NASH.7654.CP24.p790-825.vpdf 9/23/05 3:26 PM Page 790 CHAPTER 24 The Great Depression ...wwphs.sharpschool.com/UserFiles/Servers/Server_10640642... · The Great Depression and the

Coming of Age and Riding the Rails During the Depression

C H A P T E R 24The Great Depression and the New Deal

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Flickering in a Seattle movie theater in the depths of the Great Depression, the Holly-wood production Wild Boys of the Road captivated 13-year-old Robert Symmonds.Thefilm, released in 1933, told the story of boys hitching rides on trains and tramping

American Stories

The WPA (Works Progress Administration) hired artists from 1935 to 1943 to create muralsfor public buildings. The assumption was not only that “artists need to eat too,” as Harry Hop-kins announced, but also that art was an important part of culture and should be supported bythe federal government. Here Moses Soyer, a Philadelphia artist, depicts WPA artists creating amural. Do you think it is appropriate for the government to subsidize artists? (Moses Soyer, Artistson WPA, 1935. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC/Art Resource, New York)

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around the country. It was supposed to warn teenagers of the dangers of rail riding,but for some it had the opposite effect. Robert, a boy from a middle-class home, al-

ready had a fascination with hobos. He had watched his mother give sand-wiches to the transient men who sometimes knocked on the back door.He had taken to hanging around the “Hooverville” shantytown south ofthe King Street railroad station, where he would sit next to the fires andlisten to the rail riders’ stories. Stoked for adventure, when school let outin 1934, Robert and a school friend hopped onto a moving boxcar on atrain headed out of town. Hands reached out to pull them aboard the car,

which already held 20 men.The two boys journeyed as far as Vancouver,Washington,and home to Seattle again. It was frightening, and exhilarating.

In 1938, under the weight of the Depression, the Symmonds family’s security busi-ness failed.Years later, Robert recalled the effects on his father:“It hurt him bad when hewent broke and all his friends deserted him. He did the best he could but never recov-ered his self-esteem and his pride.” The loss of income forced Robert’s family to accepta relative’s offer of shelter in a three-room mountain cabin without electricity. Becauseof the move, Robert could no longer attend high school in Seattle. Once again, this timeout of necessity, he turned to the rails, leaving his parents and three sisters behind.

Robert faced a personal challenge of surviving difficult times, but he also was part ofa looming problem that troubled the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt.Thousandsof young people were graduating from high school or leaving school early, with very fewjobs open to them.An estimated 250,000 young people were among the drifters whoresorted to the often dangerous practice of hitching rides on trains around the country.Robert rode the rails during summers to find work harvesting fruit up and down theWest Coast. In 1939, his travels took him to Montana, where he encountered the Roo-sevelt administration’s solution for the “youth problem”: the Civilian ConservationCorps (CCC).When he enlisted in the CCC, Robert became one of nearly 3 millionyoung men age 17 and older who found work in government-sponsored conservationprojects between 1933 and 1942. In exchange for their work,CCC workers earned $25a month for their families back home plus $5 a month spending money for themselves.

The CCC was known as Roosevelt’s “tree army” because the corps planted treescovering more than 2 million acres, improved more than 4 million acres of existing for-est, and fought forest fires. In addition, the CCC worked on a wide variety of conserva-tion-related projects in a nation suffering from deforestation, erosion, drought, duststorms, and other environmental problems.They improved parks and recreation areasand even Civil War historic sites, including the notorious Andersonville prison camp inGeorgia. In many ways, the CCC operated like a military organization, with workerswearing surplus World War I uniforms and following a fixed regimen of work and recre-ation that began with a bugler’s call at 6 A.M. Many of its veterans credited the corpswith transforming them from boys into men, although others chafed under the disci-pline of the camps.

One historian has called the CCC the greatest peacetime mobilization in U.S. his-tory, and it set the stage for the wartime mobilization that followed. By the timeRobert Symmonds joined the CCC in 1939, war loomed in Europe. Like many CCCveterans, Robert’s next stop in life was military service. He joined the navy and afterthe war became a merchant seaman. In later years, like many Americans of his genera-tion, Robert remembered his experiences of the Great Depression grimly, but withsome nostalgia. He even returned to hopping rides on railroad cars again during hisretirement years, out of a sense of adventure rather than necessity. “It’s somethingthat got into my blood years ago,” he explained.“I guess it is a freedom thing.”

The Great Depression changed the lives of all Americans, separating that

generation from the one that followed. An exaggerated need for security, the

fear of failure, a nagging sense of guilt, and a real sense that it might happen all

CHAPTER OUTLINE

The Great DepressionThe Depression BeginsHoover and the Great Depression

Economic DeclineA Global DepressionThe Bonus Army

Roosevelt and the First NewDealThe Election of 1932Roosevelt’s Advisers

One Hundred DaysThe Banking CrisisRelief MeasuresAgricultural Adjustment ActIndustrial RecoveryCivilian Conservation CorpsTennessee Valley AuthorityCritics of the New Deal

The Second New DealWork Relief and Social SecurityAiding the FarmersThe Dust Bowl: An Ecological

DisasterThe New Deal and the WestControlling Corporate Power and

Taxing the WealthyThe New Deal for LaborAmerica’s Minorities in the 1930sWomen and the New Deal

The Last Years of the NewDealThe Election of 1936The Battle of the Supreme CourtCompleting the New Deal

The Other Side of the 1930sTaking to the RoadThe Electric HomeThe Age of LeisureLiterary Reflections of the 1930sRadio’s Finest HourThe Silver Screen

Conclusion: The MixedLegacy of the GreatDepression and the New Deal

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792 PART 5 A Modernizing People, 1900–1945

over again divided the Depression generation from

everyone born after 1940. Like Robert Symmonds,

they never forgot those bleak years.

This chapter explores the causes and conse-

quences of the Great Depression, which had an im-

pact around the world. We will look at Herbert

Hoover and his efforts to combat the Depression and

then turn to Franklin Roosevelt, the dominant per-

sonality of the 1930s. We will examine the New Deal

and Roosevelt’s program to bring relief, recovery, and

reform to the nation. The New Deal legislation, some

of which continued reforms started during the pro-

gressive era, did not end the Depression. But this leg-

islation was based on the idea that the federal gov-

ernment had some responsibility for the economy

and for promoting the welfare of all the people. We

will also look at the other side of the 1930s, for the

decade did not consist only of crippling unemploy-

ment and New Deal agencies. It was also a time of

great strides in technology, when innovative develop-

ments in radio, movies, and the automobile affected

the lives of most Americans.




THE GREAT DEPRESSIONThere had been recessions and depressions inAmerican history, notably in the 1830s, 1870s, and1890s, but nothing compared with the devastatingeconomic collapse of the 1930s. The Great Depres-sion was all the more shocking because it came af-ter a decade of unprecedented prosperity, whenmost experts assumed that the United States wasimmune to a downturn in the business cycle. TheGreat Depression had an impact on all areas ofAmerican life; perhaps most important, it destroyedAmerican confidence in the future.

The Depression BeginsFew people anticipated the stock market crash inthe fall of 1929. But even after the collapse of thestock market, few expected the entire economy togo into a tailspin. General Electric stock, selling for396 in 1929, fell to 34 in 1932; U.S. Steel declinedfrom 261 to 21. By 1932, the median income hadplunged to half of what it had been in 1929. Con-struction spending fell to one-sixth of the 1929level. By 1932, at least one of every four Americanbreadwinners was out of work, and industrial pro-duction had almost ground to a halt.

Why did the nation sink deeper and deeper intodepression? The answer is complex, but it appears

in retrospect that the prosperity of the1920s was superficial. Farmers and coaland textile workers had suffered allthrough the 1920s from low prices, andthe farmers were the first group in the1930s to plunge into depression. Butother aspects of the economy alsolurched out of balance. Two percent ofthe population received about 28 percent

of the national income, but the lower 60 percent gotonly 24 percent. Businesses increased profits while

holding down wages and the prices of raw materi-als. This pattern depressed consumer purchasingpower. American workers, like American farmers,did not have the money to buy the goods theyhelped to produce. There was a relative decline inpurchasing power in the late 1920s, unemploymentwas high in some industries, and the housing andautomobile industries were already beginning toslacken before the crash.

Well-to-do Americans were speculating a signifi-cant portion of their money in the stock market.Their illusion of permanent prosperity helped firethe boom of the 1920s, just as their pessimism andlack of confidence helped exaggerate the Depres-sion in 1931 and 1932.

Other factors were also involved. The stock mar-ket crash revealed serious structural weaknesses inthe financial and banking systems (7,000 banks hadfailed during the 1920s). The Federal Reserve Board,fearing inflation, tightened credit—exactly the op-posite of the action it should have takento fight a slowdown in purchasing. Butthe Depression was also caused by globaleconomic problems created by World WarI and the peace settlement. Large repara-tions exacted against Germany had led tothe collapse of the German economy, andhigh tariffs had reduced internationaltrade. When American investment in Europe slowedin 1928 and 1929, European economies declined.Americans purchased fewer European goods, andEuropeans got along without American products. Asthe European financial situation worsened, theAmerican economy spiraled downward.

The federal government might have preventedthe stock market crash and the Depression by morecareful regulation of business and the stock market.Central planning might have ensured a more equi-table distribution of income. But that kind of policywould have taken more foresight than most people

Prosperity ofthe 1920s and

the GreatDepression

John Baer, “WeDemand a NewDeal!” 1931





CHAPTER 24 The Great Depression and the New Deal 793

had in the 1920s. It certainly would have requireddifferent people to be in power, and it is unlikelythat the Democrats, had they been in control, wouldhave altered the government’s policies in funda-mental ways.

Hoover and the Great DepressionInitial business and government reactions to thestock market crash were optimistic. “All the evi-dence indicates that the worst effects of the crashupon unemployment will have been passed duringthe next sixty days,” Herbert Hoover reported.Hoover, the great planner and progressive efficiencyexpert, did not sit idly by and watch the countrydrift toward disorder. His upbeat first statementswere calculated to prevent further panic.

Hoover acted aggressively to stem the economiccollapse. More than any president before him, heused the power of the federal government and theoffice of the president to deal with an economic cri-sis. Nobody called it a depression for the first year atleast, for the economic problems seemed verymuch like earlier cyclic recessions. Hoover calledconferences of businessmen and labor leaders. Hemet with mayors and governors and encouragedthem to speed up public works projects. He createdagencies and boards, such as the National CreditCorporation and the Emergency Committee for Em-ployment, to obtain voluntary action to solve theproblem. Hoover even supported a tax cut, whichCongress enacted in December 1929, but it did littleto stimulate spending.

ECONOMIC DECLINEVoluntary action and psychological campaignscould not stop the Depression. The stock market, af-ter appearing to bottom out in the winter of1930–1931, continued its decline, responding inpart to the European economic collapse that under-mined international finance and trade. Of course,not everyone lost money in the market. WilliamDanforth, founder of Ralston Purina, and JosephKennedy, film magnate, entrepreneur, and the fa-ther of a future president, were among those whomade millions of dollars by selling short as the mar-ket went down.

More than a collapsing market afflicted the econ-omy; an additional 1,300 banks failed in 1930. DespiteHoover’s pleas, many factories cut back on produc-tion, and some simply closed. U.S. Steel announced a10 percent wage cut in 1931. As the auto industry laidoff workers, the unemployment rate rose to more

than 40 percent in Detroit. More than 4 million Amer-icans were out of work in 1930, and at least 12 millionwere unemployed by 1932. Foreclosures and evictionscreated thousands of personal tragedies. While themiddle class watched in horror as their life savingsand their dreams disappeared, the rich were increas-ingly concerned as the price of government bonds(the symbol of safety and security) dropped. They be-gan to hoard gold and fear revolution.

There was never any real danger of revolution.Some farmers organized to dump their milk toprotest low prices, and when a neighbor’s farm wassold, they gathered to hold a penny auction, biddingonly a few cents for equipment and returning it totheir dispossessed neighbor. But everywhere, peopledespaired as the Depression deepened in 1931 and1932. For unemployed blacks and for many tenantfarmers, the Depression had little immediate effectbecause their lives were already so depressed. MostAmericans (the 98 percent who did not own stock)hardly noticed the stock market crash; for them, theDepression meant the loss of a job or a bank foreclo-sure. For Robert Symmonds it meant the failure of hisfather’s business and being forced to drop out of highschool. For some farmers, it was burning corn ratherthan coal because the price of corn had fallen so lowthat it was not worth marketing.

Per

cen

t o

f n

on

agri

cult

utr

al w

ork

ers

un

emp

loye

d 40

35

30

25

20

15

10

5

01929 1931 1933 1935 1937 1939

Year

Source: U.S. Bureau of the Census.

Unemployment Rate, 1929–1940

Although the unemployment rate declined during theNew Deal years, the number still unemployed remainedtragically high until World War II brought full employment.




For some in the cities, the Depression meant nothaving enough money to feed the children. InChicago, children fought with men and women overthe garbage dumped by the city trucks. In Toledo,when municipal and private charity funds were dry-ing up (as they did in all cities), those granted assis-tance were given only 2.14 cents per meal per per-son. In Philadelphia a social worker noticed that thechildren were playing a game called “Eviction.”“Sometimes they play ‘Relief,”’ she remarked, “but‘Eviction’ has more action and all of them know howto play.”

