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How does the stock market work - Oliver Elfenbaum

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Hoover's Response to the Great Depression

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Hoover's Response to the Great Depression

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worksheet

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Why Did Investors Panic in 1929, Leading to the Great Depression?

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Why Did Investors Panic in 1929, Leading to the Great Depression?

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Why did Investors Panic in 1929  from Don't Know Much About History

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What Were the New Deal and the Hundred Days?

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What Were the New Deal and the Hundred Days?

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What were the New Deal and the Hundred Days  from Don't Know Much About History

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FDR and the New Deal Summary and Analysis

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FDR and the New Deal Summary and Analysis

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The Great Depression

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US National Archives

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CSPAN

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Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Inauguration (March 4, 1933)

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Banking Crisis

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GCSE History | Depression and the New Deal - USA 1929-1941

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Jocz Productions

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American Pageant Chapter 33 APUSH Review

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Review of American Pageant (Kennedy) Chapter 33, American History (Brinkley) Chapter 23-24, America's History (Henretta) Chapter 23.

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YWLH 5.2

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Migrant Farm Families Photographs

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Migrant Farm Families
Photos with Original Captions

Dorothea Lange (1895-1965) has been called America's greatest documentary photographer. She is best known for her chronicles of the Great Depression and for her photographs of migratory farm workers. Below are 42 pre-World War II photographs she created for the U.S. Farm Security Administration (FSA) investigating living conditions of farm workers and their families in Western states such as California. Most of the workers had come west to escape the Dust Bowl, the lengthy drought which devastated millions of acres of farmland in Midwestern states such as Oklahoma.

-- Tents as Home Left - Drought refugees from Texas encamped in California near Exeter. Seven in family. Mid - Brawley, Imperial Valley, In Farm Security Administration (FSA) migratory labor camp. Right - In a carrot pullers' camp near Holtville, California.

- Car on siding across tracks from pea packing plant. Twenty-five year old itinerant, originally from Oregon. "On the road eight years, all over the country, every state in the union, back and forth, pick up a job here and there, travelling all the time." Calipatria, Imperial Valley. On the Move -- Left Mid - Calipatria, Imperial Valley. Idle pea pickers discuss prospects for work. California. Right - Family who traveled by freight train. Washington, Toppenish, Yakima Valley.

- Entering Farm Security Administration (FSA) camp for migratory laborers at Indio. Coachella Valley, California. Finding Alternatives -- Left Mid - Heads of families on the Mineral King cooperative farm. Ten families are now established on this 500-acre ranch to be operated as a unit. (Farm Security Administration) Tulare County, California. Right - Family living in tent while building the house around them. Near Klamath Falls, Klamath county, Oregon.

Enduring Life -- Left- Migrant children. Merrill, Klamath County, Oregon. In unit of FSA (Farm Security Administration) mobile camp. Mid - Migrant worker on California highway. Right - Billboard on U.S. Highway 99 in California. National advertising campaign sponsored by National Association of Manufacturers.

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The History Place - Dorothea Lange Photo Gallery: Migrant Farm Families

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Forty-two pre-World War II photographs Dorothea Lange created for the U.S. Farm Security Administration (FSA) investigating living conditions of farm workers and their families.

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It's a bird ... it's a plane ... No -- It's a distraction from the economy!

Here at HowStuffWorks.com, one of our all-time favorite topics is superheroes. That's why I jumped at the chance to blog about it when I ran across this CNN piece, which discusses how the first superheroes were born out of the Great Depression. At the tail end of the Depression (and as war was starting in Europe), Americans created such larger-than-life characters as Superman and Batman.

In Los Angeles, the Skirball Cultural Center is holding a new exhibit of these classic superheroes. Curators of the exhibit say that the characters were a form of escapism for a public who was losing faith in the American Dream.

A similar thing was already happening in America's movies at the time. Throughout the Depression era, Hollywood produced lavish flicks that historians often chalk up to "escapism" to distract from the tough economic times.

To me, calling these superheroes and movies mere escapism seems like an oversimplification. Neither ignored real problems. Superman was a cynical superhero who fought against villains who sometimes exploited the hard financial times, according to this New York Times piece. And 1930s Hollywood musicals pervaded sarcasm and cynicism despite their extravagant backdrops. Sometimes, they even included somber musical numbers that faced political and economic problems head-on.

But they're also more than escapism because they offer hope. Now that we're starting to struggle with the economy again, we are getting a glimpse of the pain that those during the Depression experienced. We are starting to realize how hard it must have been to cling on to even the slightest glimmer of hope. If something as seemingly frivolous as movies and comic books can lend refuge, then they don't seem as silly anymore.

More you might like: Battling Blockbusters: Fighting Against Superman How Kryptonite Works How Recessions Work

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Superman vs. the Recession: Superheroes Battle Our Fears

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It's a bird ... it's a plane ... No -- It's a distraction from the economy! Here at HowStuffWorks.com, one of our all-time favorite topics is superheroes. That's why I jumped at the chance to blog about it when I ran across this CNN piece, which discusses how the first superheroes were born out of the Great Depression.

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The saga of the Bonus Army was born out of the inequality of the Selective Service Act (1917), the failure of the government to provide any meaningful benefits to the veterans of the First World War, and the fear and anxiety produced by the Great Depression.

During WWI, for the first time in America's history, a wartime army went off to fight composed of more than half draftees. Despite the rigorous propaganda efforts of George Creel's Committee on Public Information, only 97,000 men had volunteered for the war three weeks after America's declaration of war against Germany. Although 2 million men ultimately did volunteer, another 2.8 million were drafted. Draftees were organized into 4 categories, one of which exempted draftees who worked in essential defense industries. By the end of the war, these industrial workers had earned about ten times what the category I troops had earned. They had also avoided the physical, mental, and spiritual hardships of combat, and they were better positioned to survive in the nation's shrinking economy. It didn't take returning combat troops long to recognize the inequity of their situation. Meanwhile, Black American troops, bared from combat duty with American units, had fought in the trenches under the French flag. Having experienced a measure of equality and dignity from the French, they too arrived home with a heightened awareness of inequality.

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Soon, American veterans began to argue that they should receive "adjusted compensation" for the wages they had lost while serving overseas, a term carefully chosen to suggest equality. Critics, however, were successful at labeling these veterans as "bonus seekers", suggesting some special treatment above and beyond what they deserved. In 1924, after several years of lobbying, congress finally awarded the WWI veterans "adjusted universal compensation"-a bonus-in the form of government bonds that would collect interest over two decades and be paid out no earlier than 1945. The bill was passed by overriding a veto from President Calvin Coolidge, who remarked, "Patriotism which is bought and paid for is not patriotism." Although the provision that allowed for the bonus to be paid immediately upon the veteran's death earned it the nickname, "the tombstone bonus," the veterans were satisfied.

But then, in 1929, the economy collapsed. President Herbert Hoover's reluctance to recognize the severity of the economic crisis exacerbated the problem. Although the president ultimately did authorize some massive public works projects to put money back into the economy, it was too little, too late. By 1932 veterans, desperate for economic relief, wanted the bonus to be paid immediately. Such a bill was introduced in congress by Congressman Wright Patman of Texas, himself a war veteran. This bill caught the attention of a former sergeant named Walter W. Waters, now unemployed in Portland, Oregon. Waters grew increasingly frustrated as the bill languished, while Washington lobbyists appeared successful at procuring legislation that benefited corporate interests. On March 15, Waters met with other veterans in the Portland area, and urged them to march on Washington, D.C., to lobby for the bonus in person. He had no takers that evening, but after the bill was shelved on May 11, the Portland veterans reconsidered. Soon, about 300 of them began "riding the rails" toward the nation's capital.

As they headed east, the media took an interest in the story. Radio, newspaper, and film crews reported on the veterans favorably. Suddenly, the Bonus Expeditionary Force (a play on the "American Expeditionary Force," under which they had been organized in France) became a movement of hope. Veterans across the country started jumping on freight trains, sometimes with their families, and headed for Washington. They came on buses, old trucks, and even on jitney Fords with up to 20 veterans hanging off the sides of them. Sympathetic railroad men, many of them veterans themselves, refused to turn in these illegal passengers. In town after town, supporters donated food, money and moral support.On May 21, railroad police tried to stop Waters and his men from hopping eastbound freight trains just outside of St. Louis in Illinois. In response, the veterans uncoupled cars and soaped the rails, refusing to let trains depart. Illinois governor Louis L. Emmerson called out the Illinois National Guard, and in Washington, the Army deputy chief of staff, Brig. Gen. George Van Horn Moseley, urged that U.S. Army troops be sent to stop the Bonus Marchers, on grounds that they were delaying the U.S. mail. But his boss, Army chief of staff and WWI veteran Douglas MacArthur vetoed the plan. To resolve the issue, the veterans were escorted onto trucks and transported to the Indiana state line. Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Maryland each sent the veterans by truck on to the next state.

On May 25, 1932, the first veterans arrived. Waters and his men arrived on the 29th. Within a few weeks another 20,000 had joined them. They made camp wherever they could find space-in vacant lots and abandoned buildings. One large "Hooverville" sprang up along the Anacostia River, where veterans and their families erected crude structures from materials scavenged from an old dump at one end of the camp. The camp quickly became a local attraction. Washingtonians brought them much needed supplies, from sleeping bags to vegetables, to cigarettes, and often tossed coins to camp musicians. Soon the camp, named Camp Marks in honor of the police captain in whose precinct they were encamped, came to resemble a small city. There were named streets, a library, a post office, and a barber shop. Classes were set up for the children. They published their own newspaper, and staged vaudeville shows and boxing matches. Camp rules prohibited alcohol, weapons, fighting, and begging. And since the veterans wanted their motives to be unambiguous, communists were not allowed. Dozens of American flags could be seen waving above the shacks and mud. Marine Corps legend and retired Major General Smedley Butler turned out to praise and encourage them. It was the largest Hooverville in the nation.

Police Chief Pelham Glassford, himself a decorated WWI general, sympathized with his fellow vets. He toured the camp almost daily, organized medical care, provided building materials, solicited local merchants for food donations, and even contributed $773 out of his own pocket for provisions. Glassford once drove with Evalyn Walsh McLean, heiress to a Colorado mining fortune and owner of the famed Hope diamond, to an all-night diner where they ordered 1,000 sandwiches, 1,000 packs of cigarettes, and coffee. When McLean learned that the marchers needed a headquarters tent, she had one delivered along with books, radios and cots.

But Chief Glassford also knew that congress was not in a mood to pay bonuses. And Glassford also viewed the camp as symbolic of the vast army of the nation's unemployed. He was wary of events getting out of hand, of creating widespread social disorder across the nation. Despite the camp rules, a few of the veterans apparently did have some Communist sympathies, a not uncommon phenomenon in 1932, since it appeared to many that capitalism had failed. And the press did report on this small communist faction of veterans. Rumors about communist revolutionaries soon spread throughout the city, and deeply affected the highest levels of government. At the Justice Department, J. Edgar Hoover's Bureau of Investigation labored to find evidence that the Bonus Army had communist roots, evidence that never existed.

President Hoover's press secretary, Theodore Joslin, wrote in his diary that "The marchers have rapidly turned from bonus seekers to communists or bums." Government authorities also noted the absence of Jim Crow in this Southern event. They chose to interpret this racial camaraderie between former brothers-in-arms as symptomatic of left-wing radicalism. For several years, as the Great Depression had settled in, the government had been fearful of the possibility of an armed insurrection against Washington. Even before the arrival of the Bonus Army, the army had developed a plan to defend the city with tanks, machine guns, and poison gas.

