| I. The Early
Years of the Depression, 1929–1932 |
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A. |
Down and Out: Life in the Great
Depression |
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|
1. |
During the 1930s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt launched a program of federal
activism—which he called the New Deal—that would change the nature of American
government. |
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|
2. |
The
New Deal represented a new form of liberalism, known as social-welfare liberalism, a fresh interpretation of the ideology
of individual rights that had long shaped the character of American society and
politics. |
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|
3. |
The
American economy went rapidly downhill between 1929 and 1932.
U.S.
gross
domestic product fell almost by half, from $103.1 billion to $58 billion.
Consumption dropped by 18 percent, construction by 78 percent, and private
investment by 88 percent. Fifteen million people were unemployed by 1933, and
many others took wage cuts to keep their jobs. |
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4. |
Those that were “down and out” did what they could to survive. But not all
Americans were devastated by the depression. The middle class did not disappear,
and the rich lived in luxury. |
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5. |
The
first line of defense was private charity, particularly religious organizations.
But by 1931, these services became overwhelmed. The government did not provide
public support for the elderly. Few Americans had any retirement savings. |
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6. |
Americans adapted to depression conditions. Couples delayed marriage and
reduced the number of children they conceived. The marriage rate fell to a
statistical low, while the birth rate dropped from 97 births per one thousand
women to 75 by 1933. |
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|
7. |
Women endured additional burdens, such as campaigns against hiring married
women. Three-quarters of the school districts of the country banned married
women from being hired as teachers. Despite such conditions, female employment
increased during the 1930s as women worked more to feed their families. |
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|
8. |
Europe, particularly
Germany,
felt the impact of a world-wide economic recession. |
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|
9. |
Within
the United States, there were regional variations: the South fared better than
the rest of the nation because it lacked heavy industry which experienced a
steeper downturn. Bank failures were concentrated in the
Midwest
and Plains. |
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|
10. |
Black men suffered twice the unemployment rate of white men in northern
industrial cities and the southern states. Black women experienced a triple
unemployment rate compared to white women. |
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B. |
Herbert Hoover Responds |
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|
1. |
As
the depression continued, the president drew upon two powerful American
traditions. The first was the belief that economic outcomes were the responsibility
of individual people. People’s fate was in their own hands, not in the workings
of the market. The second tradition was voluntarism—the idea that the business
community could regulate itself. |
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2. |
Hoover recognized that
voluntarism from corporate leaders might not be enough and turned to government
action. Soon after the stock market crash, he won cuts in federal taxes in an
attempt to boost private spending and corporate investment. He also called on
state and local governments to increase capital expenditures on public works.
In 1931, he secured an increase of $700 million in federal spending on public
works. |
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|
3. |
Hoover’s most innovative program, which was continued
during
Roosevelt’s New Deal, was the
Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), which Congress approved in January
1932. To stimulate economic activity, the RFC provided federal loans to
railroads, banks, and other institutions. |
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|
4. |
This
plan might have worked, but the RFC was too cautious in lending the money.