Not everyone went hungry, stood in bread lines,or lost jobs during the Depression, but almost

everyone was affected, and many victimstended to blame themselves. A business-man who lost his job and had to stand ina relief line remembered years later howhe would bend his head low so nobodywould recognize him. A 28-year-oldteacher in New Orleans was released be-

cause of a cut in funds, and in desperation she tooka job as a domestic servant. “If with all the advan-tages I’ve had,” she remarked, “I can’t make a living,I’m just no good, I guess. I’ve given up ever amount-ing to anything. It’s no use.”

The Depression probably disrupted women’slives less than men’s. When men lost their jobs,their identity and sense of purpose as the familybreadwinner were shattered. Some helped out with

family chores, but usually with bitterness and re-sentment. For women, however, even when moneywas short, there was still cooking, cleaning, andmending, and women were still in command oftheir households. Yet many women were forced todo extra work. They took in laundry, found room fora boarder, and made the clothes they formerlywould have bought. Women also bore the psycho-logical burden of unemployed husbands, hungrychildren, and unpaid bills. The Depression alteredpatterns of family life, and many families wereforced to move in with relatives. The marriage rate,the divorce rate, and the birthrate all dropped dur-ing the decade. Many of these changes created ten-sion that statistics cannot capture.

A Global DepressionHoover reacted to growing despair by urging morevoluntary action. He insisted on maintaining thegold standard, believing it to be the only responsiblecurrency, and a balanced budget, but so did almosteveryone else. He blamed the Depression on inter-national economic problems, and he was at leastpartly right. The legacy of the war and the globaleconomic policies of the 1920s had been one causeof the economic downturn in the United States, andas the United States sank into depression, the worldfollowed. In May 1931, the leading Austrian bankcollapsed; by June, the German financial system,

Out of Work The worstresult of the Depression washopelessness and despair.Those emotions are capturedin this painting by Isaac Soyerof an unemployment office.When did the unemploymentcrisis finally end? (Isaac Soyer,Employment Agency, 1937, Oilon canvas, 341/4 x 45 in. [87 x114.3 cm]. Collection of WhitneyMuseum of American Art, Pur-chase, 37.44, Photograph ©2000: Whitney Museum ofAmerican Art)

Depression EraBreadline





which had gone from hyperinflation to false stabil-ity, was in chaos. In September, England abandonedthe gold standard, precipitating a decline in inter-national lending and trade. Soon most of the indus-trialized world, including Argentina, Brazil, andJapan, was caught in the Great Depression. In somecountries, the social safety net of health and unem-ployment insurance helped, but there were hungryand unemployed people in much of the world. Thata stock market crash in the United States triggered aworldwide depression indicated that by 1930 the

United States was an economic worldpower, but that was little solace as theglobal depression exaggerated and ex-tended the Depression at home.

Despite the worldwide depression,Americans began to blame Hoover forsome of the disaster. The president be-came isolated and bitter. The shanties

that grew near all the large cities were called“Hoovervilles,” and the privies “Hoover villas.” Un-able to admit mistakes and to take a new tack, hecould not communicate personal empathy for thepoor and the unemployed.

Hoover did try innovative schemes. More publicworks projects were built during his administrationthan in the previous 30 years. In the summer of1931, he attempted to organize a pool of privatemoney to rescue banks and businesses that werenear failure. When the private effort failed, heturned reluctantly to Congress, which passed a billearly in 1932 authorizing the Reconstruction Fi-nance Corporation. The RFC was capitalized at $500million, but a short time later that was increased to$3 billion. It was authorized to make loans to banks,insurance companies, farm mortgage companies,and railroads. Some critics charged that it was sim-ply another trickle-down measure whereby busi-nessmen and bankers would be given aid while theunemployed were ignored. Hoover, however, cor-rectly understood the immense costs to individualsand to communities when a bank or mortgage com-pany failed. The RFC did help shore up a number ofshaky financial institutions and remained the majorgovernment finance agency until World War II. But itbecame much more effective under Roosevelt be-cause it lent directly to industry.

Hoover also asked Congress for a Home FinancingCorporation to make mortgages more readily avail-able. The Federal Home Loan Bank Act of 1932 be-came the basis for the Federal Housing Administra-tion of the New Deal years. He supported the passageof the Glass–Steagall Banking Act of 1932, which ex-panded credit to make more loans available to busi-nesses and individuals. But Hoover rejected calls for

the federal government to restrict production inhopes of raising farm prices—that, he believed, wastoo much government intervention. He maintainedthat the federal government should promote cooper-ation and even create public works. But he firmly be-lieved in loans, not direct subsidies, and he thought itwas the responsibility of state and local governments,as well as of private charity, to provide direct relief tothe unemployed and the needy.

The Bonus ArmyMany World War I veterans lost their jobs during theGreat Depression, and beginning in 1930, they lob-bied for the payment of their veterans’ bonuses,which were not due until 1945. A bill passed Con-gress in 1931, over Hoover’s veto, allowing them toborrow up to 50 percent of the bonus due them, butthis concession did not satisfy the destitute veter-ans. In May 1932, about 17,000 veterans marched onWashington. Some took up residence in a shanty-town called Bonus City that was located in the Ana-costia flats outside the city.

In mid-June, the Senate defeated the bonus bill,and most of the veterans, disappointed but resigned,accepted a free railroad ticket home. Several thou-sand remained, however, along with some wives andchildren, in the unsanitary shacks during the steam-ing summer heat. Among them were a small group ofcommitted Communists and other radicals. Hoover,who exaggerated the subversive elementsamong those still camped out in Washing-ton, refused to talk to the leaders and fi-nally called out the U.S. army.

General Douglas MacArthur, the armychief of staff, ordered the army to dis-perse the veterans. He described theBonus marchers as a “mob . . . animatedby the essence of revolution.” With tanks,guns, and tear gas, the army routed veterans who 15years before had worn the same uniform as their at-tackers. Two Bonus marchers were killed, and sev-eral others were injured. “What a pitiful spectacle isthat of the great American Government, mightiestin the world, chasing unarmed men, women andchildren with Army tanks,” commented a Washing-ton newspaper. “If the Army must be called out tomake war on unarmed citizens, this is no longerAmerica.” The army was not attacking revolutionar-ies in the streets of Washington but was routing be-wildered, confused, unemployed men who had seentheir American dream collapse.

The Bonus army fiasco, bread lines, andHoovervilles became the symbols of Hoover’s presi-dency. He deserved better because he tried to use

Children with“Hoover’s Poor

Farm” Sign

BonusExpeditionary

Force March onWashington






Bonus Army Shacks U.S. soldiers burn the Bonusarmy shacks within sight of the Capitol in the summer of1932. This image of the failure of the American dream waspublished widely around the world. Who do you blame forthe Bonus Army fiasco? (National Archives)

the power of the federal government to solve grow-ing and increasingly complex economic problems.But in the end, his personality and background lim-ited him. He could not understand why army veter-ans marched on Washington to ask for a handoutwhen he thought they should all be back homeworking hard, practicing self-reliance, and cooper-ating “to avert the terrible situation in which we aretoday.” He believed that the greatest problem beset-ting Americans was a lack of confidence. Yet hecould not communicate with these people or in-spire their confidence. Willing to use the federalgovernment to support business, he could not ac-cept federal aid for the unemployed. He feared anunbalanced budget and a large federal bureaucracythat would interfere with the “American way.” Ironi-cally, his actions and his inactions led in the nextyears to a massive increase in federal power and inthe federal bureaucracy.




ROOSEVELT AND THE FIRSTNEW DEALThe first New Deal, lasting from 1933 to early 1935,focused mainly on recovery from the Depressionand relief for the poor and unemployed. Some of theprograms were borrowed from the Hoover adminis-tration, and some had their origin in the progressiveperiod. Others were inspired by the nation’s experi-ences in mobilizing for World War I. No single ideo-logical position united all the legislation, for FranklinRoosevelt was a pragmatist who was willing to try avariety of programs. More than Hoover, however, he

believed in economic planning and in governmentspending to help the poor.

Roosevelt’s caution and conservatism shaped thefirst New Deal. He did not promote socialism orsuggest nationalizing the banks. He was even care-ful in authorizing public works projects to stimulatethe economy. The New Deal was based on the as-sumption that it was possible to create a just societyby superimposing a welfare state on the capitalistsystem, leaving the profit motive undisturbed.While the progressives believed in voluntary actionand only reluctantly concluded that the federal gov-ernment needed to intervene to promote a just soci-ety, the New Dealers, from the beginning, believedin an active role for the government. Roosevelt wasconfident he could achieve his goals through coop-eration with the business community. Later hewould move more toward reform, but at first his pri-mary concern was simply relief and recovery.

The Election of 1932The Republicans nominated Herbert Hoover for asecond term, but in the summer of 1932, the De-pression and Hoover’s unpopularity opened the wayfor the Democrats. After a shrewd campaign,Franklin D. Roosevelt, governor of New York,emerged from the pack and won thenomination. Journalist Walter Lipp-mann’s comment during the campaignthat Roosevelt was a “pleasant man who,without any important qualifications foroffice, would like very much to be Presi-dent” was exaggerated at the time and

FDR with LegBraces





The Disabled President This is a rare photograph ofFranklin Roosevelt in his wheelchair taken in a private moment withhis dog, Fala, and a young friend. Usually FDR’s advisers carefullyarranged to have the president photographed only when he wasseated or propped up behind a podium. Despite being paralyzed fromthe waist down, the president gave the impression of health and vital-ity until near the end of his life. Did his physical disability restrict hisability to be president? (Margaret Suckley Collection, Franklin DelanoRoosevelt Library)

seemed absurd later. Roosevelt, distantly related toTheodore Roosevelt, had served as an assistant sec-retary of the navy during World War I and had beenthe Democratic vice presidential candidate in 1920.Crippled by polio not long after, he had recoveredenough to serve as governor of New York for twoterms, although he was not especially well-knownby the general public in 1932.

As governor, Roosevelt had promoted cheaperelectric power, conservation, and old-age pensions.He became the first governor to support state aid forthe unemployed, “not as a matter of charity, but as amatter of social duty.” But it was difficult to tell dur-ing the presidential campaign exactly what he stoodfor. He did announce that the government must dosomething for the “forgotten man at the bottom ofthe economic pyramid,” yet he also mentioned theneed for balancing the budget and maintaining thegold standard. Ambiguity was probably the beststrategy in 1932, but the truth was that Rooseveltdid not have a master plan to save the country. But

he won the election overwhelmingly, carrying morethan 57 percent of the popular vote.

During the campaign, Roosevelt had promised a“new deal for the American people.” But the NewDeal had to wait for four months because the Con-stitution provided that the new president be inau-gurated on March 4 (this was changed toJanuary 20 by the Twentieth Amend-ment, ratified in 1933). During the longinterregnum, the state of the nation de-teriorated badly. The banking systemseemed near collapse, and the hardshipincreased. Despite his bitter defeat,Hoover tried to cooperate with the president-electand with a hostile Congress, but he could accom-plish little. Everyone waited for the new presidentto take office and to act.

In his inaugural address, Roosevelt announcedconfidently, “The only thing we have to fear is fearitself.” This, of course, was not true, for the countryfaced the worst crisis since the Civil War,but Roosevelt’s confidence and his abilityto communicate with ordinary Ameri-cans were obvious early in his presidency.He had clever speechwriters, a sense ofpace and rhythm in his speeches, and anability, when he spoke on the radio, toconvince listeners that he was speaking directly tothem. Recognizing the possibilities of the new me-dia, he instituted a series of radio “fireside chats” toexplain to the American people what he was doingto solve the nation’s problems. When he said “myfriends,” millions believed that he meant it, andthey wrote letters to him in unprecedented num-bers to explain their needs.

Roosevelt’s AdvisersDuring the interregnum, Roosevelt surroundedhimself with intelligent and innovative advisers.Some, such as James A. Farley, a former New YorkState boxing commissioner with a genius for re-membering names, and Louis Howe, Roosevelt’ssecretary and confidant since 1912, had helped planhis successful campaign. His cabinet was made upof a mixture of people from different backgroundswho often did not agree with one another. HaroldIckes, the secretary of the interior, was a Republicanlawyer from Chicago and a one-time supporter ofTheodore Roosevelt. Another Republican, HenryWallace of Iowa, a plant geneticist and agriculturalstatistician, became the secretary of agriculture.Frances Perkins, the first woman ever appointed toa cabinet post, became the secretary of labor. A dis-ciple of Jane Addams and Florence Kelley, she had

FDR’sInauguration

FDR, RadioAddress(1933)





798

been a settlement resident, secretary of the NewYork Consumers League, and an adviser to Al Smith.

In addition to the formal cabinet, Roosevelt ap-pointed an informal “Brain Trust,” including AdolphBerle, Jr., a young expert on corporation law, andRexford Tugwell, a Columbia University authorityon agricultural economics and a committed na-tional planner. Roosevelt also appointed RaymondMoley, another Columbia professor, who later be-came one of the president’s severest critics, andHarry Hopkins, a nervous, energetic man who lovedto bet on horse races and had left Iowa to be a socialworker in New York. Hopkins’s passionate concernfor the poor and unemployed would play a largerole in the formulation of New Deal policy.

Eleanor Roosevelt, the president’s wife, was a con-troversial first lady. She wrote a newspaper column

and made a great many speeches and ra-dio broadcasts. She traveled widely andwas constantly listening to the concerns ofwomen, minorities, and ordinary Ameri-cans. Attacked by critics who thought shehad too much power and mocked for herprotruding front teeth, her awkward ways,and her upper-class accent, she coura-geously took stands on issues of social justice andcivil rights. She helped push the president toward so-cial reform.

