fair Deal?

During his State of the Union address in January 1949, President Harry S. Truman unveiled plans for a legislative agenda that he termed the Fair Deal that would build upon the New Deal plans developed by his predecessor Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The primary goals of Truman's Fair Deal was to increase employment to capacity, provide assistance to farmers and extend Social Security. Let's see, who do you suppose would be against full employment, helping people who provide sustenance, and taking care of those people that the government feels free to call upon to lay down their lives in the service of?

If you said Republicans, you are only half right. Those southern Democrats who would bolt their party to briefly take on the single most stupid name for a political party ever, Dixiecrats, before finally switching over to become Republicans joined in with the members of the Grand Ole Party to place obstructions in the path of continuing the better policies of the New Deal. In addition to those policies listed above, Truman's Fair Deal policies also sought to enact legislation that would put an end to the often brutal discriminatory practices throughout America, but especially in the South. You might also be interested to know that thanks to the coalition of Republicans and southern Democrats,

America has been under the thumb of the medical-insurance-industrial complex for at least sixty years more than it had to have been. Part of the Fair Deal of Harry Truman (who otherwise was an absolutely horrific President) would have been a move toward universal health care coverage. Just think, if it hadn't been for the fact that so many politicians were in the pockets of the lobbyists for the doctors and insurance companies back then, tens of millions of people would have lived because they would have been able to afford health insurance.

A few tenets of the Fair Deal did manage to worm their way into existence despite the worst intentions of Republicans and southern Republicans-to-be. Just as today, the conservatives who are controlled like Howdy Doody by their puppet masters that run big business sounded like Chicken Little in their dire predictions that raising the minimum wage would send the economy into a tailspin. Raising the minimum wage did not send the American economy plummeting into a tailspin like David Schwimmer's career since Friends went off the air in 1948; raising the minimum wage has never adversely affected American's economy and it never will. On that score the Fair Deal of Truman managed to score a rare victory. In addition, the Fair Deal did manage to extend Social Security benefits to over ten million more recipients and the Housing Act of 1949 provided for the construction of over 800,000 low-cost homes.

The concerted effort by the conservative contingent in Congress might well have been enough to bring the Fair Deal to a thudding halt by itself. Combined with the fact that Truman's attention was essentially brought up short by the idiocy of Gen. Douglas MacArthur and the second of America's unnecessary wars, the one in Korea, and any attempt to actually make America better was once undone by the military-industrial complex that thrives on the idea of slowly destroying everything that America was supposed to stand for.

Sources:
http://countrystudies.us/united-states/history-115.htm
http://us.history.wisc.edu/hist102/lectures/lecture22.html