The Great Depression

The Great Depression was a global phenomenon, unlike previous economic downturns which generally
were confined to a handful of nations or specific regions. Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, and North and
South America all suffered from the economic collapse. International trade fell 30 percent as nations tried
to protect their industries by raising tariffs on imported goods. "Beggar-thy-neighbor" trade policies were
a major reason why the Depression persisted as long as it did. By 1932, an estimated 30 million people
were unemployed around the world.

Also, in contrast to the relatively brief economic "panics" of the past, the Great Depression dragged on
with no end in sight. As the depression deepened, it had far-reaching political consequences. One
response to the depression was military dictatorship--a response that could be found in Argentina and in
many countries in Central America. Western industrialized countries cut back sharply on the purchase of
raw materials and other commodities. The price of coffee, cotton, rubber, tin, and other commodities
dropped 40 percent. The collapse in raw material and agricultural commodity prices led to social unrest,
resulting in the rise of military dictatorships that promised to maintain order.

A second response to the Depression was fascism and militarism--a response found in Germany, Italy,
and Japan. In Germany, Adolph Hitler and his Nazi Party promised to restore the country's economy and
to rebuild its military. After becoming chancellor in 1932, Hitler outlawed labor unions, restructured
German industry into a series of cartels, and after 1935, instituted a massive program of military
rearmament that ended high unemployment. In Italy, fascism arose even before the Depression's onset
under the leadership of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. In Japan, militarists seized control of the
government during the 1930s. In an effort to relieve the Depression, Japanese military officers conquered
Manchuria, a region rich in raw materials, and coastal China in 1937.

A third response to the Depression was totalitarian communism. In the Soviet Union, the Great
Depression helped solidify Joseph Stalin's grip on power. In 1928, Stalin instituted a planned economy.
His First Five Year Plan called for rapid industrialization and "collectivization" of small peasant farms
under government control. To crush opposition to his program, which required peasant farmers to give
their products to the government at low prices, Stalin exiled millions of peasant to labor camps in Siberia
and instituted a program of terror called the Great Purge. Historians estimate that as many as 20 million
Soviets died during the 1930s as a result of famine and deliberate killings.

A final response to the Depression was welfare capitalism, which could be found in countries including
Canada, Great Britain, and France. Under welfare capitalism, government assumed ultimate responsibility
for promoting a reasonably fair distribution of wealth and power and for providing security against the
risks of bankruptcy, unemployment, and destitution.

Compared to other industrialized countries, the economic decline brought on by the Depression was
steeper and more protracted in the United States. The unemployment rate rose higher and remained higher
longer than in any other western society. European countries significantly reduced unemployment by

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1936. However, the American jobless rate still exceeded 17 percent as late as 1939, when World War II
began in Europe. It did not drop below 14 percent until 1941.

The Great Depression transformed the American political and economic landscape. It produced a major
political realignment, creating a coalition of big city ethnics, African Americans and Southern Democrats
committed, to varying degrees, to interventionist government. The Depression strengthened the federal
presence in American life, producing such innovations as national old age pensions, unemployment
compensation, aid to dependent children, public housing, federally subsidized school lunches, insured
bank deposits, the minimum wage, and stock market regulation. It fundamentally altered labor relations,
producing a revived labor movement and a national labor policy protective of collective bargaining. It
transformed the farm economy by introducing federal price supports and rural electrification. Above all,
the Great Depression produced a fundamental transformation in public attitudes. It led Americans to view
the federal government as the ultimate protector of public well-being.

The Human Toll

After more than half a century, images of the Great Depression remain firmly etched in the American
psyche: breadlines, soup kitchens, tin-can shanties and tar-paper shacks known as "Hoovervilles,"
penniless men and women selling apples on street corners, and gray battalions of Arkies and Okies
packed into Model A Fords heading to California.

The collapse was staggering in its dimensions. Unemployment jumped from less than 3 million in 1929 to
4 million in 1930, to 8 million in 1931, and to 12 1/2 million in 1932. In that year, a quarter of the nation's
families did not have a single employed wage earner. Even those fortunate enough to have jobs suffered
drastic pay cuts and reductions in working hours. Only one company in ten failed to cut pay, and in 1932,
three-quarters of all workers were on part-time schedules, averaging just 60 percent of the normal work
week.

The economic collapse was terrifying in its scope and impact. By 1933, average family income had
tumbled 40 percent, from $2,300 in 1929 to just $1,500 four years later. In the Pennsylvania coal fields,
three or four families crowded together in one-room shacks and lived on wild weeds. In Arkansas,
families were found inhabiting caves. In Oakland, California, whole families lived in sewer pipes.

Vagrancy shot up as many families were evicted from their homes for nonpayment of rent. The Southern
Pacific Railroad boasted that it threw 683,000 vagrants off its trains in 1931. Free public flophouses and
missions in Los Angeles provided beds for 200,000 of the uprooted.

To save money, families neglected medical and dental care. Many families sought to cope by planting
gardens, canning food, buying used bread, and using cardboard and cotton for shoe soles. Despite a steep
decline in food prices, many families did without milk or meat. In New York City, milk consumption
declined by a million gallons a day.

President Herbert Hoover declared, "Nobody is actually starving. The hoboes are better fed than they
have ever been." But in New York City in 1931, there were 20 known cases of starvation; in 1934, there
were 110 deaths caused by hunger. There were so many accounts of people starving in New York that the
West African nation of Cameroon sent $3.77 in relief.

The Depression had a powerful impact on families. It forced couples to delay marriage and drove the
birthrate below the replacement level for the first time in American history. The divorce rate fell, for the
simple fact that many couples could not afford to maintain separate households or to pay legal fees. Still,

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rates of desertion soared. By 1940, there were 1.5 million married women living apart from their
husbands. More than 200,000 vagrant children wandered the country as a result of the break-up of their
families.

The Depression inflicted a heavy psychological toll on jobless men. With no wages to punctuate their
ability, many men lost power as primary decision makers. Large numbers of men lost self-respect,
became immobilized and stopped looking for work, while others turned to alcohol or became self-
destructive or abusive to their families.

In contrast to men, many women saw their status rise during the Depression. To supplement the family
income, married women entered the work force in large numbers. Although most women worked in
menial occupations, the fact that they were employed and bringing home paychecks elevated their
position within the family and gave them a say in family decisions.

Despite the hardships it inflicted, the Great Depression drew some families closer together. As one
observer noted: "Many a family has lost its automobile and found its soul." Families had to devise
strategies for getting through hard times because their survival depended on it. They pooled their
incomes, moved in with relatives in order to cut expenses, bought day-old bread, and did without. Many
families drew comfort from their religion, sustained by the hope things would turn out well in the end;
others placed their faith in themselves, in their own dogged determination to survive that so impressed
observers like Woody Guthrie. Many Americans, however, no longer believed that the problems could be
solved by people acting alone or through voluntary associations. Increasingly, they looked to the federal
government for help.