Within days of his arrival, Walter Waters had a full-blown lobbying operation under way. On June 4, the B.E.F. marched in full force down the streets of Washington. Veterans filled their representative's waiting rooms, while others gathered outside the Capitol building. On June 14, the bonus bill, opposed by Republicans loyal to President Hoover, came to the floor. When Congressman Edward E. Eslick (D-TN) was speaking in support of the bill, he suddenly fell dead from of a heart attack. Thousands of Bonus Army veterans marched in his funeral procession, while congress adjourned out of respect. The following day, June 15, the House of Representatives passed the bonus bill by a vote of 211 to 176.

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On the 17th, about 8,000 veterans gathered at the Capitol, feeling confident that the Senate would pass the bill. Another 10,000 were stranded behind the Anacostia drawbridge, which police had raised to keep them out of the city. Debate continued into the evening. Finally, around 9:30, Senate aides summoned Waters inside. He returned moments later to break the news to the crowd: the bill had been defeated. For a moment it looked as if the veterans would attack the Capitol. Instead, at the suggestion of a reporter, Waters asked the veterans to sing "America". When the song was over, they slowly filed back to camp.

In the days that followed, many bonus marchers went home. But Waters and 20,000 others declared their intention "to stay here until 1945 if necessary to get our bonus." They continued to demonstrate. On July 13, 1932, Police Chief Glassford addressed a rally on the Capitol grounds. He asked the veterans to raise their hands if they had served in France and were 100 percent American. As the weeks passed, conditions at the camp worsened. Evalyn Walsh McLean contacted Vice President Charles Curtis, who had attended dinner parties at her mansion. "Unless something is done for these men, there is bound to be a lot of trouble," she told him. McLean's efforts backfired. Vice President Curtis became paranoid when he saw veterans near his Capitol Hill office on the anniversary of the day the mobs stormed France's Bastille. President Hoover, Army Chief of Staff MacArthur, and Secretary of War Patrick J. Hurley, increasingly feared that the Bonus Army would turn violent and trigger uprisings in Washington and elsewhere. Hoover was especially troubled by the veterans who occupied abandoned buildings downtown.

On July 28, on President Hoover's orders, Police Chief Glassford arrived with 100 policemen to evict them. Waters informed Glassford that the men had voted to remain. Just after noon, a small contingent of vets confronted a phalanx of policemen near the armory, resulting in a quick, but violent skirmish. Veterans threw bricks while policemen used their nightsticks. Shortly after 1:45 p.m. another fight broke out in a building adjacent to the armory. Shots rang out. When it ended, one veteran lay dead, another mortally wounded. Three policemen were injured.

At this point, Army Chief of Staff General MacArthur had had enough. He decided to put their practiced plan into action, and assumed personal command. For the first time in the nation's history, tanks rolled through the streets of the capital. MacArthur ordered his men to clear the estimated 8,000 veterans from the downtown area, and spectators who had been drawn to the scene by radio reports. Fred Blacher was 16 years old and standing on a corner waiting for a trolley. "By God, all of a sudden I see these cavalrymen come up the avenue and then swinging down to The Mall. I thought it was a parade," Blacher later said. "I asked a gentleman standing there, I said, do you know what's going on? What holiday is this? He says, 'It's no parade, bud.' He says, 'the Army is coming in to wipe out all these bonus people down here.'"Nearly 200 mounted cavalry, sabers drawn and pennants flying, rode out of the Ellipse, led by Major George S. Patton. They were followed by five tanks and about 300 helmeted infantrymen, armed with loaded rifles with fixed bayonets. The cavalry drove them all off the streets-pedestrians-curious onlookers, government workers and Bonus Army vets, including their wives and children. Soldiers with gas masks released hundreds of tear gas grenades at the crowd, setting off dozens of fires among the veterans' shelter erected near the armory.

Naaman Seigle, 7 years old that day, happened to go downtown to a hardware store with his father. As they emerged from the shop, they saw the tanks and were hit with a dose of tear gas. "I was coughing like hell. So was my father," Seigle recalled.

16-year-old Fred Blancher later said, "These guys got in there and they start waving their sabers, chasing these veterans out, and they start shooting tear gas. There was just so much noise and confusion, hollering and there was smoke and haze. People couldn't breathe."

By evening, the army arrived at Camp Marks. There, General MacArthur gave them twenty minutes to evacuate the women and children. The troops then attacked the camp with tear gas and fixed bayonets. One baby died, allegedly from tear-gas inhalation. They drove off the veterans and set fire to the camp,which quickly burned. The sky turned red in the dusk and the fire could be seen from all over Washington. Thousands of veterans and their families began a slow walk toward the Maryland state line, four miles away, where National Guard trucks waited to drive them to the Pennsylvania border.

Eyewitnesses, including MacArthur's aide Dwight D. Eisenhower (later Supreme Allied Commander of WWII and two-term President of the United States), insisted that Secretary of War Hurley, speaking for the president, had forbade any troops to cross the bridge into Anacostia and that at least two high-ranking officers were dispatched by Hurley to convey these orders to MacArthur. Eisenhower later wrote in his book, At Ease, that MacArthur, "said he was too busy and did not want either himself or his staff bothered by people coming down and pretending to bring orders." Eisenhower put it more bluntly during an interview with the late historian Stephen Ambrose. "I told that dumb son-of-a-bitch he had no business going down there," he said.

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Around 11:00 p.m., MacArthur called a press conference to justify his actions. "Had the President not acted today, had he permitted this thing to go on for twenty-four hours more, he would have been faced with a grave situation which would have caused a real battle," MacArthur told reporters. "Had he let it go on another week, I believe the institutions of our Government would have been severely threatened."

Over the next few days, newspapers and newsreels (shown in movie theaters) showed graphic images of violence perpetrated on once uniformed soldiers (and their families), those who had won the First World War, by uniformed servicemen. In movie theaters across America, the Army was booed and MacArthur jeered. The incident only further weakened President Hoover's chances at re-election, then only three months away. Franklin, D. Roosevelt won easily.

For each of the next four years, veterans returned to Washington, D.C., to push for a bonus. Many of the men were sent to rehabilitation camps in the Florida keys. On September 2, 1935, several hundred of them were killed in a hurricane. The government attempted to suppress the news, but the writer Ernest Hemingway was aboard one of the first rescue boats, and he wrote an angry piece about it. Resistance to the bonus withered. Finally, in 1936, the veterans received their bonus.

Cite This Article

"Hoover & the Depression: The Bonus Army" History on the Net
© 2000-2019, Salem Media.
April 23, 2019 <https://www.historyonthenet.com/hoover-depression-bonus-army>
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Hoover & the Depression: The Bonus Army - History

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The saga of the Bonus Army was born out of the inequality of the Selective Service Act (1917), the failure of the government to provide any meaningful benefits to the veterans of the First World War, and the fear and anxiety produced by the Great Depression.

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Author James Baldwin once wrote, "I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason: I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually."

Criticism - and dissent - are patriotic. In fact, one of the most important strands of the American DNA, is protest. From the Boston Tea Party, to the Republican Tea Party. From Civil Rights marches to Occupy Wall Street. But it's how the government and the institutions of power respond to dissent that is really the test of any democracy.

In 1932, in the midst of the Great Depression, a group of World War I veterans set up an encampment in Washington D.C. and vowed to stay until their voices were heard. It was a remarkable chapter in American history, and a demonstration of the power of citizens to come together for a cause. But, in the end, it didn't turn out so well. On this episode of the Radio Diaries Podcast, March of the Bonus Army.

Thanks to Paul Dickson and Tom Allen, authors of
The Bonus Army: An American Epic. You also heard the voices of the late Fred Blacher, John diJoseph, and Lillie Linebarrier. This story was produced by Samara Freemark and Joe Richman, and edited by Deborah George and Ben Shapiro. The Radio Diaries Podcast is produced by Nellie Gilles and Sarah Kate Kramer. This story features music from the Bonus Army String Band and New Bonus Army.

Radio Diaries is part of Radiotopia from PRX, a collective of the best story-driven podcasts on the planet.

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The March to Washington (1932 Edition) - Radio Diaries

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Author James Baldwin once wrote, "I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason: I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually." Criticism - and dissent - are patriotic. In fact, one of the most important strands of the American DNA, is protest.

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I wrote last month about the idea of a president's "first 100 days" in office and how it all originated with FDR. Although I touched on the comparisons between FDR and Obama, I think this is worth another look considering all the buzz it's been generating lately.

Two news stories from this week have brought the comparisons up again. On Monday, Slate had a piece on Obama's plans to possibly hold a series of short, televised speeches addressing the nation about the state of the economy. Writer John Dickerson draws comparisons between this and FDR's fireside chats and even finds an FDR quote from these chats that exactly reflects Obama's rhetoric about the economy.

The other story has to do with Obama's VP, Joe Biden, who gave a speech at a Democratic National Committee fundraiser on Monday. According to Yahoo, in his speech, Biden echoed the popular comparison between our current economic woes and the Great Depression that FDR faced (a comparison that many, including Jimmy Carter, take issue with).

But Biden took it a step further -- he said that Obama is facing a more difficult first 100 days than even FDR. He explains this saying the economic problems Obama faces today are far more complicated than that which caused the Depression. Despite emphasizing that we are in unchartered waters, Biden also stressed that "This is not about ideology. This is about economic necessity."

Obviously, this new administration is trying to walk fine lines. They don't want to sound too dismal, nor too optimistic. They want to stress that problems we're facing today are both alike and unlike what we've faced in the past. Notice how they want to promote old, New-Deal solutions to today's problems, but on a bigger scale to fix a smaller, more complicated situation. Managing these historical comparisons has become a tricky business.

More presidential and economic stuff: How Barack Obama Works How Joe Biden Works What's the difference between a recession and a depression?

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Obama and FDR: History repeating itself?

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I wrote last month about the idea of a president's "first 100 days" in office and how it all originated with FDR. Although I touched on the comparisons between FDR and Obama, I think this is worth another look considering all the buzz it's been generating lately.

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1930-1945

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Texas 1935

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by Dorthea Lange

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DBQ

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So what did Hoover do? Not enough. It's important to remember that the American government is not just the President. Hoover couldn't always get Congress to do what he wanted but his political ineptitude was not particularly surprising, because the first elected office that he ever held in his life was President of the United States.

Like, let's take the foreign debt issue. Hoover proposed a moratorium on intergovernmental debt payments and he actually got Congress to go along with it, but it wasn't enough, mainly because the central bankers in Europe and America refused to let go of the gold standard, which would have allowed the governments to devalue their currency and pump needed money into their economies.

And when Britain, rather heroically, I might add, did abandon the gold standard in 1931 and stopped payments in gold, the U.S. did not follow suit, which meant that world financial markets froze up even further. Like, this is a little bit complicated but if you and I have always used Cheetos as currency to exchange goods and services, and one day I announce that we can't really do that anymore because it doesn't give us the flexibility that we need to pull ourselves out of this deflationary spiral, if I don't also agree to abandon Cheetos then it's going to be a total disaster, which it was.

And then, even worse, the Fed raised its discount rate, making credit even harder to come by. By the end of 1931, 2294 American banks had failed - double the number that had gone under in 1930. Now, it's easy to criticize poor Herbert Hoover for not doing enough to stop the Great Depression, and he probably didn't do enough, but part of that is down to our knowledge of what happened afterward - the New Deal.

That Franklin Delano Roosevelt at least tried to do something about the Depression makes us forget that when Hoover was president, orthodox political and economic theory counselled in favor of doing nothing. And at least Hoover didn't follow the advice of his Treasury Secretary who, according to Hoover anyway, argued that the solution was to "liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate," which sounds like the worst milkshake ever.

Instead, Hoover believed that the best course of action was to "use the powers of government to cushion the situation", and in a White House meeting, he persuaded a large number of industrialists to agree to maintain wage rates. He also got the Federal Farm Board to support agricultural production and got congressional approval for 140 million dollars in new public works.

