Bertrand Snell - Later Career

Later Career

With Hoover's defeat and the advent of the New Deal, Snell spent the rest of his days in Congress fighting the liberal programs of Franklin D. Roosevelt. His initial reaction to the New Deal was one of cautious but critical cooperation. Snell, in the midst of the economic crisis, supported some early measures of the New Deal, such as the 1933 Emergency Banking Act and the 1933 Economy Act, but he came out in cautious, conservative opposition to most of the president's program. He opposed the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the Elmer Thomas amendment favoring inflation, the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act, and other early New Deal measures.

During the Court-packing battle of 1937, Snell agreed with Senate GOP leaders to allow the now mammoth Democratic majority to fight amongst themselves, which they did, sinking the plan. The so-called Roosevelt recession of 1937 also encouraged Snell and other conservatives to step up their resistance to the New Deal. In late 1937 Snell introduced legislation for a tax cut. During the special session of Congress in the same year, Republicans and southern Democrats combined to recommit Roosevelt's Fair Labor Standards Bill, although it was enacted in the next session. In 1938 Snell and the GOP minority successfully opposed Roosevelt's original executive branch reorganization plan. The midterm elections that year were a triumph for the GOP, narrowing the partisan gap in Congress. However, because of declining eyesight and hearing and his belief that the Republicans would not retake the House in the near future, Snell decided to retire. After his retirement in 1939, he became publisher of the Potsdam Courier-Freedom, which he had bought five years earlier, and in 1941 became owner and manager of the New York State Oil Company, of Kansas. After his death in Potsdam, New York, in 1958, he was interred in Bayside Cemetery.