The Dispossessed

Economic hardship and loss visited all sections of the country during the Depression. One-third of the
Harvard class of 1911 confessed that they were hard-up, on relief, or dependent on relatives. Doctors and
lawyers saw their incomes fall 40 percent. Though, no groups suffered more from the Depression than
African Americans and Mexican Americans.

A year after the stock market crash, 70 percent of Charleston's black population was unemployed and 75
percent of Memphis's black population was unemployed. In Macon County, Alabama--home of Booker T.
Washington's famous Tuskegee Institute--most black families lived in homes without wooden floors or
windows or sewage disposal and subsisted on salt pork, hominy grits, corn bread, and molasses. Income
averaged less than a dollar a day.

Conditions were also distressed in the North. In Chicago, 70 percent of all black families earned less than
a $1,000 a year, far below the poverty line. In Chicago and other large northern cities, most African
Americans lived in "kitchenettes." Apartment owners took six-room apartments, which previously rented
for $50 a month, and divided them into six smaller-unit kitchenettes. The kitchenettes then rented for $32
dollars a month, assuring landlords a windfall of an extra $142 a month. Buildings that previously held 60
families now contained 300.

The Depression hit Mexican American families especially hard. Mexican Americans faced serious
opposition from organized labor, which resented competition from Mexican workers as unemployment
rose. Bowing to union pressure, federal, state and local authorities "repatriated" more than 400,000 people
of Mexican descent to prevent them from applying for relief. Since this group included many United
States citizens, the deportations constituted a gross violation of civil liberties.

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Private and Public Charity

The economic crisis of the 1930s overwhelmed private charities and local governments. In South Texas,
the Salvation Army provided a penny per person each day. In Philadelphia, private and public charities
distributed $1 million a month in poor relief. This amount, however, provided families with only $1.50 a
week for groceries. In 1932, total public and private relief expenditures amounted to $317 million--$26
for each of the nation's 12 1/2 million jobless.

Franklin Roosevelt and The Election of 1932

In June 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt received the Democratic presidential nomination. At first glance, he
did not look like a man who could relate to other peoples' suffering--Roosevelt had spent his entire life in
the lap of luxury. No fewer than 16 of his ancestors had come over on the Mayflower. A fifth cousin of
Teddy Roosevelt, he was born in 1882 to one of New York's wealthiest families. Roosevelt enjoyed a
privileged youth. He attended Groton, an exclusive private school, and then went to Harvard University
and Columbia Law School. After three years in the New York state senate, Roosevelt was tapped by
President Wilson to serve as assistant secretary of the Navy in 1913. His status as the rising star of the
Democratic Party was confirmed when James Cox chose Roosevelt as his running mate in the presidential
election of 1920.

Handsome and outgoing, Roosevelt seemed to have a bright political future. Then disaster struck. In
1921, he was stricken with polio. The disease left him paralyzed from the waist down and confined to a
wheelchair for the rest of his life. Instead of retiring, however, Roosevelt labored diligently to return to
public life. "If you had spent two years in bed trying to wiggle your toe," he later declared, "after that
anything would seem easy."

Buoyed by an exuberant optimism and devoted political allies, Roosevelt won the governorship of New
York in 1928--one of the few Democrats to survive the Republican landslide. Surrounding himself with
able advisors, Roosevelt labored to convert New York into a laboratory for reform, involving
conservation, old-age pensions, public works projects, and unemployment insurance.

In his acceptance speech before the Democratic convention in Chicago, Roosevelt promised "a New Deal
for the American people." Although his speech contained few concrete proposals, Roosevelt radiated
confidence, giving many desperate voters hope. He even managed during the campaign to turn his lack of
a blueprint into an asset, offering instead a policy of experimentation. "It is common sense to take a
method and try it," he declared, "if it fails, admit it frankly and try another."

The Bonus Army

The Bonus Army incident that took place in the summer of 1932 virtually assured Roosevelt's election.
By then, the unemployment rate had reached 23.6 percent. Over 12 million were jobless (out of a labor
force of 51 million).

Some 20,000 World War I veterans and their families marched on Washington. Their purpose was to
pressure Congress into voting for immediate payment of a veteran’s bonus earmarked for 1945. The
proposal was to pay veterans $1 for each day served in the United States and $1.25 for every day
overseas. The Democratic-controlled House approved the measure, but the Republican Senate refused.
Meanwhile, thousands of veterans jammed the Capitol grounds.

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On June 7, as 100,000 watched, some 8,000 veterans marched down Pennsylvania Avenue. By mid-July,
the White House was "guarded from veterans" by "the greatest massing of policemen seen in Washington
since the race riot after the World War."

District of Columbia officials, under White House pressure, ordered the Bonus Army's camps evacuated.
A skirmish turned into a riot; two police officers and two veterans were killed. President Hoover called on
the Army to "put an end to rioting and defiance of authority."

The Third Cavalry advanced on the veterans, followed by infantry with fixed bayonets, a machine gun
detachment, troops with tear gas canisters, and six midget tanks. The camps were burned. The flames and
smoke from the torched shack burned near the Capitol dome. Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur claimed
the "mob" had been "animated by the essence of revolution."

Although Hoover was appalled by what happened, he publicly accepted the responsibility and endorsed
MacArthur's charge that the bonus marchers included dangerous radicals who wanted to overthrow the
government. Most Americans felt outraged by the government's harsh treatment of the Bonus Army, and
Hoover encountered resentment everywhere he campaigned.

Upon learning of the Bonus Army incident, Franklin D. Roosevelt remarked: "Well, this will elect me."
Roosevelt was correct; he buried Hoover in November, winning 22,809,638 votes to Hoover's 15,758,901
votes, and 472 to 59 electoral votes. In addition, the Democrats won commanding majorities in both
houses of Congress.

The First 100 Days

The nation's plight on March 4, 1933, the day Franklin Roosevelt assumed the presidency, was desperate.
A quarter of the nation's workforce was jobless. A quarter million families had defaulted on their
mortgages the previous year. During the winter of 1932 and 1933, some 1.2 million Americans were
homeless. Scores of shantytowns (called Hoovervilles) sprouted up.

Since 1929, about 9,000 banks, holding the savings of 27 million families, had failed. Of those bank
failings, 1,456 folded in 1932 alone. Farm foreclosures were averaging 20,000 a month. The public was
desperate for action. Hamilton Fish, a conservative Republican congressman, promised the president that
Congress would "give you any power that you need."

A month before taking office, Giuseppe Zangara, a mentally ill bricklayer, tried to assassinate the
president-elect in Miami. Chicago's mayor was killed, but Roosevelt miraculously escaped injury. In his
inaugural address, Roosevelt expressed confidence that his administration could end the Depression. "The
only thing we have to fear," he declared, "is fear itself."