Roosevelt proved to be an adept politician. He wasnot well read, especially on economic matters, but hehad the ability to learn from his advisers and yet notbe dominated by them. He took ideas, plans, and sug-gestions from conflicting sources and combinedthem. He had a “flypaper mind,” one of his advisers

AMERICAN VOICES

President Roosevelt, and especially his wife Eleanor, receivedhundreds of thousands of letters from ordinary citizens askingfor help or explaining their troubles.The first lady finally hadto hire several people to answer the letters. But in the end,there was little she could do.

July 15, 1939Dear Sir and Madam,

Hardly expect this to reach you personally but Isimply have to write to someone about the hope-lessness of our trying to earn an honest living.

We are a family of four, one boy to enter highschool this fall, the other boy in junior high.We’vebeen married sixteen years, happily in spite of theterrific struggle trying to make both ends meet.

Our problem is the same as hundreds, morelikely thousands of others. We started out withdoctor and hospital bills the first few years of ourmarried life and are still trying to pay them off.Wemake a fair living wage but can’t live even comfort-ably on it as most of it goes to pay these old bills,all drawing interest now.We have tried to get on acash basis but then the creditors press us. No mat-ter how we try the future hasn’t a sign of a rosetint. Is there a solution?

The whole family needs dental and eye carebut how can it be managed? Husband’s insurance

even had to be dropped and his work is far fromsafe, but what else to do? We don’t ask for charityor relief, but just help to get on our feet and freeof debt.

Isn’t there aid of some sort for the honest peo-ple, trying to get along? How can people be happy,contented and good Americans when every cent isneeded for old accounts? I personally knowdozens of families struggling just as we are.What isto become of us? We can’t save for a rainy day be-cause every cent is needed for bills. . . . I wonder ifit’s worth the struggle. Can you yourselves realizethe fight we’re making to live decently and hon-estly? In this glorious land of plenty of ours howcan a common person get a start when he’s bur-dened with old doctor bills and other small ac-counts . . . ?

Very Sincerely,Mrs. Ivan G. MartinFoster, Oregon

■ If you were Mrs. Roosevelt’s secretary, how would youanswer this letter?

■ What does it reveal about the lot of the working poor atthe end of the 1930s?

Mrs. Ivan G. Martin,“What Is to Become of Us?” An Oregon Woman Writes to Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt

EleanorRoosevelt

Visiting WPANursery





The AmericanDream MargaretBourke-White, one of theoutstanding documentaryphotographers of the 1930s,captured the disjunction be-tween the ideal and the realin the Depression era. Thisphotograph, depictingAfrican American flood vic-tims lining up for food inLouisville, Kentucky, under-neath a propaganda bill-board erected by the Na-tional Association ofManufacturers, contraststhe American Dream withthe reality of racism andpoverty. Does this famousphotograph depict the con-trast in American life un-fairly? (Margaret Bourke-White, The Louisville Flood,1937. Photograph Copyright© 1966: Whitney Museum ofAmerican Art, New York, Giftof Sean Callahan [92.58])

decided. There was no overall plan, no master strat-egy. An improviser and a pragmatist who once likenedhimself to a football quarterback who called one playand if it did not work called a different one, Rooseveltwas an optimist by nature. And he believed in action.

ONE HUNDRED DAYSBecause Roosevelt took office in the middle of a majorcrisis, a cooperative Congress was willing to pass al-most any legislation that he put before it. Not sinceWoodrow Wilson’s first term had a president orches-trated Congress so effectively. In three months, nu-merous bills were rushed through. Some of them werehastily drafted and not well thought out, and somecontradicted other legislation. But many of the lawspassed during Roosevelt’s first 100 days would havefar-reaching implications for the relationship of gov-ernment to society. Roosevelt was an opportunist, butunlike Hoover, he was willing to use direct governmentaction to solve the problems of depression and unem-ployment. As it turned out, none of the bills passedduring the first 100 days cured the Depression, buttaken together, the legislation constituted one of themost innovative periods in American political history.

The Banking CrisisThe most immediate problem Roosevelt faced wasthe condition of the banks. Many had closed, andAmerican citizens, no longer trusting the financialinstitutions, were hoarding money and putting theirassets into gold. Roosevelt immediately declared afour-day bank holiday. Three days later, an emer-gency session of Congress approved his action andwithin hours gave the president broad powers overfinancial transactions, prohibited the hoarding ofgold, and allowed for the reopening of sound banks,sometimes with loans from the Reconstruction Fi-nance Corporation.

Within the next few years, Congress passed addi-tional legislation that gave the federal governmentmore regulatory power over the stock market andover the process by which corporations issuedstock. It also passed the Banking Act of 1933, whichstrengthened the Federal Reserve System, estab-lished the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation(FDIC), and insured individual deposits up to$5,000. Although the American Bankers Associationopposed the plan as “unsound, unscientific, unjustand dangerous,” banks were soon attracting deposi-tors by advertising that they were protected by gov-ernment insurance.




The Democratic platform in 1932 called for re-duced government spending and an end to Prohibi-tion. Roosevelt moved quickly on both. The EconomyAct, which passed Congress easily, called for a 15 per-cent reduction in government salaries as well as a re-organization of federal agencies to save money. Thebill also cut veterans’ pensions, despite their protests.However, the Economy Act’s small savings weredwarfed by other bills passed the same week, whichcalled for increased spending. The Beer-Wine Rev-enue Act legalized beer that had an alcohol contentof 3.2 percent and light wines and levied a tax onboth. The Twenty-First Amendment, ratified on De-cember 5, 1933, repealed the Eighteenth Amendmentand ended the Prohibition experiment. The veteransand the antiliquor forces, two of the strongest lobby-ing groups in the nation, were both overwhelmed bya Congress that seemed ready to give the presidentfree rein.

Congress granted Roosevelt great power to de-value the dollar and to manipulate inflation. Somemembers argued for the old Populist solution of freeand unlimited coinage of silver, while others calledfor issuing billions of dollars in paper currency.Bankers and businessmen feared inflation, but farm-ers and debtors favored an inflationary policy as away to raise prices and put more money in theirpockets. “I have always favored sound money,” Roo-sevelt announced, “and I do now, but it is ‘too darnedsound’ when it takes so much of farm products tobuy a dollar.” He rejected the more extreme inflation-ary plans supported by many congressmen from theagricultural states, but he did take the country off thegold standard. No longer would paper currency beredeemable in gold. The action terrified some con-servative businessmen, who argued that it wouldlead to “uncontrolled inflation and complete chaos.”Even Roosevelt’s director of the budget announcedsolemnly that going off the gold standard “meant theend of Western Civilization.”

Devaluation did not end Western civilization, butneither did it lead to instant recovery. After experi-menting with pushing the price of gold up by buyingit in the open market, Roosevelt and his advisersfixed the price at $35 an ounce in January 1934(against the old price of $20.63). This inflated the dol-lar by about 40 percent. Roosevelt also tried briefly toinduce inflation through the purchase of silver, butsoon the country settled down to a slightly inflatedcurrency and a dollar based on both gold and silver.

Relief MeasuresRoosevelt believed in economy in government andin a balanced budget, but he also wanted to help the

unemployed and the homeless. One survey esti-mated in 1933 that 1.5 million Americans werehomeless. One man with a wife and six childrenfrom Latrobe, Pennsylvania, who was being evictedwrote, “I have 10 days to get another house, no job,no means of paying rent, can you advise me as towhich would be the most humane way to dispose ofmyself and family, as this is about the only thingthat I see left to do.”

Roosevelt’s answer was the Federal EmergencyRelief Administration (FERA), which Congress au-thorized with an appropriation of $500 million in di-rect grants to cities and states. A few months later,Roosevelt created a Civil Works Administration(CWA) to put more than 4 million people to work onvarious state, municipal, and federal projects. Hop-kins, who ran both agencies, had experimented withwork relief programs in New York. Like most socialworkers, he believed it was much better to pay peo-ple to work than to give them charity. An accountantworking on a road project said, “I’d rather stay outhere in that ditch the rest of my life than take onecent of direct relief.”

The CWA was not always effective, but in justover a year, the agency built or restored half a mil-lion miles of roads and constructed 40,000 schoolsand 1,000 airports. It hired 50,000 teachers to keeprural schools open and others to teach adult educa-tion courses in the cities. It also put more than a bil-lion dollars of purchasing power into the economy.Roosevelt, who later would be accused of deficitspending, feared that the program was costing toomuch and might create a permanent class of reliefrecipients. In the spring of 1934, he ordered theCWA closed down.

The Public Works Administration (PWA), directedby Harold Ickes, in some respects overlapped thework of the CWA, but it lasted longer. Be-tween 1933 and 1939, the PWA built hos-pitals, courthouses, and school buildings.It helped construct structures as diverseas the port of Brownsville, Texas, a bridgethat linked Key West to the Florida main-land, and the library at the University ofNew Mexico. It built the aircraft carriers Yorktownand Enterprise, planes for the Army Air Corps, andlow-cost housing for slum dwellers.

One purpose of the PWA was economic pumppriming—the stimulation of the economy and con-sumer spending through the investment of govern-ment funds. Afraid that there might be scandals inthe agency, Ickes spent money slowly and carefully.Thus, during the first years, PWA projects, worth-while as most of them were, did little to stimulatethe economy.

“PWA inAction” Poster





CCC in Action The Civilian Conservation Corps was one ofthe most popular of all the New Deal programs. The CCC put unem-ployed men (and a few women) to work restoring forests and build-ing recreation facilities. Could we use a CCC today? (Courtesy FranklinD. Roosevelt Library, [7420(273)])

Agricultural Adjustment ActIn 1933, most farmers were desperate, as mountingsurpluses and falling prices drastically cut their in-comes. Some in the Midwest talked of open rebel-lion, even of revolution. But most observers sawonly hopelessness and despair in farmers who hadworked hard but were still losing their farms.

Congress passed a number of bills in 1933 and1934 to deal with the agricultural crisis. But the NewDeal’s principal solution to the farm problem was

the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA),which sought to control the overproduc-tion of basic commodities so that farmersmight regain the purchasing power theyhad enjoyed before World War I. To guar-antee these “parity prices” (the averageprices in the years 1909–1914), the pro-duction of major agricultural staples—wheat, cotton, corn, hogs, rice, tobacco,

and milk—would be controlled by paying the farm-ers to reduce their acreage under cultivation. TheAAA levied a tax at the processing stage to pay forthe program.

The act aroused great disagreement amongfarm leaders and economists, but the controversywas nothing compared with the outcry from thepublic over the initial action of the AAA in thesummer of 1933. To prevent a glut on the cottonand pork markets, the agency ordered 10 millionacres of cotton plowed up and 6 million young pigsslaughtered. It seemed unnatural, even immoral,to kill pigs and plow up cotton when millions ofpeople were underfed and in need of clothes. Thestory circulated that in the South, mules trainedfor many years to walk between the rows of cottonnow refused to walk on the cotton plants. Somesuggested that those mules were more intelligentthan the government bureaucrats who had or-dered the action.

The Agricultural Adjustment Act did raise theprices of some agricultural products. But it helpedthe larger farmers more than the small operators,and it was often disastrous for the tenant farmersand sharecroppers. Landowners often dischargedtenant families when they reduced the acres undercultivation. Many sharecroppers were simply castout on the road with a few possessions andnowhere to go. Large farmers cultivated theirfewer acres more intensely, so that the total cropwas little reduced. In the end, the prolongeddrought that hit the Southwest in 1934 did morethan the AAA to limit production and raise agricul-tural prices. But the long-range significance of theAAA, which was later declared unconstitutional,

was the establishment of the idea that the govern-ment should subsidize farmers for limiting pro-duction.

Industrial RecoveryThe legislation during the first days of the Rooseveltadministration contained something for almostevery group. The National Industrial Recovery Act(NIRA) was designed to help business, raise prices,control production, and put people back to work.The act established the National Recovery Adminis-tration (NRA), with the power to set fair competitioncodes in all industries. For a time, everyone forgotabout antitrust laws and talked of cooperation andplanning rather than competition. There were pa-rades and rallies, even a postage stamp, and indus-tries that cooperated could display a blue eagle, thesymbol of the NRA, designed to symbolize patrioticcooperation. “We Do Our Part,” the posters andbanners proclaimed, but the results were somewhatless than the promise.

Section 7a of the NIRA, included at the insistenceof organized labor, guaranteed labor’s right to orga-nize and to bargain collectively and established theNational Labor Board to see that their rights were re-spected. But the board, usually dominated by busi-nesspeople, often interpreted the labor provisions ofthe contracts loosely. In addition, small-business

Henry A.Wallace

Explains theFarm Act(1933)





SOUTHCAROLINA

GEORGIA

ALABAMA

MISSISSIPPI

ILLINOISKENTUCKY

WESTVIRGINIA

NORTH CAROLINA

TENNESSEE

MISSOURI

VIRGINIAPaducah

Nashville

Chattanooga

Knoxville

Asheville

Bristol

Muscle Shoals

Riv

erM

issi

ssippi

Cu m berland

River

Ri ver

Ohio

R i ver

Ten nessee

Tennessee Riverwatershed

Dams

Power plants

Chemical plants

The Tennessee Valley Authority

The TVA transformed the way the Tennessee valley looked; it replaced a wild river with a series of flood-control and hy-droelectric dams and created a series of lakes behind the dams. It stopped short of the coordinated regional planning thatsome people wanted, but it was one of the most important New Deal projects.

owners complained that the NIRA was unfair to theirinterests. Any attempt to set prices led to controversy.