Although Congress allocated $1.5 billion to the RFC, the agency had expended
only 20 percent of these funds by the end of 1932. |
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|
5. |
Compared with previous chief executives—and in contrast to his popular image as
a “do-nothing” president—
Hoover
had responded to the national emergency with government action on an
unprecedented scale. But the nation’s needs were also unprecedented, and
Hoover’s programs failed
to meet them. |
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C. |
Rising Discontent |
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|
1. |
As
the depression continued, many citizens came to hate Herbert Hoover. Terms,
such as “Hoovervilles” (shantytowns where people
lived in packing crates) and “Hoover blankets” (newspapers), were introduced
into the American vocabulary to reflect the growing discontent with
Hoover’s failing policies. |
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|
2. |
Even
as some Americans were going hungry, farmers formed the Farm Holiday
Association and destroyed food rather than accepting prices that would not
cover their costs. |
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|
3. |
Bitter labor strikes occurred in the depths of the depression, despite the
threat that strikers would lose their jobs. |
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|
4. |
Veterans staged the most publicized—and most tragic—protest. In the summer of
1932, the “Bonus Army” of 15,000 unemployed World War I veterans marched on
Washington to demand immediate payment of their bonuses;
newsreels showing the U.S. Army moving against its own veterans made
Hoover’s popularity
plunge even lower. |
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D. |
The 1932 Election |
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|
1. |
As
the 1932 election approached, the nation overall was not in a revolutionary
mood. Many middle-class Americans had internalized the ideal of the self-made man and blamed themselves
rather than the system for their hardships. |
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|
2. |
The
Republicans nominated
Hoover
once again for president, and the Democrats nominated Governor Franklin Delano
Roosevelt of New York. |
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|
3. |
In
1921,
Roosevelt had suffered an attack of
polio that left both his legs paralyzed, yet he emerged from the illness a
stronger, more resilient man. |
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|
4. |
Roosevelt won the election easily, receiving 22.8 million votes to
Hoover’s 15.7 million. |
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|
5. |
Elected in November,
Roosevelt would not begin
his presidency until March of 1933. (Ratified in 1933, the Twentieth Amendment
set January 20 as the permanent inauguration day.) |
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|
6. |
As
FDR waited, Americans suffered through the worst winter of the depression.
Nationwide, unemployment continued to climb to staggering levels of 60 percent
in some cities. Public-welfare institutions were totally overwhelmed. |
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|
7. |
Despite dramatic increases in their spending, private charities and public
relief agencies only reached a fraction of the needy. |
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|
8. |
The
nation’s banking system was so close to collapse that many state governors
closed banks temporarily to avoid further withdrawals. By March 1933, the
nation had hit rock bottom. |
| II. The
New Deal Arrives, 1933–1935 |
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A. |
Roosevelt and the First Hundred Days |
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|
1. |
A
wealthy aristocrat from a patrician family, Roosevelt was an unlikely figure to
inspire millions of ordinary Americans. But he established a close rapport with
the American people; his use of radio-broadcasted “fireside chats” fostered a
sense of intimacy. |
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|
2. |
Roosevelt’s personal charisma allowed him to dramatically
expand the role of the executive branch in initiating policy, thereby helping
to create the modern presidency. |
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3. |
To
draft legislation and policy, Roosevelt relied heavily on financier Bernard
Baruch and a “Brains Trust” of professors from
Columbia, Harvard, and other leading
universities. He also turned to his talented cabinet, including Secretary of
the Interior Harold L. Ickes, Frances Perkins at the Labor Department, Henry A.
Wallace at Agriculture, and Henry Morgenthau Jr., the secretary of the treasury. |
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|
4. |
Roosevelt
could have done little, however, without a sympathetic Congress. The 1932
election had swept Democratic majorities into both the House and Senate. |
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|
5. |
The first months of
the administration produced a whirlwind of activity in Congress known as the
“Hundred Days” in which fifteen major bills were enacted. Four areas were
targeted: banking failures, agricultural overproduction, the business slump,
and soaring unemployment. |
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|
6. |
Derided by opponents
as an “alphabet soup” because of the many abbreviations they spawned (CCC, WPA, AAA, etc.), the new policies and agencies
represented the dawn of a new American state. |
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|
7. |
The
first problem
Roosevelt confronted was the
banking crisis; the president declared a national “bank holiday” and called
Congress into special session. The result was the Emergency Banking Act, which
permitted banks to reopen but only if a Treasury Department inspection showed
they had sufficient cash reserves. |
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|
8. |
In
his first fireside chat, the president reassured citizens that the banks were
safe; when the banks reopened, there were more deposits than withdrawals. |
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9. |
A
second banking law, the Glass-Steagall Act, further
restored public confidence by creating the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation
(FDIC), which insured deposits up to $2,500.