In Roosevelt’s first hundred days in office, he pushed 15 major bills through Congress. The bills would
reshape every aspect of the economy, from banking and industry to agriculture and social welfare. The
president promised decisive action. He called Congress into special session and demanded "broad
executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given me if we
were in fact invaded by a foreign foe."

Roosevelt attacked the bank crisis first. He declared a national bank holiday, which closed all banks. In
just four days, his aides drafted the Emergency Banking Relief Act, which permitted solvent banks to
reopen under government supervision, and allowed the RFC to buy the stock of troubled banks and to
keep them open until they could be reorganized. The law also gave the president broad powers over the

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Federal Reserve System. The law radically reshaped the nation's banking system; Congress passed the
law in just eight hours.

Roosevelt appealed directly to the people to generate support for his program. On March 12, he conducted
the first of many radio "fireside chats." Using the radio in the way later presidents exploited television, he
explained what he had done in plain, simple terms and told the public to have "confidence and courage."
When the banks reopened the following day, people demonstrated their faith by making more deposits
than withdrawals. One of Roosevelt's key advisors did not exaggerate when he later boasted, "Capitalism
was saved in eight days."

The president quickly pushed ahead on other fronts. The Federal Emergency Relief Act pumped $500
million into state-run welfare programs. The Homeowners Loan Act provided the first federal mortgage
financing and loan guarantees. By the end of Roosevelt's first term, the Homeowners Loan Act provided
more than 1 million loans totaling $3 billion. The Glass-Steagall Act provided a federal guarantee of all
bank deposits under $5,000, separated commercial and investment banking, and strengthened the Federal
Reserve's ability to stabilize the economy.

In addition, Roosevelt took the nation off the gold standard, devalued the dollar, and ordered the Federal
Reserve System to ease credit. Other important laws passed during the 100 days included the Agricultural
Adjustment Act--the nation's first system of agricultural price and production supports; the National
Industrial Recovery Act--the first major attempt to plan and regulate the economy; and the Tennessee
Valley Authority Act--the first direct government involvement in energy production.

The New Dealers

Franklin Roosevelt brought a new breed of government officials to Washington. Previously, most
government administrators were wealthy patricians, businessmen, or political loyalists. Roosevelt,
however, looked to new sources of talent, bringing to Washington a team of Ivy League intellectuals and
New York State social workers. Known as the "brain trust," these advisors provided Roosevelt with
economic ideas and oratorical ammunition.

The New Dealers were strongly influenced by the Progressive reformers of the early 20th century, who
believed that government had not only a right but a duty to intervene in all aspects of economic life in
order to improve the quality of American life. In one significant respect, however, the New Dealers
differed decisively from the Progressives. Progressive reform had a strong moral dimension; many
reformers wanted to curb drinking, eliminate what they considered immoral sexual behavior, and reshape
human character. In comparison, the New Dealers were much more pragmatic--an attitude vividly
illustrated by an incident that took place during World War I. One of the most intense policy debates
during the war was whether to provide American troops with condoms. The Secretary of the Navy
Josephus Daniels rejected the idea, fearing that it would corrupt the troops' morals:

It is wicked to seem to encourage and approve placing in the hands of the men an appliance
which will lead them to think they may indulge in practices which are not sanctioned by
moral...law.
While Daniels was on vacation, however, Franklin Roosevelt authorized prophylactics for sailors.
Pragmatism, not moral reform, would be a key New Deal theme.

Apart from their commitment to pragmatism, the New Dealers were unified in their rejection of laissez-
faire orthodoxy--the idea that federal government's responsibilities were confined to balancing the federal

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budgets and providing for the nation's defense. The New Dealers did, however, disagree profoundly about
the best way to end the Depression. They offered three alternative prescriptions for rescuing the nation's
economy. The "trust-busters," led by Thurman Arnold, called for vigorous enforcement of anti-trust laws
to break-up concentrated business power. The "associationalists" wanted to encourage cooperation
between business, labor, and government by establishing associations and codes supported by the three
parties. The "economic planners," led by Rexford Tugwell, Adolph Berle, and Gardiner Means, wanted to
create a system of centralized national planning.

Roosevelt never aligned himself with any of these factions. He summed up his pragmatic attitude: "Take a
method and try it," he said, "if it fails admit it frankly and try another. But above all try something."

The Farmer’s Plight

Roosevelt moved aggressively to address the crisis facing the nation's farmers. No group was harder hit
by the Depression than farmers and farm workers. At the start of the Depression, a fifth of all American
families still lived on farms. These families, however, were in deep trouble. Farm income fell by a
staggering two-thirds during the Depression's first three years. A bushel of wheat that sold for $2.94 in
1920 dropped to $1 in 1929 and 30 cents in 1932. In one day, a quarter of Mississippi's farm acreage was
auctioned off to pay for debts.

The farmers' problem, ironically, was that they grew too much. Worldwide crop production soared--a
result of more efficient farm machinery, stronger fertilizers, and improved plant varieties--but demand
fell. People ate less bread, Europeans imposed protective tariffs, and consumers replaced cotton with
rayon. Too much was being grown, and the glut caused prices to fall. In order to meet farm debts in 1932,
farmers needed to grow 2.5 times as much corn as they grew in 1929, 2.7 times as much wheat, and 2.4
times as much cotton.

As farm incomes fell, farm tenancy soared; two-fifths of all farmers worked on land that they did not
own. The Gudgers, a white southern Alabama sharecropping family of six, illustrated the plight of tenants
who were slipping deeper and deeper into debt. Each year, their landlord provided them with 20 acres of
land, seed, an unpainted one-room house, a shed, a mule, fertilizer, and $10 a month. In return, they owed
him half of their corn and cotton crop and 8 percent interest on their debts. In 1934, they were $80 in
debt; by 1935, their debts had risen another $12.

Nature itself seemed to have turned against farmers. In the South, the boll weevil devoured the cotton
crop; on the Great Plains, the top soil literally blew away, piling up in ditches like "snow drifts in winter."
The Dust Bowl produced unparalleled human tragedy, but it had not occurred by accident. The Plains had
always been a harsh, arid inhospitable environment. Nevertheless, a covering of tough grass-roots, called
sod, permitted the land to retain moisture and support vegetation. During the 1890s, however, overgrazing
by cattle severely damaged the sod. Then, during World War I, demand for wheat and the use of gasoline-
powered tractors allowed farmers to plow large sections of the prairie for the first time. The fragile skin
protecting the prairie was destroyed. When drought struck, beginning in 1930, and temperatures soared
(to 108 degrees in Kansas for weeks on end) the wind began to blow the soil away. One Kansas county,
which produced 3.4 million bushels of wheat in 1931, harvested just 89,000 bushels in 1933.