Many consumers suspected that the codes andcontracts were raising prices, while others fearedthe return of monopoly in some industries. Onewoman wrote the president that she was takingdown her blue eagle because she had lost her job;another wrote from Tennessee to denounce theNIRA as a joke because it helped only the chainstores. The booster campaign for New Deal legisla-tion backfired in the end because anyone with acomplaint about a New Deal agency seemed to takeit out on the NRA symbol of the blue eagle. Whenthe Supreme Court declared the NIRA unconstitu-tional in 1935, few people complained. Still, theNIRA was an ambitious attempt to bring some orderinto a confused business situation, and the laborprovisions of the act were picked up later by the Na-tional Labor Relations Act.

Civilian Conservation CorpsOne of the most popular and successful of the NewDeal programs, the Civilian Conservation Corps(CCC), combined work relief with the preservationof natural resources. It put young unemployedwhite men, such as Robert Symmonds, between

ages 17 and 25 to work on reforestation, road andpark construction, flood control, and other projects.There were a few carefully segregated black units.The men lived in work camps (more than 1,500camps in all) and earned $30 a month, $25 of whichhad to be sent home to their families. Some com-plained that the CCC camps, run by the U.S. army,were too military, and one woman wrote from Min-nesota to point out that all the best young men wereat CCC camps when they ought to be home lookingfor real jobs and finding brides. Others complainedthat the CCC did nothing for unemployed youngwomen, so a few special camps were organized forthem, but only 8,000 women took part in a programthat by 1941 had nearly 3 million participants. Over-all, the CCC was one of the most successful andleast controversial of all the New Deal programs.

Tennessee Valley AuthorityFranklin Roosevelt, like his distant Republican rela-tive Theodore, believed in conservation. He pro-moted flood-control projects and added millions ofacres to the country’s national forests, wildliferefuges, and fish and game sanctuaries. But themost important New Deal conservation project, theTennessee Valley Authority (TVA), owed more to




Republican George Norris, a progressive senatorfrom Nebraska, than to Roosevelt.

During World War I, the federal government hadbuilt a hydroelectric plant and two munitions facto-ries at Muscle Shoals, on the Tennessee River in Al-abama. The government tried unsuccessfully to sellthese facilities to private industry, but all throughthe 1920s, Norris campaigned to have the federalgovernment operate them for the benefit of the val-ley’s residents. Twice Republican presidents vetoedbills that would have allowed federal operation, butRoosevelt endorsed Norris’s idea and expanded itinto a regional development plan.

Congress authorized the TVA as an independentpublic corporation with the power to sell electricityand fertilizer and to promote flood control and landreclamation. The TVA built nine major dams andmany minor ones between 1933 and 1944, affecting

parts of Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia,Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, andKentucky. Some private utility companiesclaimed that the TVA offered unfair com-petition to private industry, but it was animaginative experiment in regional plan-ning. It promoted everything from flood

control to library bookmobiles. For residents of thevalley, it meant cheaper electricity and changedlifestyles. The TVA meant radios, electric irons,washing machines, and other appliances for thefirst time. The largest federal construction projectever launched, it also created jobs for many thou-sands who helped build the dams. But governmentofficials and businessmen who feared that the ex-periment would lead to socialism curbed the re-gional planning possibilities of the TVA.

Critics of the New DealThe furious legislative activity during the first 100days of the New Deal helped alleviate the pessimismand despair hanging over the country. Stock marketprices rose slightly, and industrial production wasup 11 percent at the end of 1933. Still, the countryremained locked in depression, and nearly 12 mil-lion Americans were without jobs. Yet Rooseveltcaptured the imagination of ordinary Americanseverywhere. But conservatives were not so sure thatRoosevelt was a savior; in fact, many businesspeo-ple, after being impressed with Roosevelt’s earlyeconomy measures and approving programs suchas the NIRA, began to fear that the president wasleading the country toward socialism. Appalled bywork relief programs, regional planning such as theTVA, and the abandonment of the gold standard,many businesspeople were also annoyed by the

style of the president, whom they called “that manin the White House.”

The conservative revolt against Roosevelt sur-faced in the summer of 1934 as the congressionalelections approached. A group of disgruntled politi-cians and businesspeople formed the LibertyLeague. The league supported conservative or atleast anti–New Deal candidates for Congress, but ithad little influence. In the election of 1934, the De-mocrats increased their majority from 310 to 319 inthe House and from 60 to 69 in the Senate (only thesecond time in the twentieth century that the partyin power had increased its control of Congress inthe midterm election). A few people were learningto hate Roosevelt, but it was obvious that mostAmericans approved of what he was doing.

While some thought the New Deal was too radi-cal, others maintained that the government had notdone enough to help the poor. One source of criti-cism was the Communist party. Attracting support-ers from all walks of life during a time when capital-ism seemed to have failed, the Communist partyincreased its membership from 7,500 in 1930 to75,000 in 1938. The Communists organized protestmarches and tried to reach out to the oppressed andunemployed. While a majority who joined the partycame from the working class, communism had aspecial appeal to writers, intellectuals, and some

The Radio Priest Father Charles E. Coughlin from RoyalOak, Michigan, was a flamboyant Catholic priest who was just asmuch the master of the radio as the president himself. At first he sup-ported Roosevelt, but in 1935 he became one of FDR’s most causticcritics. His impassioned anti-Semitic remarks finally caused theCatholic church to take him off the air. In what other ways was theradio important in the 1920s? (Library of Congress [LC-USZ6-2-111027])

The TennesseeValley Authority





college students during a decade when the Ameri-can dream had turned into a nightmare.

A larger number of Americans, however, were in-fluenced by other movements promising easy solu-tions to poverty and unemployment. In Minnesota,Governor Floyd Olson, elected on a Farm–Laborticket, accused capitalism of causing the Depressionand startled some listeners when he thundered, “Ihope the present system of government goes rightto hell.” In California, Upton Sinclair, the muckrak-ing socialist and author of The Jungle, ran for gover-nor on the platform “End Poverty in California.” Hepromised to pay everyone over age 60 a pension of$50 a month using higher income and inheritancetaxes to finance the program. He won in the primarybut lost the election, and his program collapsed.

California also produced Dr. Francis E.Townsend, who claimed he had a national followingof more than 5 million people. His supportersbacked the Townsend Old Age Revolving PensionPlan, which promised $200 a month to all unem-ployed citizens over age 60 on the condition thatthey spend it in the same month they received it.Economists laughed at the utopian scheme, but fol-lowers organized thousands of Townsend PensionClubs across the country.

More threatening to Roosevelt and the New Dealwere the protest movements led by Father CharlesE. Coughlin and Senator Huey P. Long. Father

Coughlin, a Roman Catholic priest froma Detroit suburb, attracted an audienceof 30 million to 45 million to his nationalradio show. At first, he supported Roo-sevelt’s policies, but later he savagely at-tacked the New Deal as excessivelyprobusiness. Mixing religious commen-tary with visions of a society operating

without bankers and big businessmen, he rousedhis audience with blatantly anti-Semitic appeals.Most often the “evil” bankers he described wereJewish—the Rothschilds, Warburgs, and Kuhn-Loebs. Anti-Semitism reached a peak in the 1930s,so Jews bore the brunt of nativist fury.

Huey Long, like Coughlin, had a charisma thatwon support from the millions still trying to survive

in a country where the continuing de-pression made day-to-day existence astruggle. Elected governor of Louisianain 1928, Long promoted a “Share theWealth” program. He taxed the oil re-fineries and built hospitals, schools, andthousands of miles of new highways. By1934, he was the virtual dictator of his

state, personally controlling the police and thecourts. Long talked about a guaranteed $2,000 to

$3,000 income for all American families (18.3 mil-lion families earned less than $1,000 per year in1936) and promised pensions for the elderly andcollege educations for the young. He would pay forthese programs by taxing the rich and liquidatingthe great fortunes. Had not an assassin’s bullet cutLong down in September 1935, he might havemounted a third-party challenge to Roosevelt.

Huey Long,“Share Our

Wealth”(1935)

Father CharlesE. Coughlin, “A

Third Party”(1936)






THE SECOND NEW DEALResponding in part to the discontent of the lowermiddle class but also to the threat of variousutopian schemes, Roosevelt moved his programs in1935 toward the goals of social reform and socialjustice. At the same time, he departed from at-tempts to cooperate with the business community.“We find our population suffering from old inequal-ities,” Roosevelt announced in his annual messageto Congress in January 1935. “In spite of our effortsand in spite of our talk, we have not weeded out theoverprivileged and we have not effectively lifted upthe underprivileged.”

Work Relief and Social SecurityThe Works Progress Administration (WPA), autho-rized by Congress in April 1935, was the first mas-sive attempt to deal with unemployment and its de-moralizing effect on millions of Americans. TheWPA employed about 3 million people a year on avariety of socially useful projects. The WPA workers,who earned wages lower than private industry paid,built bridges, airports, libraries, roads, and golfcourses. Nearly 85 percent of the funds went directlyinto salaries and wages.

A minor but important part of the WPA fundingsupported writers, artists, actors, and musicians.Richard Wright, Jack Conroy, and Saul Bellow wereamong the 10,000 writers who were paid less than$100 a month. Experimental theater, innovative andwell-written guides to all the states, murals paintedin municipal and state buildings, and theHistorical Records Survey were amongthe long-lasting results of these projects.

Only one member of a family couldqualify for a WPA job, and first choice al-ways went to the man. A woman couldqualify only if she headed the household.But eventually more than 13 percent of the peoplewho worked for the WPA were women, althoughtheir most common employment was in the sewingroom, where old clothes were made over. “For un-skilled men we have the shovel. For unskilled

WPA’s FederalArt Project





WPA Workers TheWPA (which some wagssaid stood for “We PutterAround”) employed manypeople for a great variety ofjobs. This is an unusual pho-tograph because it is incolor. A few photographerswho worked for govern-ment agencies were begin-ning to experiment withcolor film, but most of thephotographs that survivefrom the 1930s are blackand white. Does the govern-ment have a responsibilityto create jobs for the unem-ployed during a depression?(Bettmann-CORBIS)

women we have only the needle,” one official re-marked.

The WPA was controversial from the beginning.Critics charged that the agency had hired Commu-nists to paint murals or work on the state guides. Forothers, a “lazy good-for-nothing” leaning on ashovel symbolized the WPA. The initials WPA, somewags charged, stood for “We Pay for All” or “We Put-ter Around.” Yet for all the criticism, the WPA diduseful work; the program built nearly 6,000 schools,more than 2,500 hospitals, and 13,000 playgrounds.More important, it restored the morale of millions ofunemployed Americans.

The National Youth Administration (NYA) sup-plemented the work of the WPA and assisted youngmen and women between ages 16 and 25, many of

them students. A young law studentnamed Richard Nixon earned 35 cents anhour working for the NYA while he was atDuke University, and Lyndon Johnson be-gan his political career as director of theTexas NYA.

By far the most enduring reform camewith the passage of the Social Security Actof 1935. Since the progressive period, so-cial workers and reformers had argued for

a national system of health insurance, old-age pen-sions, and unemployment insurance. By the 1930s,

the United States remained the only major indus-trial country without such programs. Within theRoosevelt circle, Frances Perkins argued moststrongly for social insurance, but the popularity ofthe Townsend Plan and other schemes toaid the elderly helped convince Rooseveltof the need to act. The number of peopleover age 65 in the country increased from5.7 million in 1925 to 7.8 million in 1935,and that group demanded action.

The Social Security Act of 1935 was acompromise. Congress quickly dropped aplan for federal health insurance becauseof opposition from the medical profession. Themost important provision of the act was old-age andsurvivor insurance to be paid for by a tax of 1 per-cent on both employers and employees. The bene-fits initially ranged from $10 to $85 a month. The actalso established a cooperative federal–state systemof unemployment compensation. Other provisionsauthorized federal grants to the states to help carefor the disabled and the blind. Finally, the Social Se-curity Act provided some aid to dependent children.This provision would eventually expand to becomethe largest federal welfare program.

The National Association of Manufacturers de-nounced social security as a program that would regi-ment the people and destroy individual self-reliance.

PresidentRoosevelt

Focuses onAmerica’s

Youth

FrancesPerkins and theSocial Security

Act (1935,1960)






TEXAS

OKLAHOMANEW

MEXICO

NEBRASKA

COLORADOKANSAS

WYOMING IOWA

MO

AR

MEXICO

Severe

Severest

Areas of Wind Erosion1935–1940

The Dust Bowl

This map depicts the wide extent of damage caused by highwinds and drought, the worst in the history of the country,according to the U.S.Weather Bureau.

Yet in no other country was social insurance paid forin part by a regressive tax on workers’ wages. “We put

those payroll contributions there so as togive the contributors a legal, moral, andpolitical right to collect their pensions andunemployment benefits,” Roosevelt laterexplained. “With those taxes in there, nodamn politician can ever scrap my socialsecurity program.” It was never intended as

a traditional pension program, but rather as a socialcontract whereby one generation helped to pay forthe previous generation’s retirement. But the law alsoexcluded many people, including those who neededit the most, such as farm laborers and domestic ser-vants. It discriminated against married women whowere wage earners, and it failed to protect againstsickness. Yet for all its weaknesses, it was one of themost important New Deal measures. A landmark inAmerican social legislation, it marked the beginningof the welfare state that would expand significantly af-ter World War II.