Roosevelt
also removed the U.S. Treasury from the gold standard, which allowed the
Federal Reserve to lower interest rates. It had been raising them since 1931, which
deepened the downturn. |
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|
10. |
The
Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) established a system for seven major
commodities (wheat, cotton, corn, hogs, rice, tobacco, and dairy products) that
provided cash subsidies to farmers who cut production in the hopes that prices
would rise. |
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|
11. |
The
AAA’s benefits were distributed unevenly; subsidies went primarily to the
owners of large and medium-sized farms, while renters and sharecroppers
received a few dollars in relief payments. |
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|
12. |
The
National Industrial Recovery Act launched the National Recovery Administration
(NRA), which established a system of self-governing private associations in six
hundred industries. |
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|
13. |
The
NRA’s codes established prices and production quotas. But large companies tended
to dominate the NRA’s code-drafting process, thus solidifying the power of
large businesses at the expense of smaller ones. |
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|
14. |
The
Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), set up in May 1933 under the
direction of Harry Hopkins, offered federal money to the states for relief
programs and was designed to keep people from starving until other recovery
measures took hold. |
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|
15. |
Established in November 1933, the Civil Works Administration (CWA) put 2.6
million men and women to work; at its peak, it employed 4 million in public
works jobs. The CWA lapsed the next spring when Republican opposition compelled
New Dealers to abandon it. |
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|
16. |
A
more long-term program, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), mobilized 250,000 young men to do
reforestation and conservation work. “CCC
boys” built thousands of bridges, roads, trails, and other structures in state
and national parks. |
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|
17. |
More than half a million Americans lost their homes between 1930 and 1932. In
response, Congress created the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) to refinance
home mortgages. In just two years of operation, the HOLC helped more than a
million Americans retain their homes. |
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|
18. |
The
Federal Housing Act of 1934 extended the program under a new agency, the
Federal Housing Administration (FHA). The HOLC, FHA, and the subsequent Housing
Act of 1937 permanently changed the mortgage system and extended homeownership. |
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B. |
The New Deal under Attack |
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|
1. |
Business leaders and conservative Democrats formed the Liberty League in 1934
to lobby against the New Deal and its “reckless spending” and “socialist”
reforms. |
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|
2. |
In Schechter
v. United States, the Supreme Court ruled that the National Industrial
Recovery Act represented an unconstitutional delegation of legislative power to
the executive branch. |
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|
3. |
Citizens like Francis Townsend thought that the New Deal had not gone far
enough; Townsend proposed the Old Age Revolving Pension Plan. |
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|
4. |
In
1935, Father Charles Coughlin organized the National Union for Social Justice
to attack
Roosevelt’s New Deal and demand
nationalization of the banking system and expansion of the money supply. |
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5. |
Because he was Canadian-born and a priest, Coughlin was not likely to run for
president; the most direct threat to Roosevelt came from Senator Huey Long of
Louisiana. |
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|
6. |
In
1934, Senator Long broke with the New Deal and established his own national
movement, the Share Our Wealth Society. |
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|
7. |
Coughlin and Long offered feeble solutions to the depression and quick-fix
plans that addressed only part of the problem. Both men showed little respect
for the principles of representative government. |
| III. The Second New Deal and the Redefining of
Liberalism, 1935–1938 |
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A. |
The Welfare State Comes into Being |
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|
1. |
As
the depression continued and attacks on the New Deal mounted,
Roosevelt—with
his eye on the 1936 election—began to move to the left and construct a new
coalition and broaden the scope of his response to the depression. |
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|
2. |
The
first beneficiary of
Roosevelt’s change in
direction was the labor movement. |
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|
3. |
After the Supreme Court declared the NRA unconstitutional in 1935, labor
representatives demanded legislation that would protect the right to organize
and bargain collectively. |
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|
4. |
The
Wagner Act of 1935 upheld the right of industrial workers to join a union and
established the nonpartisan National Labor Relations Board to further protect
workers’ rights. |
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|
5. |
The
Social Security Act of 1935 provided pensions for most workers in the private
sector to be financed by a federal tax that both employers and employees would
pay and established a joint federal-state system of unemployment compensation. |
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|
6. |
The Social
Security Act was a milestone in the creation of the modern welfare state. Never before had the
federal government assumed such responsibility for the well-being of a
substantial portion of the citizenry. |
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|
7. |
The
Second New Deal created what historians call “New Deal Liberalism.” Classical liberalism held individual
liberty to be the foundation of a democratic society. Roosevelt and his
advisors redefined the idea and created policy to preserve individual liberty
through government assistance. |
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B. |
From Reform to Stalemate |
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|
1. |
Under Harry Hopkins, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) put relief workers
directly onto the federal payroll; between 1935 and 1943, the WPA employed 8.5
million Americans, but only reached one-third of the unemployed. |
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|
2. |
Ralph
Landon, the Republican challenger to
Roosevelt
in 1936, accepted the legitimacy of most New Deal programs but criticized their
inefficiency and expense. The Republican candidate also pointed to
authoritarian regimes in
Italy
and
Germany
, directed by
Benito Mussolini and Adolph Hitler, respectively, and hinted that
Roosevelt harbored similar dictatorial ambitions. |
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|
3. |
Roosevelt beat Landon in a landslide; there was no
third-party threat, as Huey Long had been assassinated in September of 1935.