Tenant farmers found themselves evicted from their land. By 1939, a million Dust Bowl refugees and
other tenant farmers left the Plains to work as itinerant produce pickers in California. As a result, whole
counties were depopulated. In one part of Colorado, 2,811 homes were abandoned, while an additional
1,522 people simply disappeared.

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The New Deal attacked farm problems through a variety of programs. Rural electrification programs
meant that for the first time Americans in Appalachia, the Texas Hill Country, and other areas would have
the opportunity to share in the benefits of electricity and running water. As late as 1935, more than 6
million of America's 6.8 million farms had no electricity. Unlike their sisters in the city, farm women had
no washing machines, refrigerators, or vacuum cleaners. Nor did private utility companies intend to
change things. Private companies insisted that it would be cost prohibitive to provide electrical service to
rural areas.

Roosevelt disagreed. Settling on the 40,000 square mile valley of the Tennessee River as his test site,
Roosevelt decided to put the government into the electric business. Two months after he took office,
Congress passed a bill creating the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). The TVA was authorized to build
21 dams to generate electricity for tens of thousands of farm families. In 1935, Roosevelt signed an
executive order creating the Rural Electrification Administration (REA) to bring electricity generated by
government dams to America's hinterland. Between 1935 and 1942, the lights came on for 35 percent of
America's farm families.

Electricity was not the only benefit the New Deal bestowed on farmers. The Soil Conservation Service
helped farmers battle erosion; the Farm Credit Administration provided some relief from farm
foreclosures; and the Commodity Credit Corporation permitted farmers to use stored products as
collateral for loans. Roosevelt's most ambitious farm program, however, was the Agriculture Adjustment
Act (AAA).

The AAA, led by Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace, sought a partnership between the government
and major producers. Together the new allies would raise prices by reducing the supply of farm goods.
Under the AAA, the large producers, acting through farm cooperatives, would agree upon a "domestic
allotment" plan that would assign acreage quotas to each producer. Participation would be voluntary.
Farmers who cut production to comply with the quotas would be paid for land left fallow.

Unfortunately for its backers, the AAA got off to a horrible start. Because the 1933 crops had already
been planted by the time Congress established the AAA, the administration ordered farmers to plow their
crops under. The government paid them over $100 million to plow under 10 million acres of cotton. The
government also purchased and slaughtered 6 million pigs, salvaging only 1 million pounds of meat for
the needy. The public neither understood nor forgave the agency for destroying food while jobless people
went hungry.

Overall, the AAA's record was mixed. It raised farm income, but did little for sharecroppers and tenant
farmers--the groups hardest hit by the agricultural crisis. Farm incomes doubled between 1933 and 1936,
but large farmers reaped most of the benefits. Many large landowners used government payments to
purchase tractors and combines, allowing them to mechanize farm operations, increase crop yields and
reduce the need for sharecroppers and tenants. One Mississippi planter bought 22 tractors with his
payments and, subsequently, evicted 160 tenant families. The New Deal farm policies unintentionally
forced at least 3 million small farmers from the land. For all its inadequacies, however, the AAA
established the precedence for a system of farm price supports, subsidies, and surplus purchases that still
continues more than half a century later.

The National Recovery Administration

Congress established the National Recovery Administration (NRA) to help revive industry and labor
through rational planning. The idea behind the NRA was simple: representatives of business, labor, and
government would establish codes of fair practices that would set prices, production levels, minimum

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wages, and maximum hours within each industry. The NRA also supported workers' right to join labor
unions. The NRA sought to stabilize the economy by ending ruinous competition, overproduction, labor
conflicts, and deflating prices.

Led by General Hugh Johnson, the new agency got off to a promising start. By midsummer 1933, over
500 industries had signed codes covering 22 million workers. In New York City, burlesque show strippers
agreed on a code limiting the number of times that they would undress each day. By the end of the
summer, the nation's ten largest industries had been won over, as well as hundreds of smaller businesses.
All across the land businesses displayed the "Blue Eagle," the insignia of the NRA, in their windows.
Thousands participated in public rallies and spectacular torchlight parades.

The NRA's success was short-lived. Johnson proved to be an overzealous leader who alienated many
businesspeople. Instead of creating a smooth-running corporate state, Johnson presided over a chorus of
endless squabbling. The NRA boards, which were dominated by representatives of big business, drafted
codes that favored their interests over those of small competitors. Moreover, even though they controlled
the new agency from the outset, many leaders of big business resented the NRA for interfering in the
private sector. Many quipped that the NRA stood for "national run-around."

For labor, the NRA was a mixed blessing. On the positive side, the codes abolished child labor and
established the precedent of federal regulation of minimum wages and maximum hours. In addition, the
NRA boosted the labor movement by drawing large numbers of unskilled workers into unions. On the
negative side, however, the NRA codes set wages in most industries well below what labor demanded,
and large occupational groups, such as farm workers, fell outside the codes' coverage.

Jobs Programs

Harry Hopkins, one of Roosevelt's most trusted advisors, asked why the federal government could not
simply hire the unemployed and put them to work. Reluctantly, Roosevelt agreed.

The first major program to attack unemployment through public works was the Public Works
Administration (PWA). It was supposed to serve as a "pump-primer," providing people with money to
spend on industrial products. In six years the PWA spent $6 billion, building such projects as the port in
Brownsville, Texas, the Grand Coulee Dam, and a sewer system in Chicago. Unfortunately, the man who
headed the program, Harold Ickes, was so concerned about potential graft and scandal that the PWA did
not spend sufficient money to significantly reduce unemployment.

One of the New Deal's most famous jobs programs was the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). By mid-
1933, some 300,000 jobless young men between the ages of 18 and 25 were hired to work in the nation's
parks and forests. For $30 a month, CCC workers planted saplings, built fire towers, restocked depleted
streams, and restored historic battlefields. Workers lived in wilderness camps, earning money that they
passed along to their families. By 1942, when the program ended, 2.5 million men had served in
Roosevelt's "Tree Army." Despite its immense popularity, the CCC failed to make a serious dent in
Depression unemployment. It excluded women, imposed rigid quotas on blacks, and offered employment
to only a miniscule number of the young people who needed work.

Far more ambitious was the Civil Works Administration (CWA), established in November 1933. Under
the energetic leadership of Harry Hopkins, the CWA put 2.6 million men to work in its first month.
Within two months it employed 4 million men building 250,000 miles of road, 40,000 schools, 150,000
privies, and 3,700 playgrounds. In March 1934, however, Roosevelt scrapped the CWA because he (like
Hoover) did not want to run a budget deficit or to create a permanent dependent class.