Aiding the FarmersThe Social Security Act and the Works Progress Ad-ministration were only two signs of Roosevelt’sgreater concern for social reform. The flurry of legis-lation in 1935 and early 1936, often called the “sec-ond New Deal,” also included an effort to help Amer-ican farmers. More than 1.7 million farm families hadannual incomes of less than $500 in 1935, and 42 per-cent of all those who lived on farms were tenants. TheResettlement Administration (RA), motivated in partby a Jeffersonian ideal of yeoman farmers workingtheir own land, set out to relocate tenant farmers onland purchased by the government. Lack of fundsand fears that the Roosevelt administration was try-ing to establish Soviet-style collective farms limitedthe effectiveness of the RA program.

Much more important in improving the lives offarm families was the Rural Electrification Adminis-tration (REA), which was authorized in 1935 to lendmoney to cooperatives to generate and distributeelectricity in isolated rural areas not served by pri-vate utilities. Only 10 percent of the nation’s farmshad electricity in 1936. When the REA’s lines were fi-nally attached, they dramatically changed the livesof millions of farm families who had been able onlyto dream about the radios, washing machines, andfarm equipment advertised in magazines.

In the hill country west of Austin, Texas, for exam-ple, there was no electricity until the end of the 1930s.Houses were illuminated by kerosene lamps, whosewicks had to be trimmed just right or the lamp smokedor went out, but even with perfect adjustment, it was

difficult to read by them. There were no bathrooms,because bathrooms required running water, and run-ning water depended on an electric pump.

Women and children hauled water constantly—forinfrequent baths, for continuous canning (becausewithout a refrigerator, fruits and vegetables had to beput up almost immediately or they spoiled), and forwash day. Wash day, always Monday, meant scrubbingclothes by hand with harsh soap on a washboard; itmeant boiling clothes in a large copper vat over awoodstove and stirring them with a wooden fork. Itwas a hot, backbreaking job, especially in summer.

It was memory of life in the hill country and per-sonal knowledge of how hard his mother and grand-mother toiled that inspired a young congressmanfrom Texas, Lyndon Johnson, to work to bring ruralelectrification to the area. In November 1939, thelights finally came on in the hill country, pluggingthe area into the twentieth century.

The Dust Bowl: An Ecological DisasterThose who tried to farm on the Great Plains fell vic-tim to years of drought and dust storms. Record heatwaves and below-average rainfall in the 1930s turnedan area from the Oklahoma panhandle to westernKansas into a giant dust bowl. A single storm on May

Social SecurityAct Poster





Dust Bowl Family Thousands of familiesfled the dust bowl in old cars and headed for Cali-fornia. With no place to sleep, they used sheetsand blankets to turn their cars into tents. JohnSteinbeck wrote about these migrants in TheGrapes of Wrath. Do the dust bowl migrants repre-sent a failure of the American dream? (CourtesyFranklin D. Roosevelt Library [53227(575)])

11, 1934, removed 300 million tons of topsoil andturned day into night. Between 1932 and 1939, therewas an average of 50 storms a year. Cities kept theirstreetlights on for 24 hours a day. Dust covered every-thing from food to bedspreads and piled up in dunesin city streets and barnyards. Thousands died of “dustpneumonia.” One woman remembered what it waslike at night: “A trip for water to rinse the grit from ourlips, and then back to bed with washcloths over ournoses, we try to lie still, because every turn stirs thedust on the blankets.” By the end of the decade,10,000 farm homes were abandoned to the elements,and 9 million acres of farmland were reduced to awasteland. By the end of the decade, 3.5 million peo-ple had abandoned their farms and joined a massivemigration to find better lives.

More than 350,000 left Oklahoma during thedecade and moved to California, a place that seemed

to many like the promised land. But thename Okie came to mean any farm mi-grant. The plight of these wayfarers was im-mortalized by John Steinbeck in his novelabout the Joad family, The Grapes of Wrath(1939). The next year, John Ford made apowerful movie based on the book, star-

ring Henry Fonda as Tom Joad. Many Americans sym-pathized with the plight of the embattled farm familytrying to escape the dust bowl and find a better life inCalifornia; others interpreted their defeat as a symbolof the failure of the American dream.

The dust bowl was a natural disaster, but it wasaided and exaggerated by human actions and inac-tions. The semiarid plains west of the ninety-eighth

meridian were not suitable for intensive agriculture.Overgrazing, too much plowing, and indiscriminateplanting over a period of 60 years exposed the thinsoil to the elements. When the winds came in the1930s, much of the land simply blew away. In the end,it was a matter of too little government planning andregulation and too many farmers using new technol-ogy to exploit natural resources for their own gain.

The Roosevelt administration did try to deal withthe problem. The Taylor Grazing Act of 1934 re-stricted the use of the public range in an attempt toprevent overgrazing, and it ended an era of unregu-lated use of natural resources in the West. Before1934, anyone could use public land, but the 1934 actrequired a permit and a fee. The Taylor Act estab-lished the principle that the remaining public do-main was under federal control and notfor sale. The Civilian Conservation Corpsand other New Deal agencies plantedtrees, and the Soil Conservation Servicepromoted drought-resistant crops andcontour plowing, but it was too little andtoo late. Even worse, according to someauthorities, government measures ap-plied after the disaster of 1930 encouraged farmersto return to raising wheat and other inappropriatecrops, leading to more dust bowl crises in the 1950sand 1970s.

The New Deal and the WestThe New Deal probably aided the West more than anyother region. The CCC, AAA, drought relief measures,

Family in aDust Storm

FDR FiresideChat,

September 6,1936






and various federal agencies helped the region toan extent that was out of proportion to the peoplewho lived there. In fact, the top 14 states in percapita expenditure by federal agencies during the1930s were all in the West. Most important were thelarge-scale water projects. The Boulder Dam (laterrenamed the Hoover Dam) on the Colorado River

not only provided massive amounts of hydroelec-tric power but, with the construction of a 259-mileaqueduct, also provided the water that caused thecity of Los Angeles to boom.

The largest power project of all was the GrandCoulee Dam on the Columbia River northwest ofSpokane, Washington. Employing tens of thousands

Seattle

San Francisco

Albuquerque

Denver

Dallas

Los AngelesPhoenix

WASHINGTON

OREGON

CALIFORNIA

NEVADA

IDAHO

MONTANA

WYOMING

COLORADOUTAH

ARIZONA

NEWMEXICO

NORTHDAKOTA

SOUTHDAKOTA

NEBRASKA

KANSAS

OKLAHOMA

TEXAS

MINNESOTA

IOWA

WISCONSIN

ILLINOIS

MISSOURI

ARKANSAS

LOUISIANA

MISSISSIPPI

HAWAII

ALASKA

Bureau of Indian Affairs control

30% or more Bureau of Land Management control

Department of Defense control

National Forest Service control

National Park Service control

Taylor Grazing Act, 1934

The Taylor Grazing Act of 1934 marked the end of an era when the federal governmenttransferred public land to private ownership. The federal ownership or control of vastamounts of land in the West set up a conflict between rugged individualism and govern-ment planning and management. Should the government own or control this amount of land?




of men and pouring millions of dollars into theeconomy, the dam, finally completed in 1941, pro-vided cheap electricity for the Pacific Northwest andeventually irrigated more than a million acres ofarid land.

Despite all the federal aid to the region, manywesterners, holding fast to the myth of frontier indi-vidualism, bitterly criticized the regulation and thebureaucracy that went with the grants. Cattlemen inWyoming, Colorado, and Montana desperatelyneeded the help of the federal government, buteven as they accepted the aid, they denounced Roo-sevelt and the New Deal.

Controlling Corporate Power and Taxing the WealthyIn the summer of 1935, Roosevelt set out to controlthe large corporations, and he even toyed with radicalplans to tax the well-to-do heavily and redistributewealth in the United States. The Public Utility Hold-ing Company Act, passed in 1935, attempted to re-strict the power of the giant utility companies, the 12largest of which controlled more than half the coun-try’s power. The act gave various government com-missions the authority to regulate and control thepower companies and included a “death sentence”

clause that gave each company five years to demon-strate that its services were efficient. If it could notdemonstrate this, the government could dissolve thecompany. This was one of the most radical attemptsto control corporate power in American history.

In his message to Congress in 1935, Rooseveltalso pointed out that the federal revenue laws had“done little to prevent an unjust concentration ofwealth and economic power.” He suggested steeperincome taxes for wealthy groups and a much largerinheritance tax. When Congress dropped the inheri-tance tax provision, however, Roosevelt did not fightto have it restored. Even the weakened bill, increas-ing estate and gift taxes and raising the income taxrates at the top, angered many in the business com-munity who thought that Roosevelt had sold out toHuey Long’s “Share the Wealth” scheme.

The New Deal for LaborLike many progressive reformers, Roosevelt wasmore interested in improving the lot of workingpeople by passing social legislation than bystrengthening the bargaining position of organizedlabor. Yet he saw labor as an important balance tothe power of industry, and he listened to his advis-ers, especially Frances Perkins and Senator RobertWagner of New York, who persistently brought upthe needs of organized labor.

Roosevelt supported the National Labor RelationsAct. Passed in 1935, it outlawed blacklisting and anumber of other practices and reasserted labor’sright to organize and to bargain collectively. The actalso established a Labor Relations Board with thepower to certify a properly elected bargaining unit.The act did not require workers to join unions, but itmade the federal government a regulator, or at least aneutral force, in management–labor relations. Thatalone made the National Labor Relations Act one ofthe most important New Deal reform measures.

The Roosevelt administration’s friendly attitudetoward organized labor helped increase union mem-bership from less than 3 million in 1933 to 4.5 millionby 1935. Many groups, however, were left out, includ-ing farm laborers, unskilled workers, and women.Only about 3 percent of working women belonged tounions, and women earned only about 60 percent ofwages paid to men for equivalent work. Still, manypeople resented that women were employed at all.The Brotherhood of Railway and Steamship Clerksruled that no married woman whose husband couldsupport her was eligible for a job.

The American Federation of Labor (AFL) had littleinterest in organizing unskilled workers, but a newgroup of committed and militant labor leaders

Pooresttwo-fifths

Middleone-fifth

Wealthiesttwo-fifths

13.3%

72.6%

14.1%


Distribution of Income, 1935–1936

Roosevelt and the New Deal never sought consistentlyto redistribute wealth in America, and a great disparity inincome and assets remained. Why didn’t Roosevelt andhis advisors try to redistribute wealth?




emerged in the 1930s to take up that task. John L.Lewis, the eloquent head of the United Mine Work-ers, was the most aggressive. He was joined by DavidDubinsky of the International Ladies’ Garment Work-ers, and Sidney Hillman, president of the Amalga-mated Clothing Workers. Dubinsky and Hillman weresocialists who believed in economic planning, butboth had worked closely with social justice progres-sives. These new progressive labor leaders formedthe Committee of Industrial Organization (CIO)within the AFL and set out to organize workers in thesteel, auto, and rubber industries. Rather than sepa-rating workers by skill or craft as the AFL preferred,they organized everyone into an industry-wide unionmuch as the Knights of Labor had done in the 1880s.They also used new and aggressive tactics.

In 1936, the workers at three rubber plants inAkron, Ohio, went on unauthorized strikes. Insteadof picketing outside the factory, they occupied thebuildings and took them over, preventing the own-ers from running the factory with non-union work-ers. The “sit-down strike” became a new protesttechnique. Sometimes the workers occupied a fac-tory for a week or more. After sit-down strikesagainst General Motors plants in Atlanta, Georgia,and Flint, Michigan, General Motors finally ac-cepted the United Auto Workers (UAW) as their em-ployees’ bargaining agent. The General Motorsstrike was the most important event in a critical pe-riod of labor upheaval. Labor’s voice now began tobe heard in the decision-making process in majorindustries in which labor had long been denied anyrole. The strikes at General Motors also helped raisethe status of organized labor in the eyes of manyAmericans.

Violence spread along with the sit-down strike.Chrysler capitulated, but the Ford Motor Companyused hired gunmen to discourage the strikers. Abloody struggle ensued before Ford agreed to acceptthe UAW as the bargaining agent. Even U.S. Steel,which had been militantly anti-union, signed anagreement with the Steel Workers Organizing Com-mittee calling for a 40-hour workweek and an eight-hour workday. But other steel companies refused togo along. In Chicago on Memorial Day in 1937, aconfrontation between the police and peacefulpicketers at the Republic Steel plant resulted in 10deaths. In the “Memorial Day Massacre,” as it cameto be called, the police fired without provocationinto a crowd of workers and their families, who hadgathered near the plant in a holiday mood. All 10 ofthe dead were shot in the back.

The CIO’s aggressive tactics gained many newmembers, to the horror of AFL leaders. They ex-pelled the CIO leaders from the AFL, only to see

them form a separate Congress of Industrial Organi-zation (the initials stayed the same). By acceptingunskilled workers, African Americans, and otherswho had never belonged to a union before, the CIOinfused the labor movement with a new spirit.

America’s Minorities in the 1930sHalf a million African Americans joined unionsthrough the CIO during the 1930s, and many blackswere aided by various New Deal agencies. Yet the fa-miliar pattern of discrimination, low-paying jobs,and intimidation through violence persisted.Lynchings in the South actually increased in theNew Deal years, rising from 8 in 1932 to 28 in 1933and 20 in 1935.

One particular case came to symbolize and dra-matize discrimination against African Americans inthe 1930s. On March 25, 1931, in Scottsboro, Al-abama, two young white women accused nine blackmen of raping them in a railroad boxcar as they allhitched a free ride. A jury of white men found allnine blacks guilty, and the court sentenced eight todie. The U.S. Supreme Court ordered new trials in1933, on the grounds that the accused rapists hadnot received proper legal counsel. The case gar-nered much publicity in the United States andabroad. The youth of the defendants, their quicktrial, and the harsh sentences made the “Scottsboroboys” a popular cause for many northern liberalsand especially the Communist party.