Overall, he nearly doubled the federal public works expenditure between 1929 and 1931, it just wasn't nearly enough. Because what Hoover didn't allow was for the federal government to take over the situation completely. He relied primarily on private businesses and state and local governments to stimulate the economy, and that was insufficient. It's not surprising when you consider that in 1929, federal expenditures accounted for 3% of our gross domestic product. Today, it's more like 20%.

So it was just really hard to imagine the federal government doing anything on such a large scale to address a national problem because it had never really done that much before. Hoover also hiked taxes as part of a plan to stabilize the banks by balancing the federal budget, providing confidence for foreign creditors and stopping them from buying American gold. This would support bonds and also keep the federal government out of competition with private borrowers. The Revenue Act of 1932 passed Congress but it didn't do much to stop the Depression. In fact, arguably, it made it worse.

And so, ultimately, this dire situation forced Hoover into a truly radical move. In January 1932, he and Congress created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which was basically a federal bailout program that borrowed money to provide emergency loans to banks, building and loan societies, railroads and agricultural corporations.

The problem was that by 1932, bailing out the banks wasn't enough, and the Great Depression started to take shape. By early 1932, well over 10 million people were out of work - 20% of the labor force. And in big cities the numbers were even worse, especially for people of color. Like in Chicago, 4% of the population was African-American, but they made up more than 16% of the unemployed.

Although Hoover famously claimed that no one starved, which was a little bit "let them eat cake-y", people did search trash cans for food and many Americans were forced to ask for relief. Hoover's response was to try to encourage private charity through the unfortunately acronymed President's Organization on Unemployment Relief, or POUR.

New York City's government relief programs rose from 9 million dollars in 1930 to 58 million in 1932 and private charitable giving did increase from 4.5 million to 21 million and that sounds great until you realize that the total of 79 million dollars that New York City spent on relief in 1932 was less than one month's lost wages for the 800 000 people who were unemployed.

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Nerdfighteria Wiki - The Great Depression: Crash Course US History #33

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So what did Hoover do? Not enough. It's important to remember that the American government is not just the President. Hoover couldn't always get Congress to do what he wanted but his political ineptitude was not particularly surprising, because the first elected office that he ever held in his life was President of the United States.

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Ch 11: The Great Depression and New Deal Flashcards | Quizlet

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Start studying Ch 11: The Great Depression and New Deal. Learn vocabulary, terms and more with flashcards, games and other study tools.

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Hi, I'm John Green, this is Crash Course: U.S. History, and today we're going to get little bit controversial, as we discuss the FDR administration's response to the Great Depression - the New Deal. That's the National Recovery Administration, by the way, not the National Rifle Association or the No Rodents Allowed Club, which I'm a card-carrying member of.

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Printable Version On Thursday, October 24, 1929, an unprecedented wave of sell orders shook the New York Stock Exchange. Stock priced tumbled, falling $2, $5, and even $10 between trades. As prices fell, brokers required investors who had bought stock on margin to put up money to cover their loans. To raise money, many investors dumped stocks for whatever price they could fetch. During the first three hours of trading, stock values plunged by $11 billion.

At noon, a group of prominent bankers met at the offices of J.P. Morgan and Co. to stop the hemorrhaging of stock prices. The bankers' pool agreed to buy stocks well above the market. At 1:30 p.m., they put their plan into action. Within an hour, U.S. Steel was up $15 a share; AT&T up $22; General Electric up $21; Montgomery Ward up $23.

Even though the market recovered its morning losses, public confidence was badly shaken. Rumors spread that eleven stock speculators had killed themselves and that government troops were surrounding the exchange to protect traders from an angry mob. President Hoover sought to reassure the public by declaring that the "fundamental business of the country...is on a sound and prosperous basis."

Prices held steady on Friday, and then slipped on Saturday. Monday, however, brought fresh disaster. Eastman Kodak plunged $41 a share; AT&T plunged $24; New York Central Railroad plunged $22. The worst was yet to come. It occurred on Black Tuesday, October 29, the day the stock market experienced the greatest crash in its history.

As soon as the stock exchange's gong sounded, a mad rush to sell began. Trading volume soared to an unprecedented 16,410,030 shares and the average price of a share fell 12 percent. Stocks were sold for whatever price they would bring. White Sewing Machine had reached a high of $48 a share. One purchaser--reportedly a messenger boy--bought a block of the stock for $1 a share.

The bull market of the late 1920s was over. By 1932, the index of stock prices had fallen from a 1929 high of 210 to a low of 30. Stocks were valued at just 12 percent of what they had been worth in September 1929. Altogether, between September 1929 and June 1932, the nation's stock exchanges lost $179 billion in value.

The great stock market crash of October 1929 brought the economic prosperity of the 1920s to a symbolic end. For the next ten years, the United States was mired in a deep economic depression. By 1933, unemployment had soared to 25 percent, up from just 3.2 percent in 1929. Industrial production declined by 50 percent. In 1929 before the crash, investment in the U.S. economy totaled $16 billion. By 1933, the figure had fallen to $340 million--a decrease of 98 percent.

Copyright 2019 Digital History

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Printable Version On Thursday, October 24, 1929, an unprecedented wave of sell orders shook the New York Stock Exchange. Stock priced tumbled, falling $2, $5, and even $10 between trades. As prices fell, brokers required investors who had bought stock on margin to put up money to cover their loans.

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https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/The-Great-Depression-Hoovers-Volunteerism-Bundle-2859935 Are you looking for the tools to create a complete lesson on President Herbert Hoover's response to the Great Depression? Do you want your students to understand Hoover's philosophy on government and how it drove Hoover's limited response to the crisis? Look no further. This bundle has everything you need!

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How the Great Depression Changed Our Eating Habits

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How the Great Depression Changed Our Eating Habits

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Do people think about food more in times of scarcity than in times of plenty? Married culinary historians Jane Ziegelman and Andy Coe think so. Ziegelman and Coe are the authors of A Square Meal, which examines the impact of the country's decade-long Great Depression on American diets.

Ziegelman tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross that the Depression was one of the "most important food moments" in U.S. history. Coe agrees: "The Great Depression was a time when Americans had food front and foremost in their minds and were worrying about it every day."

Cheap, nutritious and filling food was prioritized - often at the expense of taste. One recipe, which Ziegelman describes as "wrong in every possible way," combined canned corned beef, plain gelatin, canned peas, vinegar and lemon juice.

"One of the really interesting characteristics of these Depression menus is that the ingredients seem to have nothing to say to one another," Ziegelman says. "Whatever [the ingredients] taste like together is not particularly relevant."

Interview Highlights
On an example of a Depression-era dinner
Andy Coe: Now when people eat spaghetti, people know that as in Italy, it has to be al dente, like cooked, let's say, nine minutes or something like that, so it's still a little bit crunchy. But this spaghetti you were supposed to cook for 25 minutes. So already we're starting out with the mushy texture. And then you boiled carrots until they're incredibly soft, and then you make white sauce, which was the sauce which is poured over everything for budget meals during the Great Depression. It's a mixture of milk, flour, salt and either butter or margarine, with maybe a little bit of pepper. So it's like a thick and creamy sauce, and you mix all these ingredients into a tray and bake it, and you have a kind of like thick, mushy, bland casserole. Bland is really the operative word here. It does not have much flavor, and it wasn't really supposed to have much flavor. What it was was a vehicle for nutrition and nutrients, but it wasn't supposed to make you excited about food.
On the enhancement of s chool lunches during the Depression On sample school lunch menus
Jane Ziegelman: The very beginning of the school lunch movement is the turn of the 20th century, and it's launched by progressives who believed that poor kids, if they were going to perform well in school, needed to be well-nourished. So it grows out of that progressive impulse. During the Depression it became apparent that not only poor kids but kids that came from formerly middle-class families suddenly were hungry. These were children that came from families of the new poor, and school was one of the places where they could find nourishment.

During the Depression it became apparent that not only poor kids but kids that came from formerly middle-class families suddenly were hungry.

Ziegelman: This was the New York school lunch service. These were foods that were prepared in one central location and then shipped across the city in heated trucks - so it's a logistically crazy operation - and when your truck arrived, well this is what you would have ... for instance, every Tuesday, [there was] pea soup without milk; Italian spaghetti with onion and tomato sauce; white rolls, buttered. For dessert, chocolate pudding served with milk. You'll notice that milk comes up again and again in these menus, because of the tremendous importance that nutritionists placed on milk.
On experts overlooking the cheap, delicious meals that were popular within immigrant communities at the time
On Friday you would have a lima bean and barley soup; jam or fish sandwich on whole-wheat bread; creamed carrots with peas or creamed cabbage or mashed turnips; vanilla cornstarch pudding and chocolate sauce.

Ziegelman: One of the travesties of the period is that all of those home economists did not look to America's immigrant communities for inspiration. If they had, they would've found a gold mine of highly nutritious, highly economic foods, that also taste fantastic. But for a whole variety of reasons, cultural and culinary, they never took that opportunity. ...
On the belief that spicy food made people nervous
Coe: The food that Italian immigrants ate was certainly cheap and delicious and highly nutritious. I just think of the Italian immigrant women in New York City and wherever else they lived; during the early spring the dandelion greens would start coming up in the parks in the vacant lots. And they would go out and collect dandelion greens, take them home, and saute them in a little olive oil. ... You want vitamins, there's a great source of vitamins! ... They didn't eat much meat because meat was expensive, but they had great pasta dishes, which were very good, filled with flavor and filled with nutrients. It's tragic that we didn't look to their example for foods to eat during the Great Depression, but that wasn't "science," and also that was "un-American."
On why food-relief meals were purposely bland
Ziegelman: Spicy foods were [considered] stimulants. They were classified as stimulants, so they were on that same continuum along with caffeine and alcohol all the way up to cocaine and heroin. And if you started with an olive, you might find yourself one day addicted to opiates. It put you on a very slippery slope - watch out for olives!
On how today's emphasis on fresh food is a modern phenomenon
Coe: One of the things about the people who were overseeing food relief and the home economists, one of their beliefs was that the blandness wasn't bad because "nobody was ever killed by monotony." They were killed by not having enough nutrients, and if it didn't taste good ... They didn't want people to be too excited by the budget foods, because they wanted to force people to get jobs and to earn enough money to buy spices and seasonings. ... When they were handing out relief boxes, they deliberately didn't add such things as mustard and vinegar with the relief boxes, because they didn't want people to become too happy with receiving food relief.

Ziegelman: This infatuation that we have with food that's fresh, just off the farm and crisp and sweet, that didn't really hold much water for Depression-era cooks who were more entranced with modern, frozen foods. That was the miracle food! And canned foods that came in every variety and which, according to the advertisers, were made from better ingredients that were actually fresher than the fresh food that you bought at the grocery store. So things were a little bit turned on their heads. There were people during the Depression who were beginning to recognize that. And you can see toward the end of the 1930s, the beginnings of what we might call the kind of fresh, local and regional food movement.

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Creamed, Canned And Frozen: How The Great Depression Revamped U.S. Diets

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Do people think about food more in times of scarcity than in times of plenty? Married culinary historians Jane Ziegelman and Andy Coe think so. Ziegelman and Coe are the authors of A Square Meal, which examines the impact of the country's decade-long Great Depression on American diets.

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https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/FDR-and-the-New-Deal-Bundle-2861421 Do you need a complete lesson that covers the extraordinary response to the Depression by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt? Are you looking for an engaging, primary source activity that gives your students the opportunity to explore how Roosevelt's programs helped the American people and changed American society forever?

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American Experience link

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The Civilian Conservation Corps | Timeline

The Evolution of the CCC

1881: Early History
The Department of Agriculture creates a separate division of forestry to address management policies of the nation's forests.

President Benjamin Harrison, Courtesy: Bureau of Printing and Engraving

March 3, 1891
The Forest Reserve Act allows President Benjamin Harrison to create 17 forest reserves over the next three years. This is in stark contrast to the government's longstanding push towards privatization of land.