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Roosevelt badly underestimated the severity of the crisis. As government funding slowed down and
economic indicators leveled off, the Depression deepened in 1934. This intense despair triggered a series
of violent strikes, which culminated on Labor Day 1934, when 500,000 garment workers launched the
single largest strike in the nation's history. All across the land, critics attacked Roosevelt for not doing
enough to combat the Depression. These charges did not go unheeded in the White House.

Following the congressional elections of 1934, in which the Democrats won 13 new House seats and 9
new Senate seats, Roosevelt abandoned his hopes for a balanced budget. He decided that bolder action
was required. He had lost faith in government planning and the proposed alliance with business, which
left only one other road to recovery--government spending. Encouraged by the CCC's success, he decided
to create more federal jobs for the unemployed.

In January 1935, Congress created the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Roosevelt's program
employed 3.5 million workers at a "security wage"--twice the level of welfare payments, but well below
union scales. Roosevelt, again, turned to Harry Hopkins to head the new agency. Since the WPA's
purpose was to employ men quickly, Hopkins opted for labor-intensive tasks, creating jobs that were
often makeshift and inefficient. Jeering critics said the WPA stood for "We Piddle Along," but the agency
built many worthwhile projects. In its first five years alone, the WPA constructed or improved 2,500
hospitals, 5,900 schools, 1,000 airport fields (including New York's LaGuardia Airport), and nearly
13,000 playgrounds. By 1941 it had pumped $11 billion into the economy.

The WPA's most unusual feature was its spending on cultural programs. Roughly five percent of the
WPA's spending went to the arts. While folksingers like Woody Guthrie honored the nation in ballads,
other artists were hired to catalog it, photograph it, paint it, record it, and write about it. In
photojournalism, for example, the Farm Security Agency (FSA) employed scores of photographers to
create a pictorial record of America and its people. Under the auspices of the WPA, the Federal Writers
Project sponsored an impressive set of state guides and dispatched an army of folklorists into the
backcountry in search of tall tales. Oral historians collected slave narratives, and musicologists compiled
an amazing collection of folk music. Other WPA programs included the Theatre Project, which produced
a live running commentary on everyday affairs; and the Art Project, which decorated the nation's libraries
and post offices with murals of muscular workmen, bountiful wheat fields, and massive machinery.

Valuable in their own right, the WPA's cultural programs had the added benefit of providing work for
thousands of writers, artists, actors, and other creative people. In addition, these programs established the
precedent of federal support to the arts and humanities, laying the groundwork for future federal programs
to promote the life of the mind in the United States.

In 1939, a Gallup Poll asked Americans what they liked best and what they liked worst about Franklin
Delano Roosevelt's New Deal. The answer to both questions was: “The WPA, the Works Projects
Administration.”

Work crews were criticized for spending days moving leaf piles from one side of the street to the other.
Unions went on strike to protest the program's refusal to pay wages equal to those of the private sector.
President Ronald Reagan, a staunch critic of large-scale government programs, was one of the WPA's
defenders, however. "Some people," he said, "have called it boondoggle and everything else. But having
lived through that era and seen it, no, it was probably one of the social programs that was most practical
in those New Deal days."

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Approximately five percent of its budget was devoted to the arts. WPA alumni include writers Saul
Bellow, John Cheever, Ralph Ellison, and Richard Wright, the artist Jackson Pollack, and actor and
director Orson Welles.

The WPA was not especially efficient. In Washington, D.C., construction costs typically ran three-to-four
times the cost of private work. Although, this was intentional. The WPA avoided cost-saving machinery
in order to hire more workers. At its peak, the WPA spent $2.2 billion a year, or approximately $30
billion annually in current dollars.

Roosevelt’s Critics

By 1935, Roosevelt's programs were provoking strong opposition. Many conservatives regarded his
programs as infringements on the rights of the individual, while a growing number of critics argued that
they did not go far enough. Three figures stepped forward to challenge Roosevelt: Huey Long, a
Louisiana senator; Father Charles Coughlin, a Catholic priest from Detroit; and Francis Townsend, a
retired California physician.

Of the three, Huey Long attracted the widest following. Ambitious, endowed with supernatural energy,
and totally devoid of scruples, Long was a fiery, spellbinding orator in the tradition of southern populism.
As governor and then U.S. senator, he ruled Louisiana with an iron hand, keeping a private army
equipped with sub-machine guns and a "deduct box," where he kept funds deducted from state employees'
salaries. Yet the people of Louisiana loved him because he attacked the big oil companies, increased state
spending on public works, and improved public schools. Although he backed Roosevelt in 1932, Long
quickly abandoned the president and opposed the New Deal as too conservative.

Huey Long was immensely popular, especially among the poor. Part of his appeal lay in his style; he
dressed in vanilla ice cream-white suits and called himself "the Kingfish," after a character in "Amos 'n
Andy." He became a popular legend by playing up his country origins and ridiculing the rich. In one
incident, he issued a "budget" showing how millionaires could economize by living on $10,000 a day.

Early in 1934, Long announced his "Share Our Wealth" program. Vowing to make "every man a king,"
he promised to soak the rich by imposing a stiff tax on inheritances over $5 million and by levying a 100
percent tax on annual incomes over $1 million. The confiscated funds, in turn, would be distributed to the
people, guaranteeing every American family an annual income of no less than $2,000. In Long's words,
the money would be more than enough to buy "a radio, a car, and a home." By February 1935, Long's
followers had organized over 27,000 "Share Our Wealth" clubs. Roosevelt had to take him seriously, for a
Democratic poll revealed that Long could attract three-to-four million voters to an independent
presidential ticket.

Like Long, Father Charles Coughlin was an early supporter who turned sour on the New Deal. For about
16 years, from the mid-1920s until the United States entered World War II, Father Charles Coughlin was
probably the most influential religious figure in the United States. His radio program, "The Golden Hour
of the Shrine of the Little Flower," had a weekly audience of 16 million. His parish in suburban Detroit
had to build a post office to handle his mail.

Coughlin blamed the Depression on greedy bankers and challenged Roosevelt to solve the crisis by
nationalizing banks and inflating the currency. When Roosevelt refused to heed his advice, Coughlin
broke with Roosevelt and in 1934 formed the National Union for Social Justice. The National Union's
weekly newspaper serialized "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," an anti-Semitic forgery.

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Father Coughlin helped to invent a new kind of preaching that made effective use of the microphone and
radio. Coughlin exemplified what historian Richard Hofstadter called the "paranoid style." He believed
that Jews and Communists, in league with bankers and capitalists, were out to get the little man.

Roosevelt's least likely critic was Dr. Francis Townsend, a California public health officer, who found
himself unemployed at the age of 67 with only $100 in savings. Seeing many people in similar or worse
straits, Townsend embraced old-age relief as the key to ending the Depression. In January 1934,
Townsend announced his plan, demanding a $200 monthly pension for every citizen over the age of 60.
In return, recipients had to retire and spend their entire pension every month within the United States.
Younger Americans would inherit the jobs vacated by senior citizens and the economy would be
stimulated by the increased purchasing power of the elderly. Although critics lambasted the Townsend
plan as ludicrous, several million Americans found his plan refreshingly simple.