For many southerners, however, it was a matterof defending the honor of white women. As one ob-server remarked of one of the accusers, she “mightbe a fallen woman, but by God she is a whitewoman.” However, evidence supporting the allegedrapes was never presented, and eventually one ofthe women recanted. Yet the case dragged on. Innew trials, five of the young men were convictedand given long prison terms. Charges against theother four were dropped in 1937. Four of the re-maining five were paroled by 1946, and the fifth es-caped to Michigan.

African Americans did not have to be accused ofrape to want to flee to the North, however, and themigration of blacks to northern cities, which hadaccelerated during World War I, continued duringthe 1930s. The collapse of cotton prices forcedblack farmers and farm laborers to flee north forsurvival. But since most were poorly educated,they soon became trapped in northern ghettos,where they were eligible for only the most menialjobs. The black unemployment rate was triple thatof whites, and blacks often received less per personin welfare payments.




Sharecroppers Despite the black migration North duringWorld War I and the 1920s, more than 80 percent of African Ameri-cans lived in the South during the 1930s. Most were sharecroppers,tenant farmers who often were in debt to the landlord. They weretrapped by prejudice, unable to vote, and oppressed by poverty. TheNew Deal policies often made their situation worse. Many werekicked off the land and became homeless drifters. Can you imaginewhat it was like to be a sharecropper? Why did the nation toleratesuch inequality? (Library of Congress, LC-USF34T01-9575)

Black leaders attacked the Roosevelt administra-tion for supporting or allowing segregation in gov-ernment-sponsored facilities. The TVA model townof Norris, Tennessee, was off limits for blacks, andAAA policies actually drove blacks off the land in theSouth. The CCC segregated black and white work-ers, and the PWA financed segregated housing pro-jects. Some charged that NRA stood for “NegroesRarely Allowed.” Blacks ought to realize, a writer inthe NAACP journal The Crisis warned in 1935, “thatthe powers-that-be in the Roosevelt administrationhave nothing for them.” Roosevelt, fearing that hemight antagonize southern congressmen whosebacking he needed, refused to support the two ma-jor civil rights bills of the era, an antilynching billand a bill to abolish the poll tax. Yet Harold Ickesand Harry Hopkins worked to ensure that blackswere given opportunities in New Deal agencies. By1941, black federal employees totaled 150,000, morethan three times the number during the Hoover ad-ministration. Most worked in the lower ranks, but

some were lawyers, architects, officemanagers, and engineers.

Partly responsible for the presence ofmore black employees was the “blackcabinet,” a group of more than 50 youngblacks who had appointments in variousNew Deal agencies and were led by MaryMcLeod Bethune, the daughter of a

sharecropper. She had founded a black primaryschool in Florida and then transformed it intoBethune-Cookman College. In the 1920s, she hadorganized the National Council of Negro Women. In1934, Harry Hopkins, following the advice ofEleanor Roosevelt, appointed her to the advisorycommittee of the National Youth Administration.Bethune had some impact on New Deal policy andon the black cabinet. She spoke out forcefully, shepicketed and protested, and she intervenedshrewdly to obtain civil rights and more jobs forAfrican Americans, but in the end the gains forblacks during the New Deal were very limited.

W. E. B. Du Bois, in the meantime, had become in-creasingly discouraged with token appointments andthe reform of race relations through integration withwhite society. In the 1920s, he supported a series ofpan-African conferences designed to unite blackpeople from around the world. He resigned from theNAACP and from his position as editor of The Crisisin 1934 and devoted his time to promoting “volun-tary segregation” and a “Negro Nation within a na-tion.” Eventually, he joined the Communist party andmoved to Ghana, where he died in 1963.

Although Roosevelt appointed a number of blacksto government positions, he was never particularlycommitted to civil rights. That was nottrue of Eleanor Roosevelt, who was edu-cated in part by Mary McLeod Bethune. In1939, when the Daughters of the AmericanRevolution refused to allow Marian Ander-son, a black concert singer, to use theirstage, Mrs. Roosevelt publicly protestedand resigned her membership in the DAR.She also arranged for Anderson to singfrom the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, where 75,000people gathered to listen and to support civil rightsfor all black citizens.

Hundreds of thousands of Mexicans, brought tothe United States to work in the 1920s, lost their jobsin the Depression. Drifting to the Southwest or set-tling in the urban barrios and the small towns andfarms in the Southwest, they met signs such as“Only White Labor Employed” and “No Niggers,Mexicans, or Dogs Allowed.” Some NewDeal agencies helped destitute Mexicans.A few worked for the CCC and the WPA,but to be employed, an applicant had toqualify for state relief, and that elimi-nated most migrants. The primary solu-tion was not to provide aid for Mexicansbut to ship them back to Mexico. In LosAngeles and other cities, the police and immigrationauthorities rounded up aliens and held them ille-gally. A trainload of repatriates left Los Angeles

Dr. William H.Hastie—“Black

Cabinet”Member

Mrs. HenryWeddington,Letter to FDR

(1938)

MexicanWorkers andTheir Cars







every month during 1933, and officials deportedthousands from other cities. One estimate placedthe number sent back in 1932 at 200,000, includingsome American citizens.

Not all the Mexicans were repatriated, however,and some who remained adopted militant tactics toobtain fair treatment. Mexican strawberry pickerswent on strike in El Monte, California, and 18,000cotton pickers walked away from their jobs in the SanJoaquin valley in 1933. On August 31, 1939, during arecord-breaking heat wave, nearly all of the 430workers, most of them Mexican American women,staged a massive walkout at one of the largest foodprocessing plants in Los Angeles. In Gallup, NewMexico, several thousand Mexican coal minerswalked out on strike. They constructed a village ofshacks and planned to wait out the strike. The min-ers, who were aided by writers and artists from SantaFe and Taos, were evicted from their village by thecity authorities. Federal agents arrested their leader,Jesus Pallares, and deported him to Mexico.

Asians (Chinese, Japanese, and a smaller numberof Koreans and Asian Indians) also suffered duringthe Depression. Most lived in ethnic enclaves, losttheir jobs, and were treated as foreigners—not quiteblack, but not white either. Asians, especially thesecond generation who were automatically citizensif they were born in the United States, were troubledby a “twoness.” They were both Chinese or Japaneseand American. At least their parents wanted them toretain ties to the old country and the old culture.One young Chinese student from San Francisco hadto go to Chinese school after her regular school. “Wenever became proficient in reading or writing Chi-nese,” she recalled, “probably because we neverthought of ourselves as needing Chinese. After all,weren’t we Americans?” A Japanese nisei remem-bered the “queer mixture of Occident and the Ori-ent. I sat down to American breakfast and Japaneselunch. My palate developed a fondness for ricealong with corned beef and cabbage. I becameequally adept with knife and fork and with chop-sticks. I said grace at mealtime in Japanese, and re-cited the Lord’s prayer in English.” But one Japanesefather told his son to learn Japanese because therewas no future for him in the United States. MostAmerican failed to appreciate the sense of“twoness” that the Asians suffered with; indeed,they treated all Asians as aliens, and they had greatdifficulty distinguishing a Chinese from a Japanesefrom a Korean.

Native Americans also experienced alienation,disease, and despair during the Depression, andtheir plight was compounded by years of exploita-tion. Since the Dawes Act of 1887 (described in

Chapter 17), government policy had sought to makethe Indian into a property-owning farmer and tolimit tribal rights. Native Americans lost more than60 percent of the 138 million acres granted them in1887. The government declared some of the landsurplus and encouraged individuals to settle on 160acres and adopt the “habits of civilized life.” FewNative Americans profited from this system, butmany whites did.

Just as other progressives sought the quick assim-ilation of immigrants, the progressive-era Indiancommissioners sped up the allotment process to in-crease Indian detribalization. But many NativeAmericans who remained on the reservations werenot even citizens. Finally, in 1924, Congress grantedcitizenship to all Indians born in the United States.The original Americans became U.S. citizens, butthat did not end their suffering.

Franklin Roosevelt brought a new spirit to Indianpolicy by appointing John Collier as commissionerof Indian affairs. Collier was primarily re-sponsible for the passage of the IndianReorganization Act of 1934, which soughtto restore the political independence ofthe tribes and to end the allotment policyof the Dawes Act. “Even where a tribalgroup is split into factions, where leader-ship has broken down, where Indiansclamor to distribute the tribal property, even theredeep forces of cohesion persist and can be evoked,”Collier wrote. The bill also sought to promote the“study of Indian civilization” and to “preserve anddevelop the special cultural contributions andachievements of such civilization, including Indianarts, crafts, skills and traditions.”

Not all Indians agreed with the new policies.Some chose to become members of the dominantculture, and the Navajos voted to reject the Reorga-nization Act. Some Americans charged that the actwas inspired by communism. Others argued that itsprincipal result would be to increase governmentbureaucracy, while missionaries claimed that thegovernment was promoting paganism by allowingthe Indians to practice their native religions.

The paradox and contradictions of U.S. policy to-ward the Indians can be illustrated by Collier’s at-tempt to solve the Navajo problem. The Navajolands, like most of the West, were overgrazed, andsoil erosion threatened to fill the new lake behindthe Hoover Dam with silt. By supporting a policy ofreducing the herds of sheep and goats on Indianland and by promoting soil conservation, Colliercontributed to the change in the Navajo lifestyleand to the end of their self-sufficiency, somethinghe wanted to support.

WPA Project atTonawandaReservation





FDR’s Successful Presidential Campaigns, 1932–1944

Year Candidate Party Popular Vote Electoral Vote

1932 FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT Democratic 22,809,638 (57.4%) 472Herbert C. Hoover Republican 15,758,901 (39.7%) 59Norman Thomas Socialist 881,951 (2.2%) 0

1936 FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT Democratic 27,751,612 (60.8%) 523Alfred M. Landon Republican 16,681,913 (36.5%) 8William Lemke Union 891,858 (1.9%) 0

1940 FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT Democratic 27,243,466 (54.8%) 449Wendell L.Willkie Republican 22,304,755 (44.8%) 82

1944 FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT Democratic 25,602,505 (53.5%) 432Thomas E. Dewey Republican 22,006,278 (46.0%) 99

Note: Winners’ names appear in capital letters.

Women and the New DealWomen made some gains during the 1930s, andmore women occupied high government positionsthan in any previous administration. BesidesFrances Perkins, the secretary of labor, there wasMolly Dewson, a social worker with the Massachu-setts Girls Parole Department and the National Con-sumers League before becoming head of theWomen’s Division of the Democratic Committeeand then an adviser to Roosevelt. Working closelywith Eleanor Roosevelt to promote women’s causes,she helped achieve a number of firsts: two womenappointed ambassadors, a judge on the U.S. Courtof Appeals, the director of the mint, and manywomen in government agencies.

Katharine Lenroot, director of the Children’s Bu-reau, and Mary Anderson, head of the Women’s Bu-reau, selected many other women to serve in theiragencies. Some of these women had collaborated associal workers and now joined government bureausto continue the fight for social justice. But they wereusually in offices in which they did not threatenmale prerogatives.

Despite some gains, the early New Deal programsdid nothing for an estimated 140,000 homelesswomen, or the 2 million to 4 million unemployed

women. Married women often were firedfrom their jobs on the grounds that theyshould be home caring for their familiesrather than depriving men of employ-ment. Single, divorced, and widowedwomen were usually ignored. EleanorRoosevelt was genuinely concerned overthe plight of poor women. She sponsored

a White House Conference in November 1933 on theEmergency Needs of Women. She also advocated in-cluding more women in the CCC, the WPA, and

other programs, but in the end the New Deal did lit-tle for poor women.

Giving Her aLift to Town,

1933





THE LAST YEARS OF THE NEW DEALThe New Deal was neither a consistent nor a well-organized effort to end the Depression and restruc-ture society. Roosevelt was a politician and a prag-matist, unconcerned about ideological orprogrammatic consistency. The first New Deal of1933–1934 concentrated on relief and recovery,while the legislation passed in 1935 and 1936 wasmore involved with social reform. In many ways, theelection of 1936 marked the high point of Roo-sevelt’s power and influence. After 1937, in part be-cause of the growing threat of war but also becauseof increasing opposition in Congress, the pace of so-cial legislation slowed. Yet several measures passedin 1937 and 1938 had such far-reaching significancethat some historians refer to a third New Deal.Among the new measures were bills that providedfor a minimum wage and for housing reform.

The Election of 1936The Republicans in 1936 nominated a moderate,Governor Alfred Landon of Kansas. Although he at-tacked the New Deal, charging that new govern-ment programs were wasteful and created a danger-ous federal bureaucracy, Landon only promised todo the same thing more cheaply and efficiently.Two-thirds of the newspapers in the country sup-ported him, and the Literary Digest predicted hisvictory on the basis of a “scientific” telephone poll.

Roosevelt, helped by signs that the economywas recovering and supported by a coalition of the




Democratic South, organized labor, farmers, andurban voters, won easily. A majority of AfricanAmericans for the first time deserted the party of

Lincoln, not because of Roosevelt’s in-terest in civil rights for blacks but be-cause New Deal relief programs assistedmany poor blacks. A viable candidate tothe left of the New Deal failed to materi-alize. In fact, the Socialist party candi-date, Norman Thomas, polled fewerthan 200,000 votes. Roosevelt won by

more than 10 million votes, carrying every state ex-cept Maine and Vermont. Even the traditionallyRepublican states of Pennsylvania, Delaware, andConnecticut, which had voted Republican in al-most every election since 1856, went for Roosevelt.