1907
The U.S. Forest Service takes control of the forest reserves, now known as National Forests.

1910
A 19-year old Franklin Delano Roosevelt takes control of his family estate in Hyde Park, NY. To help fix a visible erosion problem he will plant thousands of trees across the property.

March 1, 1911
The Weeks Law allows the Forest Service to purchase land from private owners - primarily on the East Coast - in order to preserve watersheds.

1921
Only 19 states have any kind of state park system. Within the next four years all U.S. states will have park systems in development, but financial strain during the Great Depression will ultimately push most of those plans to the back burner.

1929: Combining Reforestation and Work Relief
New York State Governor Franklin Roosevelt passes a law to aid in county- and state-wide reforestation.

After the decade-long boom of the Roaring 20s, unemployment is roughly 3%. People will continue to have faith in the economy until the Crash of 1929 in October.

1930
New York state legislature approves a plan to purchase abandoned or neglected farmlands for reforestation. In the next year, New York will set up a temporary emergency relief administration that hires unemployed workers to improve forest conditions and create recreational facilities for the public.

1932
The state of California has 1,500 unemployed men working on reforestation and land improvement projects. They live in 25 camps across the state. Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Washington, Virginia and Indiana have similar plans in the works.

July 2, 1932
In his acceptance speech for the Democratic nominee for president, FDR touts a "plan of converting many millions of acres of marginal and unused land into timber land through reforestation."

November 1932
Roosevelt wins the presidential election in a landslide, carrying all but six states.

December 1932
Mississippi submits a plan for the government to buy one million acres in each southern state that would then be reforested and improved by young men between 18 and 30 years old. These men would receive $1 per day to build roads, trails, dams and firebreaks.

People lined up for food, Courtesy: FDR Library

1933
The U.S. is in the throes of the Great Depression. Unemployment will reach up to 25% this year.

March 4
FDR takes the oath of office.

March 9
President Roosevelt calls several department heads together to draw up a bill outlining a conservation work program to involve half a million young men between 18-25 years old.
March 31
President Roosevelt signs the Federal Unemployment Relief Act into law, calling for the program to begin in two weeks. Enrollment is limited to unmarried, unemployed, healthy young men 18-23 years of age (though this will change). Policy dictates that discrimination by race, creed or politics is not allowed.

The program is commonly called the Civilian Conservation Corps, or the CCC.

April 5
Five days after being signed into law, the CCC program has signed up 25,000 men from 16 cities.

April 14
To meet Roosevelt's goal of 250,000 men at work by July 1, the Forest Service and Park Service open enrollment to American Indians, who are typically not required to stay overnight in the camps. Over 80,000 Native Americans will serve in the CCC.

April 17
Camp Roosevelt opens with Henry Rich of Alexandria, VA, as the first enrollee.

April 22
CCC enrollment opens to locally employed men who do not have to meet the marriage and age stipulations.

A few weeks later enrollment will open to WWI veterans. These men, now in their 30's and 40's, will live in special camps where rules are slightly more lenient.
June
The CCC offers evening educational programs to all enrollees, and more than 90% will participate in some way.

Over the nine-year course of the CCC, over 40,000 illiterate men will be taught to read and write.

June 11
Camp commanders are allowed to select a few men to act as camp leaders, working some administrative tasks and overseeing projects. These leaders will receive an extra $15 a month. Commanders can also choose assistant leaders, who would make $6 extra per month.

July
Charlie Lord leads a crew of 25 men to Mount Mansfield in Stowe, VT to cut Bruce Trail. The following winter (February 1934) Mt. Mansfield will hold its first downhill ski race. CCC crews will continue to cut more trails which will eventually become the nucleus of the Stowe ski resort.

July 1
There are 34,000 enrollees working in 172 camps in 35 states across the United States. By September, the number of camps across the country will rise to 1,468.

August 12
President Roosevelt visits CCC camps in Shenandoah Valley to publicize the program's success.

December
The Winooski River Valley in Vermont is home to the largest concentration of CCC personnel, with 5,300 men in four large camps.

January: 1934
Hawaii National Park enrolls men into its first CCC camp. These men are allowed to live either at the camp or at their homes.

Summer
The President and his family visit camps in Glacier and Hawaii National Parks.

The Park Service estimates the value of work in all the State Parks at over $27 million for the first two years of the program alone. By 1935 they would deduce that the CCC had advanced forestry and park development by as much as two decades.

September 10
Robert Collins, an adjunct general in the War Department, sends a memo stating, "In the future, segregation of colored men by company, while not mandatory, will be the general rule and earnest effort will be made to reduce the total number of colored men in white units...."

December 6
CCC camps open in the territory of the U.S. Virgin Islands and include 160 enrollees from St. Croix and St. Thomas who work on forestry projects.

CCC boys at work in Prince George's County, MD, Courtesy: Office of War Information

1935: 1935
This year will see enrollment peak, with 500,000 men located in 2,600 operating camps in all states.

California alone will have over 150 camps.

April 8
The Emergency Relief Appropriation Act extends the CCC through March 1937. Two days later, President Roosevelt doubles the enrollment goal to 600,000 and broadens the age range to 17 - 28 years.

July
After receiving complaints from residents of towns near mixed-race camps, CCC Director Robert Fechner orders "complete segregation of colored and white enrollees."

Camps per state, 1933

September 25
There are 2,635 CCC camps across the U.S. President Roosevelt directs Robert Fechner to begin reducing the number of enrollees by June 1, 1938. His goal is to shrink the size of the CCC in order to make it a permanent organization.

September 27
President Roosevelt orders Robert Fechner to appoint black supervisors at the African American CCC camps. But after meeting resistance from southern congressmen, FDR will rescind the order within a few days.

November 24
A CCC company in Washington State made up of 196 Massachusetts men sends a telegram to Director Fechner protesting a segregation policy that has ordered six of their black camp-mates back to their home state. No definitive record exists of the outcome, but a communication the following day implies the segregation will be enforced.

1936
CCC boys will help flood victims in Maryland, Pennsylvania and Washington, DC this year. They also help tornado victims in Georgia and Alabama, and they assist with flood mitigation and cleanup in Tennessee and Arkansas.

June 5
Virginia's state park system launches with the opening of six CCC-created parks.

July 3
President Roosevelt dedicates Shenandoah National Park, and he suggests his intention for a permanent conservation program.

October 7
Jefferson National Forest in Virginia gains 673 acres with $60,000 of CCC funds.
Over the course of the program, the state of Virginia gained nearly 700,000 acres of new national forest land. Its proximity to Washington, DC and other major metropolitan areas helped the state garner many benefits from the program.

April 1, 1937: The Late 1930s
The CCC program in Alaska is nearly doubled, and about half of the new enrollees are required to be native Alaskans.

April 27, 1937
Reno Stitely, chief of the voucher unit, is arrested for embezzling nearly $85,000 in fake payroll vouchers. Though the fraud is isolated, the case will receive a lot of attention and become quite sensationalized in the press.

June 28, 1937
Extended for three more years, the Emergency Conservation Work, as it has been officially titled since its inception, formally becomes the Civilian Conservation Corps. The President's effort to make it a permanent government agency does not pass, but there is a new provision dedicating 10 hours a week to general education and vocational training.

1938
Thus far, the CCC boys have developed over three million acres for park use in 854 state parks. Visitation to some parks has jumped as high as 500%.

July 1938
With the Great Depression slowly ending, more men now can get better-paying jobs at home. The average number of men per CCC camp is down to 142. This is well below Roosevelt's original goal of 200.

February 8, 1939
A special investigation at Camp Pena Blanca in Arizona concludes that several men from Pennsylvania had joined the CCC in order to get a 'free' ride West. That includes nine men who had been dishonorably discharged for refusing to work - something they did in order to be released from the CCC. Desertion rates will reach almost 20% in 1939, up from 8% in 1933.

June 1, 1939
King George VI of Great Britain tours CCC camps in Virginia.

August 31, 1939
Germany invades Poland. Canada and much of Europe will declare war within a matter of days.

December 31, 1939: The Program Winds Down
Director Robert Fechner dies from complications following a heart attack. His replacement, James McEntee, faces several serious challenges as the CCC's budget has been slashed over the past few years. The improving economy is resulting in fewer recruits and a higher rate of desertion, as young men no longer need the $1 per day.

1940
Gettysburg National Military park becomes the first (of two) all-black camp when the remaining white supervisors are replaced with African Americans.

June 1940
France falls to Germany in WWII. President Roosevelt allows CCC camps on military bases where enrollees build military structures, airfields, obstacle courses, artillery ranges and training fields. The CCC has expanded the educational programs to include engineering, blueprint reading and other defense-related skills.

January 1, 1941
To retain enrollees, the CCC allows them to receive $8 per month in cash with only $15 being sent home. The remaining $7 is placed in a savings account until the enrollee's honorable discharge.

June 14, 1941
At Natural Bridge Camp in Virginia, enrollees at a veteran camp are showing lack of discipline. An agent from the Department of Justice goes undercover as a CCC worker and catches illicit moonshiners selling liquor at the camp.

August 16, 1941
All CCC enrollees now drill in simple military formations. While the government does not issue arms to the civilians, the CCC boys now spend 20 hours a week doing general defense training.

September 1941
With most able young men now enlisting in the Armed Services, the CCC is further reduced to a total of 900 camps. Any camp that cannot maintain a minimum of 165 working men is closed.

December 7, 1941
The U.S. enters WWII after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Later that month, Director McEntee decides to close all camps that do not directly relate to the war effort by May 1942.

January 1, 1942
The number of CCC camps in the U.S. is down to 800.

July 1, 1942
Although the program will never be officially terminated, the House and Senate approve funding to cover the costs of shutting down the remaining CCC camps and divvying up its equipment and resources.

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The Evolution of the CCC | American Experience | PBS

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The Civilian Conservation Corps | Timeline 1881: Early History The Department of Agriculture creates a separate division of forestry to address management policies of the nation's forests. March 3, 1891 The Forest Reserve Act allows President Benjamin Harrison to create 17 forest reserves over the next three years.

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Ch 23 The Great Depression

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Hard times had hit the United States before, but never had an economic crisis lasted so long or inflicted as much harm as the slump that followed the 1929 crash. After nearly a decade of supposed prosperity, the economy crashed to a halt. People suddenly stopped borrowing and buying. Industries built on debt-fueled purchases sold fewer goods. Retailers lowered prices and, when that did not attract enough buyers to turn profits, they laid off workers to lower labor costs. With so many people out of work and without income, shops sold even less, dropped their prices lower still, and then shed still more workers, creating a vicious downward cycle.

Four years after the crash, the Great Depression reached its lowest point: nearly one in four Americans who wanted a job could not find one and, of those who could, more than half had to settle for part-time work. Farmers could not make enough money from their crops to make harvesting worthwhile. Food rotted in the fields of a starving nation.

The needy drew down whatever savings they had, turned to their families, and sought out charities for public assistance. Soon they all were depleted. Unemployed workers and cash-strapped farmers defaulted on their debts, including mortgages. Already over-extended banks, deprived of income, took savings accounts down with them when they closed. Fear-stricken observers went to their own banks and demanded their deposits. Banks that otherwise might have endured the crisis fell prey to panic, and shut down as well.

With so little being bought and sold, and so little lent and spent, with even bankers unable to lay their hands on money, the nation's economy ground nearly to a halt. None of the remedies adopted by the president or the Congress succeeded-not higher tariffs, nor restriction of immigration, nor sticking to sound money, nor expressions of confidence in the resilience of the American people. Whatever good these measures achieved, it was not enough.

In the 1932 presidential election, the incumbent president, Herbert Hoover, a Republican, promised that he would stand firm against those who, he said, would destroy the U.S. Constitution to restore the economy. Chief among these supposedly dangerous experimenters was the Democratic presidential nominee, New York governor Franklin D. Roosevelt, who began his campaign by pledging a New Deal for the American people.