Roosevelt received 60 percent of the popular vote and carried every state
except
Maine and
Vermont. |
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4. |
Because he felt the future of New Deal reforms might be in doubt,
Roosevelt asked for fundamental changes in the structure
of the Supreme Court only two weeks after his inauguration. |
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5. |
Roosevelt proposed the addition of one new justice for
each sitting justice over the age of seventy—a scheme that would have increased
the number of justices from nine to fifteen; opponents protested that he was
trying to “pack” the Court with justices who favored the New Deal. |
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|
6. |
The
issue became a moot point when the Supreme Court upheld several key pieces of
New Deal legislation and a series of resignations created vacancies on the Court. |
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7. |
Roosevelt managed to reshape the Supreme Court to suit
his liberal philosophy through seven new appointments, including Hugo Black,
Felix Frankfurter, and William O. Douglas. |
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|
8. |
The
“Roosevelt recession” of 1937 to 1938 dealt
the most devastating blow to the president’s political effectiveness in his
second term. A steady improvement in the economy had caused
Roosevelt
to slash the budget, causing a tightening in credit, a market downturn, and
rising unemployment. |
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9. |
Roosevelt spent his way out of the downturn; he and his
economic advisors were groping toward John Maynard Keynes’s theory of using deficit
spending in order to stimulate the economy. Keynesian economics gradually
won wider acceptance as defense spending during World War II ended the Great
Depression. |
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|
10. |
Through
Roosevelt’s second term, a conservative
coalition composed of southern Democrats, rural Republicans, and industrial
interests in both parties impeded social legislation. Change was over by 1939. |
| IV. The New Deal’s Impact on
Society |
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A. |
A People’s Democracy |
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|
1. |
The
New Deal accelerated the expansion of the federal bureaucracy, and power was
increasingly centered in the nation’s capital, not in the states. |
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|
2. |
Labor’s dramatic growth in the 1930s represented one of the most important
social and economic changes of the decade. Organized labor won the battle for
recognition, higher wages, seniority systems, and grievance procedures. |
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|
3. |
The
Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) served as the cutting edge of the
union movement by promoting “industrial unionism”—organizing all of the workers
in one industry, both skilled and unskilled, into one union. |
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|
4. |
Hoping to use its influence to elect candidates that were sympathetic to labor
and social justice, the CIO quickly allied itself with the Democratic Party. |
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|
5. |
The
labor movement still had not developed into a dominant force in American life,
and many workers remained indifferent or even hostile to unionization. |
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|
6. |
Under the experimental climate of the New Deal, Roosevelt appointed the first
female cabinet member, Frances Perkins, who served as secretary of labor. |
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|
7. |
Eleanor Roosevelt had worked to increase women’s power in political parties,
labor unions, and education; as first lady, she pushed the president and the
New Deal to do more and served as the conscience of the New Deal. |
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|
8. |
New
Deal programs were marred by grave flaws; some NRA codes set a lower minimum
wage for women than men, and the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) did not hire women at all. When they did hire
women, New Deal programs tended to reinforce the broader society’s gender and
racial attitudes. |
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|
9. |
Although some New Deal programs reflected prevailing racist attitudes, blacks
received significant benefits from programs that were for the poor, regardless
of race. Yet no significant civil rights legislation was passed during the
decade. |
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|
10. |
Racism in the South, symbolized by the Scottsboro case of 1931 and the dispossession of sharecroppers by the
Agricultural Adjustment Act, forced many blacks to leave the land. |
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|
11. |
Mary McLeod Bethune headed the “black cabinet,” an informal network that worked
for fairer treatment of blacks by New Deal agencies. |
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|
12. |
Blacks had voted Republican since the Civil War, but in 1936, blacks outside
the South gave Roosevelt 71 percent of their votes and have remained
overwhelmingly Democratic ever since. |
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13. |
The
Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 and other changes in federal policies under
