A Concise History of the New Deal

During the 1930s, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal carried out a program of dramatic reform to counter the unprecedented failures of the market economy exposed by the Great Depression. Contrary to the views of today’s conservative critics, this book argues that New Dealers were not “anticapitalist” in the ways in which they approached the problems confronting society. Rather, they were reformers who were deeply interested in fixing the problems of capitalism, if at times unsure of the best tools to use for the job. In undertaking their reforms, the New Dealers profoundly changed the United States in ways that still resonate today. Lively and engaging, this narrative history focuses on the impact of political and economic change on social and cultural relations.

JASON SCOTT SMITH is Associate Professor of History at the University of New Mexico, where he teaches courses on the history of capitalism and liberalism. Smith is the author of the award-winning Building New Deal Liberalism (Cambridge University Press, 2006). He is often quoted in the media, and his scholarly work has appeared in a number of journals, including the Journal of Social History, Pacific Historical Review, Reviews in American History, and the Journal of Interdisciplinary History. From 2004 to 2006 he held a Mellon Fellowship in American Studies at Cornell University, where he was a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of History and the Department of Government. In 2001–2002 he was the Harvard-Newcomen Fellow at the Harvard Business School. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.

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A Concise History of the New Deal

Jason Scott Smith

University of New Mexico

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© Jason Scott Smith 2014

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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Smith, Jason Scott, 1970–

A concise history of the New Deal / Jason Scott Smith, University of New Mexico.

pages cm. – (Cambridge essential histories)

Includes index.

ISBN 978-0-521-87721-3

1. New Deal, 1933–1939. 2. United States – Politics and

government – 1933–1945. 3. United States – Economic conditions –

1918–1945. 4. Capitalism – United States – History –

20th century. 5. Depressions – 1929 – United States. I. Title.

ISBN 978-0-521-87721-3 Hardback

ISBN 978-0-521-70078-8 Paperback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

List of Figure and Tables

Acknowledgments

1. A Global Depression

2. Saving Capitalism, 1933–1934

3. The New Deal at High Tide, 1934–1936

4. Society and Culture in the 1930s

5. Opposition and Backlash, 1937–1939

6. Legacies of the New Deal

Essay on Sources

Index

Figure and Tables

Figure

1.1 Bankruptcy cases, 1905 to 1948

Tables

1.1 Unemployment, 1929–1945

1.2 Real Estate Foreclosures of Nonfarm Properties, 1926–1945

1.3 Farm Real Estate: Land Transfers, 1929–1941

1.4 Wholesale Prices, Agricultural and Industrial, 1929–1941

Acknowledgments

My fascination with the New Deal and its response to the Great Depression began in earnest twenty-one years ago when I started graduate study at the University of California, Berkeley. With this book I have sought to combine my interest in these topics with a desire to make this period of history accessible to a general readership and to undergraduate and graduate students eager to learn more. Writing a narrative history has also presented the opportunity to reflect further on some of the themes of my earlier work, as well as on the history of capitalism more generally, particularly in light of the global financial collapse of 2008. I am grateful to a number of people and institutions for their help with this project; responsibility for remaining errors of fact and interpretation belongs to me.

My greatest intellectual debt is to the generations of scholars whose work I draw on for the analysis that supports my narrative. I refer readers to the “Essay on Sources” at the end of this book for a more detailed discussion of this wonderful body of work. At Cambridge University Press, I am grateful for the confidence and support of the Cambridge Essential Histories series editor, Donald Critchlow, as well as for the counsel of editors Eric Crahan and Lew Bateman. At the University of New Mexico, my colleagues in the History Department and throughout the College of Arts and Sciences have made UNM an intellectually interesting place to teach and study the past. Special thanks to Meg Frisbee, whose editorial talents and critical sense improved my prose. For providing challenging and helpful feedback along the way, I am particularly grateful to the students in my classes at Cornell University and the University of New Mexico.

Academia, some say, is like organized crime but without the loyalty. I am pleased to say this statement, in my experience, is not true. I owe a great deal to a number of colleagues at other institutions who have helped sharpen my thinking. Conversations with the late Thomas McCraw underscored the importance of viewing the New Deal as a crucial episode in the history of capitalism. Stephen Mihm read an early section of the manuscript and invited me to try out some of my ideas in posts for the Bloomberg View “Echoes” blog. Scott Myers-Lipton invited me to contribute a short piece on Obama and the New Deal to his volume Rebuild America. I am pleased to acknowledge the fascinating presentations by (and discussions with) Michael Bernstein, Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman, Alice O’Connor, and Julian Zelizer at the 2010 meeting of the American Historical Association, at a session I helped organize on what Barack Obama could learn from history. At Berkeley, Richard Walker extended a welcome invitation to participate in the conference “New Deal or No Deal? The Age of Obama and the Lessons of the 1930s,” as well as the opportunity to join the academic advisory board for The Living New Deal project. Thanks to a National Endowment for the Humanities grant, I was able to participate on a team of scholars, designers, and researchers working with the Northern California public television station KQED to develop an interactive history app for mobile devices, “The New Deal Murals of San Francisco.” This experience led me to think more deeply about how the public encounters the history of the Great Depression in today’s built environment. My thanks as well to Tony Badger for asking me to take part, with Louis Hyman, Jennifer Klein, and Gavin Wright, in a terrific session on the state of New Deal scholarship for the 2009 meeting of the Organization of American Historians. For thoughtful conversation and encouragement over the past several years, I also want to thank Brian Balogh, Ed Baptist, Sven Beckert, Chad Bryant, Angus Burgin, J. P. Daughton, Robin Einhorn, Daniel Ernst, Walter Friedman, Shane Hamilton, Liz Hutchison, Meg Jacobs, Andy Jewett, Richard John, Mark Leff, Fred Logevall, Guian McKee, Ajay Mehrotra, Bill Novak, Gautham Rao, Eric Rauchway, Mark Rose, Bruce Schulman, Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, Jim Sparrow, Sam Truett, Jessica Wang, Ben Waterhouse, and Mark Wilson.