The voters chose Roosevelt in a landslide, inaugurating a rapid and enduring transformation in the U.S. government. Even though the New Deal never achieved as much as its proponents hoped or its opponents feared, it did more than any other peacetime program to change how Americans saw their country.

On Thursday, October 24, 1929, stock market prices suddenly plummeted. Ten billion dollars in investments (roughly equivalent to about $100 billion today) disappeared in a matter of hours. Panicked selling set in, stock values sank to sudden lows, and stunned investors crowded the New York Stock Exchange demanding answers. Leading bankers met privately at the offices of J. P. Morgan and raised millions in personal and institutional contributions to halt the slide. They marched across the street and ceremoniously bought stocks at inflated prices. The market temporarily stabilized but fears spread over the weekend and the following week frightened investors dumped their portfolios to avoid further losses. On October 29, Black Tuesday, the stock market began its long precipitous fall. Stock values evaporated. Shares of U.S. Steel dropped from $262 to $22. General Motors stock fell from $73 a share to $8. Four fifths of J. D. Rockefeller's fortune-the greatest in American history-vanished.

Although the crash stunned the nation, it exposed the deeper, underlying problems with the American economy in the 1920s. The stock market's popularity grew throughout the decade, but only 2.5 percent of Americans had brokerage accounts; the overwhelming majority of Americans had no direct personal stake in Wall Street. The stock market's collapse, no matter how dramatic, did not by itself depress the American economy. Instead, the crash exposed a great number of factors that, when combined with the financial panic, sank the American economy into the greatest of all economic crises. Rising inequality, declining demand, rural collapse, overextended investors, and the bursting of speculative bubbles all conspired to plunge the nation into the Great Depression.

Despite resistance by Progressives, the vast gap between rich and poor accelerated throughout the early twentieth century. In the aggregate, Americans were better off in 1929 than in 1920. Per capita income had risen 10 percent for all Americans, but 75 percent for the nation's wealthiest citizens. The return of conservative politics in the 1920s reinforced federal fiscal policies that exacerbated the divide: low corporate and personal taxes, easy credit, and depressed interest rates overwhelmingly favored wealthy investors who, flush with cash, spent their money on luxury goods and speculative investments in the rapidly rising stock market.

The pro-business policies of the 1920s were designed for an American economy built on the production and consumption of durable goods. Yet by the late 1920s, much of the market was saturated. The boom of automobile manufacturing, the great driver of the American economy in the 1920s, slowed as fewer and fewer Americans with the means to purchase a car had not already done so. More and more, the well-to-do had no need for the new automobiles, radios, and other consumer goods that fueled gross domestic product (GDP) growth in the 1920s. When products failed to sell, inventories piled up, manufacturers scaled back production, and companies fired workers, stripping potential consumers of cash, blunting demand for consumer goods, and replicating the downward economic cycle. The situation was only compounded by increased automation and rising efficiency in American factories. Despite impressive overall growth throughout the 1920s, unemployment hovered around 7 percent throughout the decade, suppressing purchasing power for a great swath of potential consumers.

For American farmers, meanwhile, hard times began long before the markets crashed. In 1920 and 1921, after several years of larger-than-average profits, farm prices in the South and West continued their long decline, plummeting as production climbed and domestic and international demand for cotton, foodstuffs, and other agricultural products stalled. Widespread soil exhaustion on western farms only compounded the problem. Farmers found themselves unable to make payments on loans taken out during the good years, and banks in agricultural areas tightened credit in response. By 1929, farm families were overextended, in no shape to make up for declining consumption, and in a precarious economic position even before the Depression wrecked the global economy.

But beyond structural flaws, speculative bubbles, and destructive protectionism, the final contributing element of the Great Depression was a quintessentially human one: panic. The frantic reaction to the market's fall aggravated the economy's other many failings. More economic policies backfired. The Federal Reserve overcorrected in their response to speculation by raising interest rates and tightening credit. Across the country, banks denied loans and called in debts. Their patrons, afraid that reactionary policies meant further financial trouble, rushed to withdraw money before institutions could close their doors, ensuring their fate. Such bank runs were not uncommon in the 1920s, but in 1930, with the economy worsening and panic from the crash accelerating, 1,352 banks failed. In 1932, nearly 2,300 banks collapsed, taking personal deposits, savings, and credit with them.

The Great Depression was the confluence of many problems, most of which had begun during a time of unprecedented economic growth. Fiscal policies of the Republican "business presidents" undoubtedly widened the gap between rich and poor and fostered a standoff over international trade, but such policies were widely popular and, for much of the decade, widely seen as a source of the decade's explosive growth. With fortunes to be won and standards of living to maintain, few Americans had the foresight or wherewithal to repudiate an age of easy credit, rampant consumerism, and wild speculation. Instead, as the Depression worked its way across the United States, Americans hoped to weather the economic storm as best they could, hoping for some relief from the ever-mounting economic collapse that was strangling so many lives.

When suffering Americans looked to Hoover for help, Hoover could only answer with volunteerism. He asked business leaders to promise to maintain investments and employment and encouraged state and local charities to assist those in need. Hoover established the President's Organization for Unemployment Relief, or POUR, to help organize the efforts of private agencies. While POUR urged charitable giving, charitable relief organizations were overwhelmed by the growing needs of the many multiplying unemployed, underfed, and unhoused Americans. By mid-1932, for instance, a quarter of all of New York's private charities closed: they had simply run out of money. In Atlanta, solvent relief charities could only provide $1.30 per week to needy families. The size and scope of the Depression overpowered the radically insufficient capacity of private volunteer organizations to mediate the crisis.

Although Hoover is sometimes categorized as a "business president" in line with his Republican predecessors, he also embraced a kind of business progressivism, a system of voluntary action called associationalism that assumed Americans could maintain a web of voluntary cooperative organizations dedicated to providing economic assistance and services to those in need. Businesses, the thinking went, would willingly limit harmful practice for the greater economic good. To Hoover, direct government aid would discourage a healthy work ethic while associationalism would encourage the self-control and self-initiative that fueled economic growth. But when the Depression exposed the incapacity of such strategies to produce an economic recovery, Hoover proved insufficiently flexible to recognize the limits of his ideology. "We cannot legislate ourselves out of a world economic depression," he told Congress in 1931.

In 1934 a woman from Humboldt County, California, wrote to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt seeking a job for her husband, a surveyor, who had been out of work for nearly two years. The pair had survived on the meager income she received from working at the county courthouse. "My salary could keep us going," she explained, "but-I am to have a baby." The family needed temporary help, and, she explained, "after that I can go back to work and we can work out our own salvation. But to have this baby come to a home full of worry and despair, with no money for the things it needs, is not fair. It needs and deserves a happy start in life."

As the United States slid ever deeper into the Great Depression, such tragic scenes played out time and time again. Individuals, families, and communities faced the painful, frightening, and often bewildering collapse of the economic institutions on which they depended. The more fortunate were spared the worst effects, and a few even profited from it, but by the end of 1932, the crisis had become so deep and so widespread that most Americans had suffered directly. Markets crashed through no fault of their own. Workers were plunged into poverty because of impersonal forces for which they shared no responsibility.

With rampant unemployment and declining wages, Americans slashed expenses. The fortunate could survive by simply deferring vacations and regular consumer purchases. Middle- and working-class Americans might rely on disappearing credit at neighborhood stores, default on utility bills, or skip meals. Those who could borrowed from relatives or took in boarders in homes or "doubled up" in tenements. But such resources couldn't withstand the unending relentlessness of the economic crisis. As one New York City official explained in 1932,

When the breadwinner is out of a job he usually exhausts his savings if he has any.... He borrows from his friends and from his relatives until they can stand the burden no longer. He gets credit from the corner grocery store and the butcher shop, and the landlord forgoes collecting the rent until interest and taxes have to be paid and something has to be done. All of these resources are finally exhausted over a period of time, and it becomes necessary for these people, who have never before been in want, to go on assistance.

But public assistance and private charities were quickly exhausted by the scope of the crisis. As one Detroit city official put it in 1932,

Many essential public services have been reduced beyond the minimum point absolutely essential to the health and safety of the city.... The salaries of city employees have been twice reduced ... and hundreds of faithful employees ... have been furloughed. Thus has the city borrowed from its own future welfare to keep its unemployed on the barest subsistence levels.... A wage work plan which had supported 11,000 families collapsed last month because the city was unable to find funds to pay these unemployed-men who wished to earn their own support. For the coming year, Detroit can see no possibility of preventing wide-spread hunger and slow starvation through its own unaided resources.

The Great Depression was particularly tough for nonwhite Americans. "The Negro was born in depression," one Black pensioner told interviewer Studs Terkel. "It didn't mean too much to him. The Great American Depression . . . only became official when it hit the white man." Black workers were generally the last hired when businesses expanded production and the first fired when businesses experienced downturns. As a National Urban League study found, "So general is this practice that one is warranted in suspecting that it has been adopted as a method of relieving unemployment of whites without regard to the consequences upon Negroes." In 1932, with the national unemployment average hovering around 25 percent, Black unemployment reached as high as 50 percent, while even Black workers who kept their jobs saw their already low wages cut dramatically.

Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother became one of the most enduring images of the Dust Bowl and the ensuing westward exodus. Lange, a photographer for the Farm Security Administration, captured the image at a migrant farmworker camp in Nipomo, California, in 1936. In the photograph a young mother stares out with a worried, weary expression. She was a migrant, having left her home in Oklahoma to follow the crops to the Golden State. She took part in what many in the mid-1930s were beginning to recognize as a vast migration of families out of the southwestern Plains states. In the image she cradles an infant and supports two older children, who cling to her. Lange's photo encapsulated the nation's struggle. The subject of the photograph seemed used to hard work but down on her luck, and uncertain about what the future might hold.

The Okies, as such westward migrants were disparagingly called by their new neighbors, were the most visible group who were on the move during the Depression, lured by news and rumors of jobs in far-flung regions of the country. Men from all over the country, some abandoning families, hitched rides, hopped freight cars, or otherwise made their way around the country. By 1932, sociologists were estimating that millions of men were on the roads and rails traveling the country. Popular magazines and newspapers were filled with stories of homeless boys and the veterans-turned-migrants of the Bonus Army commandeering boxcars. Popular culture, such as William Wellman's 1933 film, Wild Boys of the Road, and, most famously, John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, published in 1939 and turned into a hit movie a year later, captured the Depression's dislocated populations.

These years witnessed the first significant reversal in the flow of people between rural and urban areas. Thousands of city dwellers fled the jobless cities and moved to the country looking for work. As relief efforts floundered, many state and local officials threw up barriers to migration, making it difficult for newcomers to receive relief or find work. Some state legislatures made it a crime to bring poor migrants into the state and allowed local officials to deport migrants to neighboring states. In the winter of 1935-1936, California, Florida, and Colorado established "border blockades" to block poor migrants from their states and reduce competition with local residents for jobs. A billboard outside Tulsa, Oklahoma, informed potential migrants that there were "NO JOBS in California" and warned them to "KEEP Out."

Sympathy for migrants, however, accelerated late in the Depression with the publication of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. The Joad family's struggles drew attention to the plight of Depression-era migrants and, just a month after the nationwide release of the film version, Congress created the Select Committee to Investigate the Interstate Migration of Destitute Citizens. Starting in 1940, the committee held widely publicized hearings. But it was too late. Within a year of its founding, defense industries were already gearing up in the wake of the outbreak of World War II, and the "problem" of migration suddenly became a lack of migrants needed to fill war industries. Such relief was nowhere to be found in the 1930s.