Social Security

The 1935 Social Security Act, a goal of reformers since the Progressive era, aimed to alleviate the plight
of America's visibly poor--the elderly, dependent children, and the handicapped. A major political victory
for Roosevelt, the Social Security Act was a triumph of social legislation. Financed by the federal
government and the states, the act offered workers age 65 or older monthly stipends based on previous
earnings, and it gave the indigent elderly small relief payments. In addition, it provided assistance to blind
and handicapped Americans and to dependent children who did not have a wage-earning parent. The act
also established the nation's first federally-sponsored system of unemployment insurance. Mandatory
payroll deductions levied equally on employees and employers financed both the retirement system and
the unemployment insurance.

Conservatives argued that the Social Security Act placed the United States on the road to socialism. The
legislation was also profoundly disappointing to reformers, who demanded "cradle to grave" protection as
the birthright of every American. The new system authorized pitifully small payments; its retirement
system left huge groups of workers uncovered, such as migrant workers, civil servants, domestic servants,
merchant seamen, and day laborers; its budget came from a regressive tax scheme that placed a
disproportionate tax burden on the poor; and it failed to provide health insurance.

Despite these criticisms, the Social Security Act introduced a new era in American history. It committed
the government to a social welfare role by providing for elderly, disabled, dependent, and unemployed
Americans. By doing so, the act greatly expanded the public's sense of entitlement and the support people
expected government to give to all citizens.

The Wagner Act

In 1932, George Barnett, a prominent economist and president of the American Economics Association,
forecasted a bleak future for organized labor. "The changes, occupational and technological, which
checked the advance of unionism in the last decade, appear likely to continue in the same direction," he
intoned.

In 1930, only 3.4 million workers belonged to labor unions--down from 5 million in 1920. Union
members were confined to a few industries, such as construction, railroads, and local truck delivery. The
nation's major industries, like autos and steel, remained unorganized.

In 1935, Congress passed the landmark Wagner Act (the National Labor Relations Act), which spurred
labor to historic victories. One such success included a sit-down strike by auto workers in Flint, Michigan

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in 1937. The strike led General Motors to recognize the United Automobile Workers. Union membership
soared from 3.4 million in 1932 to 10 million in 1942 and to 16 million in 1952.

Bitter labor-management warfare erupted as the Depression dragged on. In 1934, some 1.5 million
workers went on strike. Auto and steel workers and longshoremen became involved in violent strikes.
Police shot 67 striking Teamsters in Minneapolis. In August, textile workers staged the largest strike the
country had ever seen--a total of 500,000 workers in 20 states. In Massachusetts alone, 110,000 workers
went on strike, and 60,000 workers in Georgia struck. While some of the strikes aimed at higher wages, a
third demanded union recognition.

Labor unrest forced the federal government to step into labor relations and to forge a compromise
between management and labor. Under the Wagner Act of 1935, the federal government guaranteed the
right of employees to form unions and to bargain collectively. It also set up the National Labor Relations
Board (NLRB), which had the power to prohibit unfair labor practices by employers.

During the mid-1930s, a bitter dispute broke out within labor's ranks. It involved an issue that had been
simmering for half a century: Should labor focus its efforts on unionizing skilled workers; or should labor
unionize all workers in industry, regardless of skill level? The country's major labor federation, the
American Federation of Labor, consisted of craft unions organized by occupation. In late 1935, a group of
union leaders, including John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers, David Dubinsky of the
Amalgamated Clothing Workers, and Sidney Hillman of the International Ladies' Garment Workers,
formed the Committee of Industrial Organization (CIO) to organize unskilled workers in America's mass
production industries. The CIO formed unions in the auto, glass, radio, rubber, and steel industries, and
by the end of 1937, it had more members than the American Federation of Labor (AFL)--3.7 million CIO
members against 3.4 million AFL members.

The 44-day sit-down strike in Flint, Michigan forced General Motors to recognize the United Auto
Workers. A few weeks later, U.S. Steel accepted unionization without a strike, but the "Little Steel"
companies, Bethlehem, Inland, National, Republic, and Youngstown Sheet & Tube, vowed to resist the
steel workers union. In response to the opposition, 75,000 workers walked out and violence flared. In
May 1937, police in South Chicago opened fire on marchers at the Republic mill, killing ten. Soon after,
the strike was routed, but in 1941 the National Labor Relations Board ordered "Little Steel" to recognize
the United Steelworkers of America and to reinstate all workers fired for union activity.

African Americans and the New Deal

Until the New Deal, blacks had shown their traditional loyalty to the party of Abraham Lincoln by voting
overwhelmingly Republican. By the end of Roosevelt's first administration, however, one of the most
dramatic voter shifts in American history had occurred. In 1936, some 75 percent of black voters
supported the Democrats. Blacks turned to Roosevelt, in part, because his spending programs gave them a
measure of relief from the Depression and, in part, because the GOP had done little to repay their earlier
support.

Still, Roosevelt's record on civil rights was modest at best. Instead of using New Deal programs to
promote civil rights, the administration consistently bowed to discrimination. In order to pass major New
Deal legislation, Roosevelt needed the support of southern Democrats. Time and time again, he backed
away from equal rights to avoid antagonizing southern whites; although, his wife, Eleanor, did take a
public stand in support of civil rights.

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Most New Deal programs discriminated against blacks. The NRA, for example, not only offered whites
the first crack at jobs, but authorized separate and lower pay scales for blacks. The Federal Housing
Authority (FHA) refused to guarantee mortgages for blacks who tried to buy in white neighborhoods, and
the CCC maintained segregated camps. Furthermore, the Social Security Act excluded those job
categories blacks traditionally filled.

The story in agriculture was particularly grim. Since 40 percent of all black workers made their living as
sharecroppers and tenant farmers, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) acreage reduction
hit blacks hard. White landlords could make more money by leaving land untilled than by putting land
back into production. As a result, the AAA's policies forced more than 100,000 blacks off the land in
1933 and 1934. Even more galling to black leaders, the president failed to support an anti-lynching bill
and a bill to abolish the poll tax. Roosevelt feared that conservative southern Democrats, who had
seniority in Congress and controlled many committee chairmanships, would block his bills if he tried to
fight them on the race question.