the “Indian New Deal” were well intentioned but did little to improve the lives
of Native Americans. |
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|
14. |
During the 1920s and 1930s, agriculture in
California became a big business—large
scale, intensive, and diversified. Corporate-owned farms produced specialty
crops—lettuce, tomatoes, peaches, grapes, and cotton—whose staggered harvests
required a lot of transient labor during picking seasons. |
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|
15. |
Thousands of workers, initially migrants from
Mexico
and
Asia and later from the Midwestern states,
trooped from farm to farm, harvesting those crops for shipment to eastern
markets. Some of these migrants also settled in the rapidly growing cities
along the West Coast, especially the sprawling metropolis of
Los Angeles. |
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|
16. |
The
economic downturn brought dramatic changes to the lives of thousands of Mexican
Americans. A formal deportation policy for illegal immigrants instituted by the
Hoover
administration was partly responsible for the decline in numbers, but even more
Mexicans left voluntarily in the first years of the depression. |
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|
17. |
Under the New Deal, the situation of Mexican Americans improved. New Deal
initiatives supported jobs in the WPA, the NYA, and the
CCC. |
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|
18. |
New
Deal programs did not improve the migrant farm labor system under which so many
people of Mexican descent labored. But Mexicans joined the New Deal coalition
in large numbers because of the Democrats commitment to ordinary Americans. |
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|
19. |
Men
and women of Asian descent—mostly from
China, Japan, and the
Philippines—formed
a tiny minority of the American population but were a significant presence in
some western cities and towns. |
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|
20. |
Migrants from
Japan
and
China
had long
faced discrimination. As farm prices declined during the depression and racial
discrimination undermined the prospects of the rising generation for nonfarm
jobs, about 20 percent of the immigrants returned to
Japan. |
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|
21. |
Chinese Americans were even less prosperous than their Japanese counterparts.
In the hard times of the depression, they turned for assistance both to
traditional Chinese social organizations such as huiguan (district associations) and to local authorities. Few benefited from the
New Deal. |
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|
22. |
Until the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943, Chinese immigrants were
classified as “aliens ineligible for citizenship” and therefore excluded from
most federal programs. |
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|
23. |
Because Filipino immigrants came from a
U.S.
territory, they were not
affected by the ban on Asian immigration passed in 1924. |
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|
24. |
As
the depression cut wages, Filipino immigration slowed to a trickle and was
virtually cut off by the Tydings-McDuffie Act of
1934. The act granted independence to the
Philippines
(which since 1898 had been an American dependency), classified all Filipinos in
the
United States
as aliens, and restricted immigration to fifty persons per year. |
| |
B. |
Reshaping the Environment |
| |
|
1. |
The
expansion of federal responsibilities in the 1930s created a climate conducive
to conservation efforts, as did public concern heightened by the devastation in
the Dust Bowl. |
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|
2. |
Although the long-term success of New Deal resources policy was mixed, it
innovatively stressed scientific management of the land, conservation instead
of commercial development, and the aggressive use of public authority to
preserve and improve the natural environment. |
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|
3. |
Between
1930 and 1941, a severe drought afflicted farmers in the semiarid states of
Oklahoma,
Texas,
New Mexico,
Colorado,
Arkansas, and
Kansas. |
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|
4. |
But
the Dust Bowl was primarily a human creation. Farmers had pushed the
agricultural frontier beyond its natural limits, stripping the land of its
native vegetation and destroying the delicate ecology of the plains. When the
rains dried up and the winds came, nothing remained to hold the soil. Huge
clouds of thick dust rolled over the land, turning the day into night. |
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|
5. |
This
ecological disaster prompted a mass exodus. Their crops ruined and their debts
unpaid, at least 350,000 “Okies” (so-called whether
or not they were from
Oklahoma) loaded their
meager belongings into beat-up Fords and headed to
California. Many were drawn by handbills
distributed by commercial farmers that promised good jobs and high wages;
instead, they found low wages and terrible living conditions. |
| |
|
6. |
John
Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939) immortalized them and their
journey, and New Deal photographer Dorothea Lange’s haunting images of migrant
camps in
California
gave a personal face to some of the worst suffering of the depression. |
| |
|
7. |
The
Dust Bowl helped to focus attention on land management and ecological balance.