Americans meanwhile feared foreign workers willing to work for even lower wages. The Saturday Evening Post warned that foreign immigrants, who were "compelled to accept employment on any terms and conditions offered," would exacerbate the economic crisis. On September 8, 1930, the Hoover administration issued a press release on the administration of immigration laws "under existing conditions of unemployment." Hoover instructed consular officers to scrutinize carefully the visa applications of those "likely to become public charges" and suggested that this might include denying visas to most, if not all, alien laborers and artisans. The crisis itself had stifled foreign immigration, but such restrictive and exclusionary actions in the first years of the Depression intensified its effects. The number of European visas issued fell roughly 60 percent while deportations dramatically increased. Between 1930 and 1932, fifty-four thousand people were deported. An additional forty-four thousand deportable aliens left "voluntarily."

Exclusionary measures hit Mexican immigrants particularly hard. The State Department made a concerted effort to reduce immigration from Mexico as early as 1929, and Hoover's executive actions arrived the following year. Officials in the Southwest led a coordinated effort to push out Mexican immigrants. In Los Angeles, the Citizens Committee on Coordination of Unemployment Relief began working closely with federal officials in early 1931 to conduct deportation raids, while the Los Angeles County Department of Charities began a simultaneous drive to repatriate Mexicans and Mexican Americans on relief, negotiating a charity rate with the railroads to return Mexicans "voluntarily" to their mother country. According to the federal census, from 1930 to 1940 the Mexican-born population living in Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas fell from 616,998 to 377,433. Franklin Roosevelt did not indulge anti-immigrant sentiment as willingly as Hoover had. Under the New Deal, the Immigration and Naturalization Service halted some of the Hoover administration's most divisive practices, but with jobs suddenly scarce, hostile attitudes intensified, and official policies less than welcoming, immigration plummeted and deportations rose. Over the course of the Depression, more people left the United States than entered it.

In the summer of 1932, more than fifteen-thousand unemployed veterans and their families converged on Washington, D.C. to petition for a bill authorizing immediate payment of cash bonuses to veterans of World War I that were originally scheduled to be paid out in 1945. Given the economic hardships facing the country, the bonus came to symbolize government relief for the most deserving recipients. The veterans in D.C. erected a tent city across the Potomac River in Anacostia Flats, a "Hooverville" in the spirit of the camps of homeless and unemployed Americans then appearing in American cities. Calling themselves the Bonus Expeditionary Force, or the Bonus Army, they drilled and marched and demonstrated for their bonuses. "While there were billions for bankers, there was nothing for the poor," they complained.

Concerned with what immediate payment would do to the federal budget, Hoover opposed the bill, which was eventually voted down by the Senate. While most of the "Bonus Army" left Washington in defeat, many stayed to press their case. Hoover called the remaining veterans "insurrectionists" and ordered them to leave. When thousands failed to heed the vacation order, General Douglas MacArthur, accompanied by local police, infantry, cavalry, tanks, and a machine gun squadron, stormed the tent city and routed the Bonus Army. Troops chased down men and women, tear-gassed children, and torched the shantytown. Two marchers were shot and killed and a baby was killed by tear gas.

The national media reported on the raid, newsreels showed footage, and Americans recoiled at Hoover's insensitivity toward suffering Americans. His overall unwillingness to address widespread economic problems and his repeated platitudes about returning prosperity condemned his presidency. Hoover of course was not responsible for the Depression, not personally. But neither he nor his advisors conceived of the enormity of the crisis, a crisis his conservative ideology could neither accommodate nor address. Americans had so far found little relief from Washington. But they were still looking for it.

The early years of the Depression were catastrophic. The crisis, far from relenting, deepened each year. Unemployment peaked at 25 percent in 1932. With no end in sight, and with private firms crippled and charities overwhelmed by the crisis, Americans looked to their government as the last barrier against starvation, hopelessness, and perpetual poverty.

On July 1, 1932, Roosevelt, the newly designated presidential nominee of the Democratic Party, delivered the first and one of the most famous on-site acceptance speeches in American presidential history. In it, he said, "I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people." Newspaper editors seized on the phrase "new deal," and it entered the American political lexicon as shorthand for Roosevelt's program to address the Great Depression.

The programs of the First Hundred Days stabilized the American economy and ushered in a robust though imperfect recovery. GDP climbed once more, but even as output increased, unemployment remained stubbornly high. Though the unemployment rate dipped from its high in 1933, when Roosevelt was inaugurated, vast numbers remained out of work. If the economy could not put people back to work, the New Deal would try. The Civil Works Administration (CWA) and, later, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) put unemployed men and women to work on projects designed and proposed by local governments. The Public Works Administration (PWA) provided grants-in-aid to local governments for large infrastructure projects, such as bridges, tunnels, schoolhouses, libraries, and America's first federal public housing projects. Together, they provided not only tangible projects of immense public good but employment for millions. The New Deal was reshaping much of the nation.

Major New Deal programs were designed with the South in mind. FDR hoped that by drastically decreasing the amount of land devoted to cotton, the AAA would arrest its long-plummeting price decline. Farmers plowed up existing crops and left fields fallow, and the market price did rise. But in an agricultural world of landowners and landless farmworkers (such as tenants and sharecroppers), the benefits of the AAA bypassed the southerners who needed them most. The government relied on landowners and local organizations to distribute money fairly to those most affected by production limits, but many owners simply kicked tenants and croppers off their land, kept the subsidy checks for keeping those acres fallow, and reinvested the profits in mechanical farming equipment that further suppressed the demand for labor. Instead of making farming profitable again, the AAA pushed landless southern farmworkers off the land.

But Roosevelt's assault on southern poverty took many forms. Southern industrial practices attracted much attention. The NRA encouraged higher wages and better conditions. It began to suppress the rampant use of child labor in southern mills and, for the first time, provided federal protection for unionized workers all across the country. Those gains were eventually solidified in the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, which set a national minimum wage of $0.25/hour (eventually rising to $0.40/hour). The minimum wage disproportionately affected low-paid southern workers and brought southern wages within the reach of northern wages.

The president's support for unionization further impacted the South. Southern industrialists had proven themselves ardent foes of unionization, particularly in the infamous southern textile mills. In 1934, when workers at textile mills across the southern Piedmont struck over low wages and long hours, owners turned to local and state authorities to quash workers' groups, even as they recruited thousands of strikebreakers from the many displaced farmers swelling industrial centers looking for work. But in 1935 the National Labor Relations Act, also known as the Wagner Act, guaranteed the rights of most workers to unionize and bargain collectively. And so unionized workers, backed by the support of the federal government and determined to enforce the reforms of the New Deal, pushed for higher wages, shorter hours, and better conditions. With growing success, union members came to see Roosevelt as a protector of workers' rights. Or, as one union leader put it, an "agent of God."

Roosevelt initially courted conservative southern Democrats to ensure the legislative success of the New Deal, all but guaranteeing that the racial and economic inequalities of the region remained intact, but by the end of his second term, he had won the support of enough non-southern voters that he felt confident confronting some of the region's most glaring inequalities. Nowhere was this more apparent than in his endorsement of a report, formulated by a group of progressive southern New Dealers, titled "A Report on Economic Conditions in the South." The pamphlet denounced the hardships wrought by the southern economy-in his introductory letter to the report, Roosevelt called the region "the Nation's No. 1 economic problem"-and blasted reactionary southern anti-New Dealers. He suggested that the New Deal could save the South and thereby spur a nationwide recovery. The report was among the first broadsides in Roosevelt's coming reelection campaign that addressed the inequalities that continued to mark southern and national life.

Despite the unprecedented actions taken in his first year in office, Roosevelt's initial relief programs could often be quite conservative. He had usually been careful to work within the bounds of presidential authority and congressional cooperation. And, unlike Europe, where several nations had turned toward state-run economies, and even fascism and socialism, Roosevelt's New Deal demonstrated a clear reluctance to radically tinker with the nation's foundational economic and social structures. Many high-profile critics attacked Roosevelt for not going far enough, and, beginning in 1934, Roosevelt and his advisors were forced to respond.

Senator Huey Long, a flamboyant Democrat from Louisiana, was perhaps the most important "voice of protest." Long's populist rhetoric appealed to those who saw deeply rooted but easily addressed injustice in the nation's economic system. Long proposed a Share Our Wealth program in which the federal government would confiscate the assets of the extremely wealthy and redistribute them to the less well-off through guaranteed minimum incomes. "How many men ever went to a barbecue and would let one man take off the table what's intended for nine-tenths of the people to eat?" he asked. Over twenty-seven thousand Share the Wealth clubs sprang up across the nation as Long traveled the country explaining his program to crowds of impoverished and unemployed Americans. Long envisioned the movement as a stepping-stone to the presidency, but his crusade ended in late 1935 when he was assassinated on the floor of the Louisiana state capitol. Even in death, however, Long convinced Roosevelt to more stridently attack the Depression and American inequality.

But Huey Long was not alone in his critique of Roosevelt. Francis Townsend, a former doctor and public health official from California, promoted a plan for old-age pensions which, he argued, would provide economic security for the elderly (who disproportionately suffered poverty) and encourage recovery by allowing older workers to retire from the workforce. Reverend Charles Coughlin, meanwhile, a priest and radio personality from the suburbs of Detroit, Michigan, gained a following by making vitriolic, anti-Semitic attacks on Roosevelt for cooperating with banks and financiers and proposing a new system of "social justice" through a more state-driven economy instead. Like Long, both Townsend and Coughlin built substantial public followings.

If many Americans urged Roosevelt to go further in addressing the economic crisis, the president faced even greater opposition from conservative politicians and business leaders. By late 1934, complaints increased from business-friendly Republicans about Roosevelt's willingness to regulate industry and use federal spending for public works and employment programs. In the South, Democrats who had originally supported the president grew more hostile toward programs that challenged the region's political, economic, and social status quo. Yet the greatest opposition came from the Supreme Court, filled with conservative appointments made during the long years of Republican presidents.

By early 1935 the Court was reviewing programs of the New Deal. On May 27, a day Roosevelt's supporters called Black Monday, the justices struck down one of the president's signature reforms: in a case revolving around poultry processing, the Court unanimously declared the NRA unconstitutional. In early 1936, the AAA fell.

The New Deal enjoyed broad popularity. Democrats gained seats in the 1934 midterm elections, securing massive majorities in both the House and Senate. Bolstered by these gains, facing reelection in 1936, and confronting rising opposition from both the left and the right, Roosevelt rededicated himself to bold programs and more aggressive approaches, a set of legislation often termed the Second New Deal. It included a nearly five-billion dollar appropriation that in 1935 established the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a permanent version of the CWA, which would ultimately employ millions of Americans on public works projects. It would employ "the maximum number of persons in the shortest time possible," Roosevelt said. Americans employed by the WPA paved more than half-a-million miles of roads, constructed thousands of bridges, built schools and post offices, and even painted murals and recorded oral histories. Not only did the program build much of America's physical infrastructure, it came closer than any New Deal program to providing the federal jobs guarantee Roosevelt had promised in 1932.

Also in 1935, hoping to reconstitute some of the protections afforded workers in the now-defunct NRA, Roosevelt worked with Congress to pass the National Labor Relations Act (known as the Wagner Act for its chief sponsor, New York senator Robert Wagner), offering federal legal protection, for the first time, for workers to organize unions. The labor protections extended by Roosevelt's New Deal were revolutionary. In northern industrial cities, workers responded to worsening conditions by banding together and demanding support for workers' rights. In 1935, the head of the United Mine Workers, John L. Lewis, took the lead in forming a new national workers' organization, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), breaking with the more conservative, craft-oriented AFL. The CIO won a major victory in 1937 when affiliated members in the United Automobile Workers (UAW) struck for recognition and better pay and hours at a General Motors (GM) plant in Flint, Michigan. Launching a "sit-down" strike, the workers remained in the building until management agreed to negotiate. GM recognized the UAW and granted a pay increase. GM's recognition gave the UAW new legitimacy and unionization spread rapidly across the auto industry. Across the country, unions and workers took advantage of the New Deal's protections to organize and win major concessions from employers. Three years after the NLRA, Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act, creating the modern minimum wage.