The Battle of the Supreme Court“I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished,” Roosevelt declared in his second inau-gural address, and he vowed to alter that situation.But the president’s first action in 1937 did not callfor legislation to alleviate poverty. Instead, he an-nounced a plan to reform the Supreme Court and

the judicial system. The Court had invali-dated not only a number of New Dealmeasures—including the NIRA and thefirst version of the AAA—but other mea-sures as well.

Increasingly angry at the “nine oldmen” who seemed to be destroying NewDeal initiatives and defying Congress’s

will, Roosevelt determined to create a more sympa-thetic Court. He hoped to gain power to appoint anextra justice for each justice over age 70, of whomthere were six. His plan also called for modernizingthe court system at all levels, but that plan got lost inthe public outcry over the Court-packing scheme.

Roosevelt’s plan to nullify the influence of theolder and more reactionary justices foundered. Re-publicans accused him of being a dictator and ofsubverting the Constitution. Many congressmenfrom his own party refused to support him. Led byVice President John Nance Garner of Texas, a num-ber of southern Democrats broke with the presidentand formed a coalition with conservative Republi-cans that lasted for more than 30 years. Aftermonths of controversy, Roosevelt withdrew the leg-islation and admitted defeat. He had perhaps mis-understood his mandate, and he certainly underes-timated the respect, even the reverence, that mostAmericans felt for the Supreme Court.

Ironically, though he lost the battle of the SupremeCourt, Roosevelt won the war. By the spring of 1937,

the Court began to reverse its position and in a 5–4decision upheld the National Labor Relations Act.When Justice Willis Van Devanter retired, Rooseveltwas able to make his first Supreme Court appoint-ment, thus ensuring at least a shaky liberal majorityon the Court. After 1937 a series of court cases estab-lished the principle that Congress and federal powertrumped states’ rights and local control. But Roo-sevelt triumphed at great cost. His attempt to reorga-nize the Court dissipated energy and slowed the mo-mentum of his legislative program. Seen as the mostunpopular action he took as president, it made himvulnerable to criticism from opponents of the NewDeal, and even some of his supporters were dis-mayed by what they regarded as an attack on theprinciple of separation of powers.

The economy improved in late 1936 and early1937, but in August, the fragile prosperity collapsed.Unemployment shot back up, industrial productionfell, and the stock market plummeted. Facing anembarrassing economic slump thatevoked charges that the New Deal hadfailed, Roosevelt resorted to “deficitspending,” as recommended by JohnMaynard Keynes, the British economist.Keynes argued that to get out of a depres-sion, the government must spend mas-sive amounts of money on goods and ser-vices to increase demand and revive production.The economy responded slowly but never fully re-covered until wartime expenditures, beginning in1940, stimulated it, reduced unemployment, andended the Depression.

Completing the New DealDespite increasing hostility, Congress passed a num-ber of important bills in 1937 and 1938 that com-pleted the New Deal reform legislation.The Bankhead–Jones Farm Tenancy Act of1937 created the Farm Security Adminis-tration (FSA) to aid tenant farmers, share-croppers, and farm owners who had losttheir farms. The FSA, which providedloans to grain collectives, also set upcamps for migratory workers. Some peo-ple saw such policies as the first step to-ward Communist collectives, but the FSA in factnever had enough money to make a real difference.

Congress passed a new Agricultural AdjustmentAct in 1938 that tried to solve the problem of farmsurpluses, which persisted even after hundreds ofthousands of farmers had lost their farms. The newact replaced the processing tax (which the SupremeCourt had declared unconstitutional) with direct

Attack on NewDeal Farm

Policies (1936)

FDR, SecondInauguralAddress(1937)

Old Reliable!,1938

Interview aboutLife in a

GovernmentCamp








Key 1930s Reform Legislation

Year Legislation Provisions

1932 Reconstruction Finance Granted emergency loans to banks, life insurance companies, and Corporation (RFC) railroads (passed during Hoover administration)

1933 Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) Employed young men (and a few women) in reforestation, road construction, and flood control projects

1933 Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) Granted farmers direct payments for reducing production of certain products; funds for payments provided by a processing tax, which was later declared unconstitutional

1933 Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) Created independent public corporation to construct dams and power projects and to develop the economy of a nine-state area in the Tennessee River valley

1933 National Industrial Recovery Sought to revive business through a series of fair-competition codes;Act (NIRA) Section 7a guaranteed labor’s right to organize (later declared

unconstitutional)1933 Public Works Administration (PWA) Sought to increase employment and business activity through construction

of roads, buildings, and other projects1934 National Housing Act—created Insured loans made by banks for construction of new homes and

Federal Housing Administration (FHA) repair of old homes1935 Emergency Relief Appropriation Act— Employed more than 8 million people to repair roads, build bridges, and

created Works Progress work on other projects; also hired artists and writersAdministration (WPA)

1935 Social Security Act Established unemployment compensation and old-age and survivors’ insurance paid for by a joint tax on employers and employees

1935 National Labor Relations Act Recognized the right of employees to join labor unions and to bargain (Wagner-Connery Act) collectively; created a National Labor Relations Board to supervise

elections and to prevent unfair labor practices1935 Public Utility Holding Act Outlawed pyramiding of gas and electric companies through the use

of holding companies and restricted these companies to activity in one area; a “death sentence” clause gave companies five years to prove local, useful, and efficient operation or be dissolved

1937 National Housing Act Authorized low-rent public housing projects(Wagner-Steagall Act)

1938 Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) Continued price supports and payments to farmers to limit production,as in 1933 act, but replaced processing tax with direct federal payment

1938 Fair Labor Standards Act Established minimum wage of 40 cents an hour and maximum workweek of 40 hours in enterprises engaged in interstate commerce

payments from the federal treasury to farmers;added a soil conservation program; and providedfor the marketing of surplus crops. Like its prede-cessor, the new act tried to stabilize farm prices bycontrolling production. But only the outbreak ofWorld War II would end the problem of farm sur-plus, and then only temporarily.

In the cities, housing continued to be a problem.Progressive reformers had dreamed of providing bet-ter housing for the urban poor. They had cam-paigned for city ordinances and state laws and hadbuilt model tenements, but the first experiment withfederal housing occurred during World War I. Thatbrief experience encouraged a number of social re-formers, who later became advisers to Roosevelt.They convinced him that federal low-cost housingshould be part of New Deal reform.

The Reconstruction Finance Corporation madelow-interest loans to housing projects, and the PublicWorks Administration constructed some apartmentbuildings. But not until the National Housing Act of1937 did Roosevelt and his advisers try to develop acomprehensive housing policy for the poor. The actprovided federal funds for slum clearance projectsand for the construction of low-cost housing. By1939, however, only 117,000 units had been built.

In the long run, New Deal housing legislation hada greater impact on middle-class housing policiesand patterns. During the first 100 days of the NewDeal, at Roosevelt’s urging, Congress passed a billcreating the Home Owners Loan Corporation(HOLC), which over the next two years made morethan $3 billion in low-interest loans and helpedmore than a million people save their homes from




foreclosure. The HOLC also had a strong impact onhousing policy by introducing the first long-term,fixed-rate mortgages. Formerly, all mortgages werefor periods of no more than five years and were sub-ject to frequent renegotiation.

The HOLC also introduced a uniform system ofreal estate appraisal that tended to undervalue urbanproperty, especially in neighborhoods that were old,crowded, and ethnically mixed. The system gave thehighest ratings to suburban developments where, ac-cording to the HOLC, there had been no “infiltrationof Jews” or other undesirable groups. This was the be-ginning of the practice later called “redlining,” inwhich lending agencies drew lines around neighbor-hoods and made it nearly impossible for prospectivehome buyers of certain ethnic or racial backgroundsto obtain a mortgage.

The Federal Housing Administration (FHA), cre-ated in 1934 by the National Housing Act, expandedand extended many of these HOLC policies. TheFHA insured mortgages, many of them for 25 or 30years; reduced the down payment required from 30percent to less than 10 percent; and allowed morethan 11 million families to buy homes between 1934and 1972. The system, however, tended to favor pur-chasing new suburban homes rather than repairingolder urban residences. New Deal housing policieshelped make the suburban home with the long FHAmortgage part of the American way of life, but thepolicies also contributed to the decline of many ur-ban neighborhoods.

Just as important as housing legislationwas the Fair Labor Standards Act, whichCongress passed in June 1938. Roosevelt’sbill proposed for all industries engaged ininterstate commerce a minimum wage of25 cents an hour, to rise in two years to 40cents an hour, and a maximum workweekof 44 hours, to be reduced to 40 hours. Theact covered only 20 percent of the laborforce and only 14 percent of workingwomen. Nevertheless, when it went into ef-fect, 750,000 workers immediately receivedraises, and by 1940, some 12 million had re-ceived pay increases. The law also prohib-ited child labor in interstate commerce,making it the first permanent federal law toprohibit youngsters under age 16 fromworking. And without emphasizing thematter, the law made no distinction be-tween men and women, thus diminishing,if not completely ending, the need for spe-cial legislation for women.

The Fair Labor Standards Act was thelast New Deal measure passed. The New

Deal had many weaknesses, but it did dramaticallyincrease government support for the needy. In 1913,local, state, and federal governments spent $21 mil-lion on public assistance. By 1932, that had risen to$218 million; by 1939, it was $4.9 billion.

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE 1930SThe Great Depression and the New Deal so dominatethe history of the 1930s that it is easy to conclude thatnothing else happened, that there were only breadlines and relief agencies. But there is another side ofthe decade, for a communications revolutionchanged the lives of middle-class Americans. Thesale of radios and attendance at movies increasedduring the 1930s, and literature flourished. Ameri-cans were fascinated by technology, especially auto-mobiles. Many people traveled during the decade;they stayed in motor courts and looked ahead to abrighter future dominated by streamlined appliancesand gadgets that would mean an easier life.

Taking to the Road“People give up everything in the world but their car,”a banker in Muncie, Indiana, remarked during theDepression, and that seems to have been true all overthe country. Although automobile production

A Streamlined Age The age of the Great Depression was also a time ofmodern, streamlined design. There were streamlined trains, cars, and planes.There were even streamlined refrigerators, radios, and pencil sharpeners. The1939 New York World’s Fair was marked by modern design and exhibits that de-picted a streamlined future based on technology. Even during the nation’s greatesteconomic crisis, some Americans planned for a better future. How do you explainthe irony of looking ahead to a streamlined future during a decade of despair?(Underwood & Underwood/CORBIS )




dropped off after 1929 and did not recover until theend of the 1930s, the number of motor vehicles regis-tered, which declined from 26.7 million in 1930 tojust over 24 million in 1933, increased to more than32 million by 1940. People who could not afford newcars drove used ones. Even the “Okies” fleeing thedust bowl of the Southwest traveled in cars. Theywere secondhand, run-down cars to be sure, but thefact that even many poor Americans owned carsshocked visitors from Europe, where automobileswere still only for the rich.

The American middle class traveled at an in-creasing rate after the low point of 1932 and 1933. In1938, the tourist industry was the third largest in the

Washday Although the washing ma-chine dates from the mid-nineteenth cen-tury, it did not end the drudgery of washday; even the introduction of electric wash-ers did not eliminate the constant wringingand rinsing that made wash day (usuallyMonday) a day to dread. The first automaticwashing machines were introduced in thelate 1930s but did not become common-place until after World War II. This adver-tisement promotes the convenience of a ma-chine that will spin-dry as well as wash.Notice the gender roles in the advertise-ment. The husband appreciates the savingbut apparently does not put the clothes inthe machine. “The Bendix” was a great im-provement, but it was not until the 1950sthat electric and gas dryers finally ended thetask of hanging clothes on the line. How doyou do your laundry today? Have thingschanged much since the 1930s? (BendixHome Appliances, Inc.)

United States, behind only steel and automobileproduction. More than 4 million Americans traveledevery year, and four out of five went by car. Manydragged a trailer for sleeping or stopped at the grow-ing number of tourist courts and overnight cabins.In these predecessors of the motel, there were nodoormen, no bellhops, no register to sign. Thetourist court was much more informal than the ho-tel, and you could park your car next to your cabin.

The Electric HomeIf the 1920s was the age of the bathroom, the 1930swas the era of the modern kitchen. The sale of



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electrical appliances increased throughout thedecade, with refrigerators leading the way. In 1930,the number of refrigerators produced exceeded thenumber of iceboxes for the first time. Refrigeratorproduction continued to rise throughout thedecade, reaching a peak of 2.3 million in 1937. Atfirst, the refrigerator was boxy and looked verymuch like an icebox with a motor sitting on top. In1935, however, the refrigerator, like most other ap-pliances, became streamlined. Sears, Roebuck ad-vertised “The New 1935 Super Six Coldspot . . .Stunning in Its Streamlined Beauty.” The Coldspot,which quickly influenced the look of all other mod-els, was designed by Raymond Loewy, one of agroup of industrial designers who emphasizedsweeping horizontal lines, rounded corners, and aslick modern look. They hoped modern designwould stimulate an optimistic attitude and, ofcourse, increase sales. At the end of the decade, in1939, the World’s Fair in New York glorified thetheme of a streamlined future, carefully plannedand based on new technology.