Yet, the New Deal did record a few gains in civil rights. Roosevelt named Mary McLeod Bethune, a
black educator, to the advisory committee of the National Youth Administration (NYA). Thanks to her
efforts, blacks received a fair share of NYA funds. The WPA was colorblind, and blacks in northern cities
benefited from its work relief programs. Harold Ickes, a strong supporter of civil rights who had several
blacks on his staff, poured federal funds into black schools and hospitals in the South. Most blacks
appointed to New Deal posts, however, served in token positions as advisors on black affairs. At best,
they achieved a new visibility in government.

Mexican Americans and the New Deal

In February 1930, in San Antonio, Texas, 5,000 Mexicans and Mexican Americans gathered at the city’s
railroad station to depart the United States for settlement in Mexico. In August, a special train carried
another 2,000 to central Mexico.

Most Americans are familiar with the forced relocation in 1942 of 112,000 Japanese Americans from the
West Coast to internment camps. Far fewer are aware that during the Great Depression, the Federal
Bureau of Immigration (after 1933, the Immigration and Naturalization Service) and local authorities
rounded up Mexican immigrants and naturalized Mexican American citizens and shipped them to Mexico
to reduce relief roles. In a shameful episode, more than 400,000 repatriodos, many of them citizens of the
United States by birth, were sent across the U.S.-Mexico border from Arizona, California, and Texas. The
Mexican-born population in Texas was reduced by a third. Los Angeles also lost a third of its Mexican
population. In Los Angeles, the only Mexican American student at Occidental College sang a painful
farewell song to serenade departing Mexicans.

Even before the stock market crash, there had been intense pressure from the American Federation of
Labor and municipal governments to reduce the number of Mexican immigrants. Opposition from local
chambers of commerce, economic development associations, and state farm bureaus stymied efforts to
impose an immigration quota, however, rigid enforcement of existing laws slowed legal entry. In 1928,
United States consulates in Mexico began to apply with unprecedented rigor the literacy test legislated in
1917.

After President Hoover appointed William N. Doak as secretary of labor in 1930, the Bureau of
Immigration launched intensive raids to identify aliens liable for deportation. The secretary believed that
removal of undocumented aliens would reduce relief expenditures and free jobs for native-born citizens.
Altogether, 82,400 were involuntarily deported by the federal government.

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Federal efforts were accompanied by city and county pressure to repatriate destitute Mexican American
families. In February 1931, Los Angeles police surrounded and raided a downtown park and detained
some 400 adults and children. The threat of unemployment, deportation, and loss of relief payments led
tens of thousands of people to leave the United States.

Still, the New Deal offered Mexican Americans some help. The Farm Security Administration established
camps for migrant farm workers in California, and the CCC and WPA hired unemployed Mexican
Americans on relief jobs. Many, however, did not qualify for relief assistance because they did not meet
residency requirements as migrant workers. Furthermore, agricultural workers were not eligible for
benefits under workers' compensation, Social Security, and the National Labor Relations Act.

Native Americans and the New Deal

The so-called "Indian New Deal" was the only bright spot in the administration's treatment of minorities.
In the late 19th century, American Indian policy had begun to place a growing emphasis on erasing a
distinctive Native American identity. In 1871, Congress ended the practice of treating tribes as sovereign
nations in an attempt to weaken the authority of tribal leaders. An effort was also made to undermine
older systems of tribal justice. Accordingly, Congress created a Court of Indian Offenses in 1882 to
prosecute Indians who violated government laws and rules. Indian schools took Indian children away
from their families and tribes and sought to strip them of their tribal heritage. School children were
required to trim their hair and to speak English and were prohibited from practicing Indian religions.

The 1887 Dawes Act was the culmination of these policies. The act allocated reservation lands to
individual Indians. The purpose of the act was to encourage Indians to become farmers; however, the
plots were too small to support a family or to raise livestock. Government policies reduced Indian-owned
lands from 155 million acres to just 48 million acres in 1934.

When Roosevelt became president in 1933, he appointed a leading reformer, John Collier, as
commissioner of Indian affairs. At Collier's request, Congress created the Indian Emergency
Conservation Program (IECP), a CCC-type project for the reservations which employed more than 85,000
Indians. Collier also made certain that the PWA, WPA, CCC, and NYA hired Native Americans.

Collier had long been an opponent of the 50-year-old government allotment program which partitioned
and distributed tribal lands. In 1934, he persuaded Congress to pass the Indian Reorganization Act. The
act terminated the allotment program of the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887; provided funds for tribes to
purchase new land; offered government recognition of tribal constitutions; and repealed prohibitions on
Native American languages and customs. That same year, federal grants were provided to local school
districts, hospitals, and social welfare agencies to assist Native Americans.

The New Deal in Decline

President Roosevelt was overwhelmingly re-elected in the election of 1936. He carried every state but
Maine and Vermont, easily defeating the Republican candidate Governor Alf Landon of Kansas.
Democrats won an equally lopsided victory in the congressional races: 331 to 89 seats in the House and
76 to 16 seats in the Senate.

In his second inaugural address in early 1937, Franklin Roosevelt promised to press for new social
legislation. "I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished," he told the country. Yet instead
of pursuing new reforms, he allowed his second term to bog-down in political squabbles. He wasted his

15
energies on an ill-conceived battle with the Supreme Court and an abortive effort to purge the Democratic
Party.

Court Packing

On "Black Monday," May 27, 1935, the Supreme Court struck down a basic part of Roosevelt's program
of recovery and reform. A kosher chicken dealer sued the government, charging that the NRA was
unconstitutional. In its famous "dead chicken" decision, Schechter v. the U.S., the court agreed. The case
affirmed that Congress had delegated excessive authority to the president and had improperly involved
the federal government in regulating interstate commerce. Complained Roosevelt, "We have been
relegated to the horse-and-buggy definition of interstate commerce."

In June 1936, the court ruled the Agricultural Adjustment Act--another of the measures enacted during the
first 100 days--unconstitutional. Then six months later, the high court declared a New York state
minimum wage law invalid. Roosevelt was aghast. The court, he feared, had established a "'no-man's
land' where no government, state or federal, can function."

Roosevelt feared that every New Deal reform, such as the prohibition on child labor or regulation of
wages and hours, was at risk. In 1936, his supporters in Congress responded by introducing over a
hundred bills to curb the judiciary's power. After his landslide re-election in 1936, the president proposed
a controversial "court-packing scheme." The plan proposed to reorganize the Supreme Court. Roosevelt
sought to make his opponents on the Supreme Court resign so that he could replace them with justices
more sympathetic to his policies. To accomplish this, he announced a plan to add one new member to the
Supreme Court for every judge who had reached the age of 70 without retiring (six justices were over 70).
To offer a carrot with the stick, Roosevelt also outlined a generous new pension program for retiring
federal judges.

The court-packing scheme was a political disaster. Conservatives and liberals alike denounced Roosevelt
for attacking the separation of powers, and critics accused him of trying to become a dictator. Fortunately,
the Court itself ended the crisis by shifting ground. In two separate cases, the Court upheld the Wagner
Act and approved a Washington state minimum wage law, furnishing proof that it had softened its
opposition to the New Deal.