Black Americans faced discrimination everywhere but suffered especially severe legal inequality in the Jim Crow South. In 1931, for instance, a group of nine young men riding the rails between Chattanooga and Memphis, Tennessee, were pulled from the train near Scottsboro, Alabama, and charged with assaulting two white women. Despite clear evidence that the assault had not occurred, and despite one of the women later recanting, the young men endured a series of sham trials in which all but one were sentenced to death. Only the communist-oriented International Labor Defense (ILD) came to the aid of the "Scottsboro Boys," who soon became a national symbol of continuing racial prejudice in America and a rallying point for civil rights-minded Americans. In appeals, the ILD successfully challenged the boys' sentencing, and the death sentences were either commuted or reversed, although the last of the accused did not receive parole until 1946.

Despite a concerted effort to appoint Black advisors to some New Deal programs, Franklin Roosevelt did little to specifically address the particular difficulties Black communities faced. To do so openly would provoke southern Democrats and put his New Deal coalition--the uneasy alliance of national liberals, urban laborers, farm workers, and southern whites-at risk. Roosevelt not only rejected such proposals as abolishing the poll tax and declaring lynching a federal crime, he refused to specifically target African American needs in any of his larger relief and reform packages. As he explained to the national secretary of the NAACP, "I just can't take that risk."

In fact, many of the programs of the New Deal had made hard times more difficult. When the codes of the NRA set new pay scales, they usually took into account regional differentiation and historical data. In the South, where African Americans had long suffered unequal pay, the new codes simply perpetuated that inequality. The codes also exempted those involved in farm work and domestic labor, the occupations of a majority of southern Black men and women. The AAA was equally problematic as owners displaced Black tenants and sharecroppers, many of whom were forced to return to their farms as low-paid day labor or to migrate to cities looking for wage work.

Perhaps the most notorious failure of the New Deal to aid African Americans came with the passage of the Social Security Act. Southern politicians chafed at the prospect of African Americans benefiting from federally sponsored social welfare, afraid that economic security would allow Black southerners to escape the cycle of poverty that kept them tied to the land as cheap, exploitable farm laborers. The Jackson (Mississippi) Daily News callously warned that "The average Mississippian can't imagine himself chipping in to pay pensions for able-bodied Negroes to sit around in idleness . . . while cotton and corn crops are crying for workers." Roosevelt agreed to remove domestic workers and farm laborers from the provisions of the bill, excluding many African Americans, already laboring under the strictures of legal racial discrimination, from the benefits of an expanding economic safety net.

Women, too, failed to receive the full benefits of New Deal programs. On one hand, Roosevelt included women in key positions within his administration, including the first female cabinet secretary, Frances Perkins, and a prominently placed African American advisor in the National Youth Administration, Mary McLeod Bethune. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt was a key advisor to the president and became a major voice for economic and racial justice. But many New Deal programs were built on the assumption that men would serve as breadwinners and women as mothers, homemakers, and consumers. New Deal programs aimed to help both but usually by forcing such gendered assumptions, making it difficult for women to attain economic autonomy. New Deal social welfare programs tended to funnel women into means-tested, state-administered relief programs while reserving entitlement benefits for male workers, creating a kind of two-tiered social welfare state. And so, despite great advances, the New Deal failed to challenge core inequalities that continued to mark life in the United States.

By 1936, Roosevelt and his New Deal won record popularity. In November, Roosevelt annihilated his Republican challenger, Governor Alf Landon of Kansas, who lost in every state save Maine and Vermont. The Great Depression had certainly not ended, but it appeared to be retreating, and Roosevelt, now safely reelected, appeared ready to take advantage of both his popularity and the improving economic climate to press for even more dramatic changes. But conservative barriers continued to limit the power of his popular support. The Supreme Court, for instance, continued to gut many of his programs.

In 1937, concerned that the Court might overthrow social security in an upcoming case, Roosevelt called for legislation allowing him to expand the Court by appointing a new, younger justice for every sitting member over age seventy. Roosevelt argued that the measure would speed up the Court's ability to handle a growing backlog of cases; however, his "court-packing scheme," as opponents termed it, was clearly designed to allow the president to appoint up to six friendly, pro-New Deal justices to drown the influence of old-time conservatives on the Court. Roosevelt's "scheme" riled opposition and did not become law, but the chastened Court thereafter upheld social security and other pieces of New Deal legislation. Moreover, Roosevelt was slowly able to appoint more amenable justices as conservatives died or retired. Still, the court-packing scheme damaged the Roosevelt administration emboldened New Deal opponents

Compounding his problems, Roosevelt and his advisors made a costly economic misstep. Believing the United States had turned a corner, Roosevelt cut spending in 1937. The American economy plunged nearly to the depths of 1932-1933. Roosevelt reversed course and, adopting the approach popularized by the English economist John Maynard Keynes, hoped that countercyclical, compensatory spending would pull the country out of the recession, even at the expense of a growing budget deficit. It was perhaps too late. The Roosevelt Recession of 1937 became fodder for critics. Combined with the court-packing scheme, the recession allowed for significant gains by a conservative coalition of southern Democrats and Midwestern Republicans in the 1938 midterm elections. By 1939, Roosevelt struggled to build congressional support for new reforms, let alone maintain existing agencies. Moreover, the growing threat of war in Europe stole the public's attention and increasingly dominated Roosevelt's interests. The New Deal slowly receded into the background, outshined by war.

Historians debate when the New Deal ended. Some identify the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 as the last major New Deal measure. Others see wartime measures such as price and rent control and the G.I. Bill (which afforded New Deal-style social benefits to veterans) as species of New Deal legislation. Still others conceive of a "New Deal order," a constellation of "ideas, public policies, and political alliances," which, though changing, guided American politics from Roosevelt's Hundred Days forward to Lyndon Johnson's Great Society-and perhaps even beyond. Indeed, the New Deal's legacy still remains, and its battle lines still shape American politics.
1. Herbert Hoover on the New Deal (1932) Americans elected a string of conservative Republicans to the presidency during the boom years of the 1920s. When the economy crashed in 1929, however, and the nation descended deeper into the Great Depression, voters abandoned the Republican Party and conservative politicians struggled to in office. In this speech on the eve of the 1932 election, Herbert Hoover warned against Franklin Roosevelt's proposed New Deal. 2. Huey P. Long, "Every Man a King" and "Share our Wealth" (1934) Amid the economic indignities of the Great Depression, Huey P. Long of Louisiana championed an aggressive program of public spending and wealth redistribution. Critics denounced Long, who served as both governor and a senator from Louisiana, as a corrupt demagogue, but "the Kingfish" appealed to impoverished Louisianans and Americans wracked by joblessness and resentful of American economic inequality. He was assassinated before he could mount his independent bid for the White House in 1936. In the following extracts from two of his most famous speeches, Long outlines his political program. 3. Franklin Roosevelt's Re-Nomination Acceptance Speech (1936) In July 27, 1936, President Franklin Roosevelt accepted his re-nomination as the Democratic Party's presidential choice. In his acceptance speech, Roosevelt laid out his understanding of what "freedom" and "tyranny" meant in an industrial democracy. 4. Second Inaugural Address of Franklin D. Roosevelt (1937) After winning a landslide victory in his 1936 quest for a second presidential term, President Franklin Roosevelt championed again the ambitious goals of his New Deal economic programs and their relationship to American democracy. 5. Lester Hunter, "I'd Rather Not Be on Relief" (1938) Lester Hunter left the Dust Bowl for the fields of California and wrote this poem, later turned into a song by migrant workers in California's Farm Security Administration camps. The "C.I.O." in the final line refers to the Congress of Industrial Unions, a powerful new industrial union founded in 1935. 6. Bertha McCall on America's "Moving People" (1940) Bertha McCall, general director of the National Travelers Aid Association, acquired a special knowledge of the massive displacement of individuals and families during the Great Depression. In 1940, McCall testified before the House of Representatives' Select Committee to Investigate the Interstate Migration of Destitute Citizens on the nature of America's internal migrants. 7. Dorothy West, "Amateur Night in Harlem" (1938) Amateur night at the Apollo Theater attracted not only Harlem's African American population but a national radio audience. In this account, written through the New Deal's Federal Writers' Project, Dorothy West describes an amateur night at the theater in November 1938 and reflects on the relationship between entertainment, race, and American life. 8. Family Walking on Highway (1936) During her assignment as a photographer for the Works Progress Administration (WPA), Dorothea Lange documented the movement of migrant families forced from their homes by drought and economic depression. This family was in the process of traveling 124 miles by foot, across Oklahoma, because the father was unable to receive relief or WPA work of his own due to an illness. 9. "Bonus Army Routed" (1932) This short newsreel clip made by British film company Pathé shows the federal government's response to the thousands of WWI veterans who organized in Washington DC during the summer of 1932 to form what was called a "Bonus Army." At the demand of attorney general, the marchers were violently removed from government property.
This chapter was edited by Matthew Downs and Eric Rauchway, with content contributed by Dana Cochran, Matthew Downs, Benjamin Helwege, Elisa Minoff, Eric Rauchway, Caitlin Verboon, and Mason Williams.

Recommended citation: Dana Cochran et al., "The Great Depression," Matthew Downs, ed., in The American Yawp, eds. Joseph Locke and Ben Wright (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018).

Recommended Reading

1. Balderrama, Francisco E., and Raymond Rodríguez. Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s, rev. ed. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006.

2. Brinkley, Alan. The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War. New York: Knopf, 1995.

3. ---. Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression. New York: Knopf, 1982.

4. Cohen, Lizabeth. Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

5. Cowie, Jefferson, and Nick Salvatore. "The Long Exception: Rethinking the Place of the New Deal in American History." International Labor and Working-Class History 74 (Fall 2008): 1-32.

6. Dickstein, Morris. Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression. New York: Norton, 2009.

7. Fraser, Steve, and Gary Gerstle, eds. The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989.

8. Gilmore, Glenda E. Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950. New York: Norton, 2009.

9. Gordon, Colin. New Deals: Business, Labor, and Politics in America 1920-1935. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

10. Gordon, Linda. Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits. New York: Norton, 2009.

11. ---. Pitied but Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare 1890-1935. New York: Free Press, 1994.

12. Greene, Alison Collis. No Depression in Heaven: The Great Depression, the New Deal, and the Transformation of Religion in the Delta. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.

13. Katznelson, Ira. Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time. New York: Norton, 2013.

14. Kelly, Robin D. G. Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990.

15. Kennedy, David. Freedom from Fear: America in Depression and War, 1929-1945. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

16. Kessler-Harris, Alice. In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

17. Leach, William. Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture. New York: Pantheon Books, 1993.

18. Leuchtenburg, William. Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932-1940. New York: Harper and Row, 1963.

19. Pells, Richard. Radical Visions and American Dreams: Culture and Social Thought in the Depression Years. New York: Harper and Row, 1973.

20. Phillips, Kimberly L. Alabama North: African-American Migrants, Community and Working-Class Activism in Cleveland, 1915-1945. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1999.

21. Phillips-Fein, Kim. Invisible Hands: The Businessmen's Crusade Against the New Deal. New York: Norton, 2010

22. Sitkoff, Harvard. A New Deal for Blacks: The Emergence of Civil Rights as a National Issue. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.

23. Sullivan, Patricia. Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.

24. Tani, Karen. States of Dependency: Welfare, Rights, and American Governance, 1935-1972. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016.

25. Wright, Gavin. Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy Since the Civil War. Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1986.

Notes

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Hard times had hit the United States before, but never had an economic crisis lasted so long or inflicted as much harm as the slump that followed the 1929 crash. After nearly a decade of supposed prosperity, the economy crashed to a halt. People suddenly stopped borrowing and buying.