Agents from the Soil Conservation Service in the Department of Agriculture
taught farmers the proper technique for tilling hillsides. |
| |
|
8. |
Government agronomists tried to prevent soil erosion through better
agricultural practices and windbreaks like the Shelter-belts. |
| |
|
9. |
The
most extensive New Deal environmental undertaking was the Tennessee Valley
Authority. It integrated flood control, reforestation, and agricultural and
industrial development, and a hydroelectric grid provided cheap power for the
valley’s residents. |
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|
10. |
Cabins, shelters, picnic areas, and lodges in American state parks, built in a
“government rustic” style, are witness to the New Deal ethos of recreation
coexisting with conservation. |
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|
11. |
The West benefited
enormously from the New Deal’s attention to the environment. The largest
project was the Grand Coulee Dam built by the PWA and the Bureau of Reclamation
in 1941. The project provided electricity and irrigation for the state’s major
crops. |
| |
|
12. |
New
Deal projects affecting the environment can be seen throughout the country—CCC
and WPA workers built the Blue Ridge Parkway; government workers built the San
Francisco Zoo, Berkeley’s Tilden Park, and the canals of San Antonio; the
CCC helped to complete the Appalachian Trail and
the Pacific Crest Trail through the Sierra Nevada. |
| |
C. |
The New Deal and the Arts |
| |
|
1. |
New Deal administrators
encouraged artists to create projects that would be of interest to the entire community, not just
the cultured elite. “Art for the millions” became a popular New Deal slogan and
encouraged the painting of murals in hundreds of public buildings. |
| |
|
2. |
The
Federal Art Project gave work to many young artists who would become the twentieth
century’s leading painters, muralists, and sculptors, like Jackson Pollock. |
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|
3. |
Under the Federal Music Project and Federal Writer’s Project, over 15,000
musicians and 5,000 writers found work. |
| |
|
4. |
The
WPA arts projects reflected a broad cultural trend known as the “documentary
impulse.” The documentary, probably the decade’s most distinctive genre,
influenced practically every aspect of American culture: literature,
photography, art, music, film, dance, theater, and radio. |
| |
D. |
The Legacies of the New Deal |
| |
|
1. |
By
creating a powerful national bureaucracy and laying the foundation of a social
welfare state, the New Deal redefined the meaning of American liberalism. |
| |
|
2. |
For
the first time, Americans experienced the federal government as a part of their
everyday lives through Social Security payments, farm loans, relief work, and
mortgage guarantees. |
| |
|
3. |
The
government made a commitment to intervene when the private sector could not
guarantee economic stability, and federal regulation brought order and
regularity to economic life. |
| |
|
4. |
The
federal government accepted primary responsibility for the individual and
collective welfare of the people with the development of the welfare state. |
| |
|
5. |
Defects of the emerging welfare system were that it did not include national health
care and failed to reach a significant minority of American workers, including
domestics and farm workers, for many years. |
| |
|
6. |
The
New Deal completed the transformation of the Democratic Party that had begun in
the 1920s toward a coalition of ethnic groups, city dwellers, organized labor,
blacks, and a broad cross-section of the middle class that would form the
backbone of the Democratic coalition for decades to come. |