Yet Roosevelt remained too obsessed with the battle to realize he had won the war. He lobbied for the
court-packing bill for several months, squandering his strength on a struggle that had long since become a
political embarrassment. In the end, the only part of the president's plan to gain congressional approval
was the pension program. Once it passed, Justice Willis Van Devanter, the most obstinate New Deal
opponent on the Court, resigned. By 1941 Roosevelt had named five justices to the Supreme Court. Few
legacies of the president's leadership proved more important. The new "Roosevelt Court" significantly
expanded the government's role in the economy and in civil liberties.

The Depression of 1937

The sweeping Democratic electoral victory in 1936 was followed by a deep economic relapse known as
the "Roosevelt Recession." In just a few months, industrial production fell by 40 percent; unemployment
rose by 4 million; stock prices plunged 48 percent.

Several factors contributed to the "little depression." Reassured by good economic news in 1936,
Roosevelt slashed government spending the following year. The budget cuts knocked the economy into a
tailspin. Roosevelt's virulent attacks on "economic royalists" also undermined business confidence.

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The reform spirit was gone by the end of 1938. A conservative alliance of southern Democrats and
northern Republicans in Congress blocked all efforts to expand the New Deal. In the congressional
elections of 1938, Roosevelt campaigned against five conservative senators who opposed the New Deal.
Nevertheless, all won re-election. Roosevelt's failures showed conservative Democrats that they could
defy the president with impunity.

Popular Culture and the Great Depression

The popular culture of the 1930s was fraught with contradictions. It was, simultaneously, a decade of
traditionalism and of modernist experimentation; of sentimentality and "hard-boiled" toughness; of
longings for a simpler past and fantastic dreams of the future.

It was a decade in which many Americans grew increasingly interested in tradition and folk culture.
Under the leadership of Alan Lomax, the Library of Congress began to collect folk songs. Plus, folk
singers like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger attracted large audiences.

Henry Ford, who had revolutionized the American landscape through the mass production of cars,
devoted his energies and fortune to a new project: Greenfield Village, a collection of historic homes and
artifacts located near Detroit. At the same time, the Rockefeller family restored colonial Williamsburg in
Virginia.

Many prominent intellectuals saw modern society as excessively individualistic and fragmented. In
response, they looked to the past. Eleven leading white southern intellectuals, known as the Southern
Agrarians, issued a manifesto, I'll Take My Stand, urging a return to an agrarian way of life. Another
group of distinguished intellectuals known as the New Humanists, led by Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer
More, extolled classical civilization as a bulwark against modern values. One of the decade's leading
social critics was Lewis Mumford. In volumes like Technics and Civilization (1934), Mumford examined
how the values of a pre-machine culture could be blended into modern capitalist civilization.

And yet, for all the emphasis on tradition, the 1930s was also a decade in which modernism in
architecture and the arts became increasingly pronounced. Martha Graham developed American modern
dance. William Faulkner experimented with "stream-of-consciousness" in novels like As I Lay Dying
(1930). John Dos Passos's avant garde U.S.A. trilogy combined newspaper headlines, capsule biographies,
popular song lyrics, and fiction to document the disintegration of Depression-era society. The architect R.
Buckminster Fuller and the industrial designer Walter Dorwin Teague employed curves and streamlining
to give their projects a modern appearance. Nothing better illustrated the concern with the future than the
1939 New York World's Fair: the self-proclaimed "Fair of the Future" promised to show fairgoers "the
world of tomorrow."

Beset by deep anxieties and insecurities, many Americans in the 1930s hungered for heroes. Popular
culture offered many: superheroes like Superman and Batman, who appeared in the new comic books of
the '30s; tough, hard-boiled detectives in the fiction of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler; and
radio heroes like "The Lone Ranger" or "The Shadow."

The Depression was, in certain respects, a powerful unifying experience. A new phrase, "the American
way of life," entered the American vernacular. Public opinion polls and statistical surveys that gave the
public a better sense of what the "average American" thought, voted, and ate also emerged. The new
photojournalism that appeared in new magazines like Life helped to create a common frame of reference.
Yet regional, ethnic, and class differences occupied an important place in the literature of the 1930s. The
great novels of the decade successfully combined social criticism and rich detail about the facts of

17
American life in specific social settings. In his novels of fictional Yoknapatawpha County, William
Faulkner explored the traditions and history of the South. James T. Farrell's Studs Lonigan trilogy (1932-
1935) analyzed the impact of urban industrial decay on Catholic youth, while Henry Roth's Call It Sleep
(1934) analyzed the assimilation of Jewish youth to American life. John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath
(1939) examined the struggle of a poor Oklahoma farming family migrating to California. Richard
Wright's classic Native Son (1940) analyzed the ways that poverty and prejudice in Chicago drove a
young African American to crime.

Hollywood played a valuable psychological role during the Great Depression. It provided reassurance to a
demoralized nation. Even at the deepest depths of the Depression, 60 to 80 million Americans attended
movies each week.

Movies reflected a despairing public's mood during the Depression's earliest years, as Tommy-gun toting
gangsters, haggard prostitutes, and sleazy backroom politicians and lawyers appeared on the screen.
Screen comedies released in these years expressed an almost anarchistic disdain for traditional institutions
and values. The Marx Brothers spoofed everything from patriotism to universities; W.C. Fields ridiculed
families; and Mae West used sexual innuendo to poke fun at the middle class code of sexual propriety.

A renewed sense of optimism generated by the New Deal combined with industry self-censorship to
produce new kinds of films during the Depression's second half. G-men, detectives, western heroes, and
other defenders of law and order replaced gangsters. Audiences enjoyed Frank Capra comedies and
dramas in which a little man stands up against corruption and restores America to itself. A new comic
genre arose--the screwball comedy. This new variety presented a world where rich heiresses wed
impoverished young men, keeping alive a vision of America as a classless society.

In the face of economic disaster, the fantasy world of the movies sustained a traditional American faith in
individual initiative and in government and upheld a common American identity of transcending social
class.

The Legacy of the New Deal

The New Deal did not end the Depression. Nor did it significantly redistribute income. It did, however,
provide Americans with economic security that they had never known before. The New Deal legacies
include unemployment insurance, old age insurance, and insured bank deposits. The Wagner Act reduced
violence in labor relations. The Securities and Exchange Commission protected stock market investments
of millions of small investors. The Federal Housing Administration and Fannie Mae enabled a majority of
Americans to become homeowners.

The New Deal's greatest legacy was a shift in government philosophy. As a result of the New Deal,
Americans came to believe that the federal government has a responsibility to ensure the health of the
nation's economy and the welfare of its citizens.

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