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Printable Version Why did the seemingly boundless prosperity of the 1920s end so suddenly? And why, once an economic downturn began, did the Great Depression last so long?

Economists have been hard pressed to explain why "prosperity's decade" ended in financial disaster. In 1929, the American economy appeared to be extraordinarily healthy. Employment was high and inflation was virtually non-existent. Industrial production had risen 30 percent between 1919 and 1929, and per capita income had climbed from $520 to $681. The United States accounted for nearly half of the world's industrial output. Still, the seeds of the Depression were already present in the "boom" years of the 1920s.

For many groups of Americans, the prosperity of the 1920s was a cruel illusion. Even during the most prosperous years of the Roaring Twenties, most families lived below what contemporaries defined as the poverty line. In 1929, economists considered $2,500 the income necessary to support a family. In that year, more than 60 percent of the nation's families earned less than $2,000 a year--the income necessary for basic necessities--and over 40 percent earned less than $1,500 annually. Although labor productivity soared during the 1920s because of electrification and more efficient management, wages stagnated or fell in mining, transportation, and manufacturing. Hourly wages in coal mines sagged from 84.5 cents in 1923 to just 62.5 cents in 1929.

Prosperity bypassed specific groups of Americans entirely. A 1928 report on the condition of Native Americans found that half owned less than $500 and that 71 percent lived on less than $200 a year. Mexican Americans, too, had failed to share in the prosperity. During the 1920s, each year 25,000 Mexicans migrated to the United States. Most lived in conditions of extreme poverty. In Los Angeles the infant mortality rate was five times higher than the rate for Anglos, and most homes lacked toilets. A survey found that a substantial number of Mexican Americans had virtually no meat or fresh vegetables in their diet; 40 percent said that they could not afford to give their children milk.

The farm sector had been mired in depression since 1921. Farm prices had been depressed ever since the end of World War I, when European agriculture revived, and grain from Argentina and Australia entered the world market. Strapped with long-term debts, high taxes, and a sharp drop in crop prices, farmers lost ground throughout the 1920s. In 1910, a farmer's income was 40 percent of a city worker's. By 1930, it had sagged to just 30 percent.

The decline in farm income reverberated throughout the economy. Rural consumers stopped buying farm implements, tractors, automobiles, furniture, and appliances. Millions of farmers defaulted on their debts, placing tremendous pressure on the banking system. Between 1920 and 1929, more than 5,000 of the country's 30,000 banks failed.

Because of the banking crisis, thousands of small businesspeople failed because they could not secure loans. Thousands more went bankrupt because they had lost their working capital in the stock market crash. A heavy burden of consumer debt also weakened the economy. Consumers built up an unmanageable amount of consumer installment and mortgage debt, taking out loans to buy cars, appliances, and homes in the suburbs. To repay these loans, consumers cut back sharply on discretionary spending. Drops in consumer spending led inevitably to reductions in production and worker layoffs. Unemployed workers then spent less and the cycle repeated itself.

A poor distribution of income compounded the country's economic problems. During the 1920s, there was a pronounced shift in wealth and income toward the very rich. Between 1919 and 1929, the share of income received by the wealthiest one percent of Americans rose from 12 percent to 19 percent, while the share received by the richest five percent jumped from 24 percent to 34 percent. Over the same period, the poorest 93 percent of the non-farm population actually saw its disposable income fall. Because the rich tend to spend a high proportion of their income on luxuries, such as large cars, entertainment, and tourism, and save a disproportionately large share of their income, there was insufficient demand to keep employment and investment at a high level.

Even before the onset of the Depression, business investment had begun to decline. Residential construction boomed between 1924 and 1927, but in 1929 housing starts fell to less than half the 1924 level. A major reason for the depressed housing market was the 1924 immigration law that had restricted foreign immigration. Soaring inventories also led businesses to reduce investment and production. During the mid-1920s, manufacturers expanded their production capacity and built up excessive inventories. At the decade's end they cut back sharply, directing their surplus funds into stock market speculation.

The Federal Reserve, the nation's central bank, played a critical, if inadvertent, role in weakening the economy. In an effort to curb stock market speculation, the Federal Reserve slowed the growth of the money supply, then allowed the money supply to fall dramatically after the stock market crash, producing a wrenching "liquidity crisis." Consumers found themselves unable to repay loans, while businesses did not have the capital to finance business operations. Instead of actively stimulating the economy by cutting interest rates and expanding the money supply--the way monetary authorities fight recessions today--the Federal Reserve allowed the country's money supply to decline by 27 percent between 1929 and 1933.

Finally, Republican tariff policies damaged the economy by depressing foreign trade. Anxious to protect American industries from foreign competitors, Congress passed the Fordney-McCumber Tariff of 1922 and the Hawley-Smoot Tariff of 1930, raising tariff rates to unprecedented levels. American tariffs stifled international trade, making it difficult for European nations to pay off their debts. As foreign economies foundered, those countries imposed trade barriers of their own, choking off U.S. exports. By 1933, international trade had plunged 30 percent.

All these factors left the economy ripe for disaster. Yet the depression did not strike instantly; it infected the country gradually, like a slow-growing cancer. Measured in human terms, the Great Depression was the worst economic catastrophe in American history. It hit urban and rural areas, blue-and white-collar families alike. In the nation's cities, unemployed men took to the streets to sell apples or to shine shoes. Thousands of others hopped freight trains and wandered from town to town looking for jobs or handouts.

Unlike most of Western Europe, the United States had no federal system of unemployment insurance. The relief burden fell on state and municipal governments working in cooperation with private charities, such as the Red Cross and the Community Chest. Created to handle temporary emergencies, these groups lacked the resources to alleviate the massive suffering created by the Great Depression. Poor Southerners, whose states had virtually no relief funds, were particularly hard hit.

Urban centers in the North fared little better. Most city charters did not permit public funds to be spent on work relief. Adding insult to injury, several states disqualified relief clients from voting, while other cities forced them to surrender their automobile license plates. "Prosperity's decade" had ended in economic disaster.

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Printable Version Why did the seemingly boundless prosperity of the 1920s end so suddenly? And why, once an economic downturn began, did the Great Depression last so long? Economists have been hard pressed to explain why "prosperity's decade" ended in financial disaster. In 1929, the American economy appeared to be extraordinarily healthy.

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Printable Version When President Herbert Hoover took office, the unemployment rate was 4.4 percent. When he left office, it was 23.6 percent.

Hoover's efforts in providing relief during and after World War I saved millions of Europeans, including Germans and Russians, from starvation and made him an international hero. Yet little more than a decade later, many of his own countrymen regarded him as a heartless brute who would provide federal aid for banks but not for hungry Americans.

Hoover was a proponent of "rugged individualism." But he also said, "The trouble with capitalism is capitalists; they're too damn greedy."

Born into a hardworking Quaker family in Iowa, Hoover was orphaned before he was ten years old and was sent west to live with relatives. He was admitted to the first class at Stanford University, mainly because the new institution needed students. He rose quickly from mine worker to engineer and entrepreneur. He was worth $4 million by the age of 40, and then devoted himself to public service. He was elected president at the age of 54.

In the speech that closed his successful 1928 presidential campaign, Hoover, a self-made millionaire, expressed his view that the American system was based on "rugged individualism" and "self-reliance." Government, which had assumed unprecedented economic powers during World War I, should, in his view, shrink back to its prewar size and avoid intervening with business.

During the early days of the Great Depression, Hoover launched the largest public works projects. Yet, he continued to believe that problems of poverty and unemployment were best left to "voluntary organization and community service." He feared that federal relief programs would undermine individual character by making recipients dependent on the government. He did not recognize that the sheer size of the nation's economic problems had made the concept of "rugged individualism" meaningless.

The president appealed to industry to keep wages high in order to maintain consumer purchasing power. Nevertheless, while businesses did maintain wages for skilled workers, it cut hours and wages for unskilled workers and installed restrictive hiring practices that made it more difficult for under qualified younger and older workers to get a job. By April 1, 1933, U.S. Steel did not have a single full-time employee.

Many Republicans believed that a protective tariff would rescue the economy by keeping out foreign goods. The Smoot-Hawley tariff, signed by Hoover in 1930, raised rates but provoked retaliation from Britain, Canada, France, Germany, and other traditional trading partners. The United States found it much more difficult to export its products overseas.

Hoover persuaded local and state governments to sharply increase public works spending. However, the practical effect was to exhaust state and local financial reserves, which led government, by 1933, to slash unemployment relief programs and to impose sales taxes to cover their deficits.

Hoover quickly developed a reputation as uncaring. He cut unemployment figures that reached his desk, eliminating those he thought were only temporarily jobless and not seriously looking for work. In June 1930, a delegation came to see him to request a federal public works program. Hoover responded to them by saying, "Gentlemen, you have come sixty days too late. The Depression is over." He insisted that "nobody is actually starving" and that "the hoboes...are better fed than they have ever been." He claimed that the vendors selling apples on street corners had "left their jobs for the more profitable one of selling apples."

By 1932, comedians told the story of Hoover asking the treasury secretary for a nickel so he could call a friend. Mellon replies, "Here, take a dime and call all your friends."

Hoover was a stubborn man who found it difficult to respond to the problems posed by the Depression. "There are some principles that cannot be compromised," Hoover remarked in 1936. "Either we shall have a society based upon ordered liberty and the initiative of the individual, or we shall have a planned society that means dictation no matter what you call it.... There is no half-way ground." He was convinced that the economy would fix itself.

Only toward the end of his term in office did he recognize that the Depression called for unprecedented governmental action. In 1932, he created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) to help save the banking and railroad systems. Loans offered under the program funded public works projects and the first federally-supported housing projects. Originally intended to combat the Depression, the RFC lasted 21 years and was authorized to finance public works projects, provide loans to farmers and victims of natural disasters, and assist school districts. When it was abolished in 1953, it had dispersed $40.6 billion. Its functions were taken over by the Small Business Administration, the Commodity Credit Corporation, and other housing, community development, and agricultural assistance programs.

Herbert Hoover was not an insensitive man. He was the first president since Theodore Roosevelt to invite African American dinner guests to the White House. He said that the use of atomic bombs against Japan "revolts my soul." He played a key role in launching the United Nation's Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF) and CARE. Despite his staunch anti-communism stand, he opposed U.S. involvement in Korea and Vietnam.

Nevertheless, his reputation was forever clouded by the Depression. A dam that was to carry Hoover's name was rechristened Boulder Dam. Washington's airfield, which was to be named for Hoover, was renamed National Airport.

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Printable Version When President Herbert Hoover took office, the unemployment rate was 4.4 percent. When he left office, it was 23.6 percent. Hoover's efforts in providing relief during and after World War I saved millions of Europeans, including Germans and Russians, from starvation and made him an international hero.

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Printable Version 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.

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.

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Printable Version 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.

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Printable Version 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.

The Election of 1932

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."

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Printable Version 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.

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Printable Version 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 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.

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Printable Version 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.

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Printable Version 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 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.

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Printable Version 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 wages, and maximum hours within each industry.

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Printable Version 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.

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."

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.

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Printable Version 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).

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Printable Version 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.

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Printable Version 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.

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Printable Version 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 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.

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Printable Version 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.

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Printable Version 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.

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.

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Printable Version 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.

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Printable Version 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 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.

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Printable Version 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.

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Printable Version 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, 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.

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Printable Version 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.

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Printable Version 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.

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.

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Printable Version 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.

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Printable Version 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.

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.

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Printable Version 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.

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Printable Version 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.

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Printable Version 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.

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Popular Culture During the Great Depression

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Popular Culture During the Great Depression

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Printable Version 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 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.

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Printable Version 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.

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Printable Version 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.

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Printable Version 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.

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Printable Version 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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Printable Version 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.

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New Deal Chart

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The Great Depression: Crash Course Black American History #28