This reverence for technological progress con-trasted with the economic despair in the 1930s, butpeople adapted to it selectively. For example, theelectric washing machine and electric iron revolu-tionized wash day. Yet even with labor-saving ma-chines, most women continued to do their wash onMonday and their ironing on Tuesday. Packagedand canned goods became more widely availableduring the decade, and many women discoveredthat it was easier, and in some cases cheaper, toserve Kellogg’s Corn Flakes or Nabisco ShreddedWheat than to make oatmeal, to heat Van Camp’spork and beans or Heinz spaghetti from a can thanto prepare a meal, or to use commercially bakedbread than to bake their own.

Ironically, despite these new conveniences, agreat many middle-class families maintained theirstandard of living during the 1930s only because thewomen in the family learned to stretch and save andmake do, and most wives spent as much time onhousework as before. Some also took jobs outsidethe home to maintain their level of consumption.The number of married women who worked in-creased substantially during the decade. At thesame time, many rural women, such as those in thehill country of Texas and other remote areas, andmany wives of the unemployed simply made do.They continued to cook, clean, and sew as their an-cestors had for generations.

The Age of LeisureDuring the Depression, many middle-class peoplefound themselves with time on their hands andsought out ways of spending it. The 1920s had been atime of spectator sports, of football and baseball he-roes, of huge crowds that turned out to see boxingmatches. Those sports continued during the Depres-sion decade, although attendance suffered. Softballand miniature golf, which were cheap forms of enter-tainment and did not require expensive travel, alsobecame popular. But leisure in the 1930s actuallygrew to be a problem, and professionals publishedsome 450 new books on the subject. Leisure wasmechanized; millions put their nickels in a slot andlistened to a record played on a jukebox. Millionsmore played a pinball machine, a mechanized devicethat had no practical use other than entertainmentand could end the game with one word: “Tilt.”

Many popular games of the period had elaboraterules and directions. Contract bridge swept thecountry during the decade, and Monopoly was themost popular game of all. Produced by ParkerBrothers, Monopoly was a fantasy of real estate

Household Appliance Production, 1922–1939

Electric appliances altered the lives of many Americanmiddle-class families during the 1930s.The replacementof the icebox with the electric refrigerator was espe-cially dramatic. How did these appliances change thelifestyle of those who purchased them?




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races, how can one possibly find that sublimeserenity which art must have if it is to quicken andflower . . . ? North America, which has not inspiredpainters—which has not raised up any sculptors,which has prompted the song of no musicians, un-less it be that of the monotonous Negro, andwhose barbarously industrial architecture seemsto care not at all for the judgment of future times,has yet produced poets and writers. Almost all ofthem—oh mockery!—have turned from their na-tive soil, in bitterness of spirit. . . .

But to paint Chicago? How can one do it withmere words or colors? Music alone, it seems tome, could accomplish the task.And rather than anyimitative rhythm, soon lost in this tumult, it shouldbe bitter chords, a heavy prelude to chaos.

■ Is Duhamel’s criticism fair?

■ Is it perhaps influenced by the time he visited?

■ Is this kind of attack (that The United States has no cul-ture, no tradition) still common among European visitors?

HOW OTHERS SEE US

Georges Duhamel, a French novelist, traveled in the UnitedStates at the beginning of the Great Depression. He usedChicago to symbolize all that he disliked about America. Asmuch as he hated everything he saw, he feared thatAmerican culture was going to spread around the world.

O painters, my friends and brothers, you cannever make anything of Chicago! You will neverpaint this world, for it is beyond the human grasp.Chicago is no more paintable than the desert. It isprodigious and untamed; it is not a living thing. . . .

America is devoted to its ephemeral works. Iterects, not monuments, but merely buildings.Should it fall into ruins tomorrow, we should seekin its ashes in vain for the bronze statuette that isenough to immortalize a little Greek village. Ruinsof Chicago!—prodigious heap of iron-work, con-crete, and old plaster, the sole beauty of which willbe gay plants and moss—I evoke you with horrorand weariness of spirit. . . .

In that ridiculous moral atmosphere in whichswarms not a great nation, but a confusion of

Georges Duhamel,A French Writer Visits the United States and Finds Nothing to Admire

speculation in which chance, luck, and the roll ofthe dice determined the winner. But one still had toobey the rules: “Go Directly to Jail. Do Not Pass Go.Do Not Collect $200.” During a depression broughton in part by frenzied speculation, Americans werefascinated by a game whose purpose was to obtainreal estate and utility monopolies and drive one’sopponents into bankruptcy.

The 1930s was also a time of fads and instantcelebrities, created by radio, newsreels, and busi-nesspeople ready to turn almost anything to com-mercial advantage. The leading box office attractionbetween 1935 and 1938 was Shirley Temple, a blondand adorable child star. She inspired dolls, dishes,books, and clothes. Even stranger was the excite-ment created by the birth of five girl babies to a cou-ple in northern Ontario in 1934. The Dionne quintu-plets appeared on dozens of magazine covers andendorsed every imaginable product. Millions ofpeople waited eagerly for the latest news about thebabies, and more than 3 million traveled to see theirhome in Canada. The crazes over Shirley Temple

and the Dionne quintuplets were products of thenew technology, especially radio and the movies.

Literary Reflections of the 1930sThough much of the literature of the 1930s reflectedthe decade’s troubled currents, reading continuedto be a popular and cheap entertainment. JohnSteinbeck, whose later novel The Grapes of Wrath(1939) followed the fortunes of the Joad family, de-scribed the plight of Mexican migrant workers inTortilla Flat (1935). His novels expressed his beliefthat there was in American life a “crime . . . that goesbeyond denunciation.” He warned, “In the eyes ofthe hungry there is a growing wrath.”

Other writers also questioned the Americandream. John Dos Passos’s trilogy U.S.A. (1930–1936)conveyed a deep pessimism about American capi-talism that many other intellectuals shared. Lesspolitical were the novels of Thomas Wolfe andWilliam Faulkner, who more sympathetically por-trayed Americans caught up in the web of local life



Just as some historians have used fiction to help definethe cultural history of a decade, others in the twenti-eth century have turned to film to describe the “spiritof an age.” On an elementary level, the movies help usappreciate changing styles in dress, furniture, and auto-mobiles.We can even get some sense of how a particu-lar time defined a beautiful woman or a handsomeman, and we can learn about ethnic and racial stereo-types and assumptions about gender and class.

The decade of the 1930s is sometimes called the“golden age of the movies.” Careful selection amongthe 500 or so feature films Hollywood produced eachyear during the decade—ranging from gangster andcowboy movies to Marx Brothers comedies, from his-torical romances to Busby Berkeley musical extrava-ganzas—could support a number of interpretationsabout the special myths and assumptions of the era.But one historian has argued that, especially after1934, “not only did the movies amuse and entertainthe nation through its most severe economic and so-cial disorder, holding it together by their capacity tocreate unifying myths and dreams, but movie culturein the 1930s became a dominant culture for many

Americans, providing new values and social ideals toreplace shattered old traditions.”

The year 1934 was a dividing line for two reasons.The motion picture industry, like all other industries,had suffered during the Depression; 1933 marked thelow point in attendance, with more than one-third ofthe theaters in the country shut down.The next year,however, attendance picked up, heralding a revival thatlasted until 1946. Also in 1934, the movie industryadopted a code for which the Catholic Legion of De-cency and other religious groups had lobbied.The newcode prohibited the depiction of “sex perversion, inter-racial sex, abortion, incest, drugs and profanity.” Evenmarried couples could not be shown together in adouble bed.Although a movie could depict immoral be-havior, sin always had to be punished. “Evil and goodshould never be confused,” the code announced.

Before the code, Hollywood had indeed producedgraphic films, such as The Public Enemy (1931) andScarface (1932), with a considerable amount of vio-lence; musicals, such as Gold Diggers of 1933, filledwith scantily clad young women; films featuring prosti-tutes, such as Jean Harlow in Red Dust (1932) and

RECOVERING THE PAST

The Movies

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A scene from It Happened One Night,1934. (Photofest)



1936 novel by Walter Edmonds, Drums is a sentimen-tal story about a man who builds a house in thewilderness, marries a pretty girl, fights off the Indi-ans, and works with the simple country folk to cre-ate a satisfying life in the very year the Americancolonies rebel against Great Britain. Drums was oneof a number of films based on historical themes thatHollywood released just before World War II. TheHowards of Virginia (1940), Northwest Passage (1939),and, most popular of all, Gone with the Wind (1939)were others in the same genre. Historical themeshad been popular before, but with the world on thebrink of war, the story of men and women in thewilderness struggling for family and country againstNative Americans (stereotyped as savages) provedcomforting as well as entertaining.

REFLECTING ON THE PAST Can a historian use moviesto describe the values and myths of a particular time,or are the complexities and exaggerations too great?Are the most popular or most critically acclaimedfilms more useful than others in getting at the “spiritof an age”? Which films that are popular today tell usthe most about our time and culture? Is there toomuch sex and violence in movies today? Should thegovernment control the language, themes, and valuesdepicted in movies? Are movies as important today asthey were in the 1930s in defining and influencing thecountry’s myths and values?

Marlene Dietrich in Blond Venus (1930); and otherfilms that confronted the problems of real life. But af-ter 1934, Hollywood concentrated on movies thatcreated a mythical world in which evil was alwayspunished, family moral values won out in the end, andpatriotism and American democracy were neverquestioned. Although the code was modified fromtime to time, it was not abandoned until 1966, when itwas replaced by a rating system.

It Happened One Night (1934) and Drums Along theMohawk (1939), two films out of thousands, illustratesome of the myths the movies created and sustained.Frank Capra, one of Hollywood’s masters at entertain-ing without disturbing, directed It Happened One Night, acomedy-romance.A rich girl (played by Claudette Col-bert) dives from her father’s yacht off the coast ofFlorida and takes a bus for New York. She meets anewspaper reporter (Clark Gable), and they have a se-ries of madcap adventures and fall in love. But mix-upsand misunderstandings make it appear that she willmarry her old boyfriend. In the end, however, they arereunited and marry in an elaborate outdoor ceremony.Afterward, they presumably live happily ever after.Themovie is funny and entertaining and presents a variationon the poor-boy-marries-rich-girl theme. Like so manymovies of the time, this one suggests that life is fulfilledfor a woman only if she can find the right man to marry.

Claudette Colbert also stars in Drums Along theMohawk, this time with Henry Fonda. Based on a

A scene from Drums Along the Mo-hawk, 1939. (20th Century Fox/The KobalCollection)

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and facing the complex problems of the modernera. Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha County,brought to life in The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay

Dying, Sanctuary, and Light in August(1929–1932), documented the South’sracial problems and its poverty as well asits stubborn pride. But the book aboutthe South that became one of thedecade’s best-sellers was far more opti-mistic and far less complex than

Faulkner’s work—Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with theWind (1936). Its success suggested that many Amer-icans read to escape, not to explore their problems.

Radio’s Finest HourThe number of radios purchased increased steadilyduring the decade. In 1929, slightly more than 10million households owned radios; by 1939, morethan 27.5 million households had radios. Not just asource of music and news, the radio was a focalpoint of the living room. In many homes, the top ofthe radio became the symbolic mantel where cher-ished photos were displayed. Families gatheredaround the radio at night to listen to and laugh atJack Benny or Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy

or to try to solve a murder mystery with Mr. andMrs. North. The Lone Ranger, another popular pro-gram, had 20 million listeners by 1939.

During the day there were soap operas. “Betweenthick slices of advertising,” wrote James Thurber,“spread twelve minutes of dialogue, add predica-ment, villainy, and female suffering in equal mea-sure, throw in a dash of nobility, sprinkle with tears,season with organ music, cover with a rich an-nouncer sauce and serve five times a week.” Afterschool, teenagers and younger children argued overwhether to listen to Jack Armstrong, the All-Ameri-can Boy and Captain Midnight or Stella Dallas andThe Young Widder Brown.

Most families had only one radio. The receptionwas sometimes poor, especially in rural areas andsmall towns. Voices faded in and out and disap-peared during storms. But the magic of radio al-lowed many people to feel connected to distantplaces and to believe they knew the radio perform-ers personally. Radio was also responsible for one ofthe most widespread episodes of mass hysteria of alltime. On October 31, 1938, Orson Welles broadcastThe War of the Worlds so realistically that thousandsof listeners really believed that Martians had landedin New Jersey. If anyone needed proof, that singleprogram demonstrated the power of the radio.

The Silver ScreenThe 1930s were the golden decade of the movies.Between 60 million and 90 million Americans wentto the movies every week. The medium was not en-tirely Depression-proof, but talking films had re-placed the silent variety in the late 1920s, and at-tendance soared. Though it fell off slightly in theearly 1930s, by 1934 movie viewing was climbingagain. For many families, even in the depth of theDepression, movie money was almost as importantas food money.

In the cities, one could go to an elaborate moviepalace and live in a fantasy world far removed fromthe reality of Depression America. In small townsacross the country, for 25 cents (10 cents for thoseunder age 12) one could go to at least four moviesduring the week. There was a Sunday–Monday fea-ture film (except in communities where thechurches had prevented Sunday movies), a differentfeature of somewhat lesser prominence on Tues-day–Wednesday, and another on Thursday–Friday.On Saturday, there was a cowboy or detective movie.Sometimes a double feature played, and there werealways short subjects, a cartoon, and a newsreel. OnSaturday, there was usually a serial that left theheroine or hero in such a dire predicament that one

The Power of Radio The radio played an important role inthe 1930s. Here a family crowds around a typical floor model to lis-ten to the latest news or a favorite program. Has the impact of theradio changed since the 1930s? Is the radio still important in your life?(Bettmann-CORBIS)

John Steinbeck




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