For their love and support, I thank my sister, Sarah, my late father, Daniel, and my mother, Yvonne. I dedicate this book to my family: Mary, Maria-Luisa, and Daniel make every day a joy, and I love them more than words can express.

1 A Global Depression

The Great Depression was a crucial episode in the history of the United States. It was also a pivotal moment in the global history of modern capitalism. These two points are vital for comprehending the tasks facing Americans in the 1930s as they confronted this unprecedented disaster. People of all backgrounds had to cope with the utter collapse of the economic system, a collapse so extensive that it exposed the failure of government, business, and society to control the market. As people responded to the Great Depression, they initiated a fundamental rethinking about the essence of capitalism in America – in short, they inspired a reform movement we call the New Deal.

The 1930s were years when a great deal went horribly wrong. In March 1933, a full forty-one months after the 1929 stock market crash, about one-fifth of the American workforce was jobless. Nearly one-third of those who could find employment worked only part time. Unemployment remained high throughout the decade, standing at just above 11 percent in 1939. It took the nationwide mobilization for World War II to drive unemployment to its twentieth-century low, 1.23 percent, in 1944. Never before in the history of the United States had the country faced such a severe and long-lasting economic downturn. During the years between 1929 and World War II, a wide range of politicians, ordinary citizens, businessmen, and others attempted to make sense of what often appeared to be a world turned upside down.

This book is about how all these people tried to understand and cope with the Great Depression – about how, in so doing, they reconfigured capitalism itself. Its goal is to provide readers with a concise history of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. The New Deal was a program of sweeping reform: in response to the massive economic crisis, the power of the federal government was expanded and deployed in a sustained and concerted fashion to address dramatic failures of the market economy. Although the New Deal did not end the crisis of the Great Depression, many of its programs halted the nation’s economic collapse, ameliorating the worst of the crisis. In so doing, the New Deal’s reforms profoundly changed the American economy, society, and political system in ways that still resonate today. Indeed, many of the key questions that challenge American society today – How should society regulate business? What is the proper role of government in addressing inequality? Who is responsible for safeguarding the nation’s financial system? – have deep roots in the debates that took place in the often dark days of the 1930s.

Contrary to the views of today’s conservative critics, New Dealers such as Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Harry Hopkins, and Rexford Tugwell were not “anti-business” in their approaches to the problems confronting society. The New Dealers certainly brought about dramatic changes, but they were not radicals who were deeply opposed to capitalism or the vitality of the market economy. Rather, as this book argues, they were reformers who were deeply interested in fixing the problems of capitalism. To be sure, the many different programs of the New Deal were at times contradictory, and at points the New Dealers themselves were forced to craft improvisatory solutions. The New Deal, however, possessed a coherent internal logic. It was, on the one hand, a full-throated attempt to respond to the economic crisis of the Great Depression, and on the other, a political project of the Democratic Party, led by FDR. To understand the nature and consequences of the New Deal’s response to the Great Depression, it is essential to understand the nature and consequences of the Great Depression itself. It was a worldwide economic collapse, and its roots can be found in the ways that the global economy started to unravel after World War I. Its roots can also be found in some of the persistent flaws in the United States’ own economy, visible in the decade of the 1920s.

The Great Depression: Global and Historical Contexts

Of course, ever since the United States’ founding as a group of states stretching up and down the Atlantic seaboard, America has existed in an interdependent set of relationships with other nations. In the years following the Civil War, as the United States expanded its reach both at home and abroad, these international ties took on a renewed resonance. While American industry grew, ordinary farmers and workers met a world that had been transformed by economic growth and growing inequalities. By the close of the nineteenth century, a more integrated global economy was launching waves of immigrants across national borders while American businesses were busily exporting goods to foreign markets. Large firms, such as Andrew Carnegie’s U.S. Steel and John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, integrated vertically and horizontally and drove the United States to the forefront of global productivity in such sectors as steel and petroleum.

This growth, however, was accompanied by domestic discontent and violent confrontations between labor and capital. The national railway strike of 1877, the bombing in Chicago’s Haymarket Square in 1886, and the severe economic depression that began in 1893 horrified much of the nation. Americans struggled to bring order to the social and economic upheavals that increasingly characterized their lives. Many members of the nation’s business and political classes sought a solution by focusing their attention abroad. Anxious to expand their reach, particularly in Central and South America and in East Asia, these elites sought to use the capacities of the federal government to enhance business’ access to these markets, with the hope that international trade could function as a kind of safety valve that might bring about some measure of social balance and peace at home. For their part, working people and labor organizations, such as the American Federation of Labor (AFL), strove in the midst of this tumult to exert some measure of meaningful control over domestic working conditions and labor standards.

The social and economic upheaval churning at the turn of the twentieth century also witnessed a number of attempts to use the power of government to reform the nation’s society. A wide range of reformers, interested in such issues as antitrust, public health, unemployment insurance, workers’ compensation, income taxation, and the growth of big business, looked to mitigate the harsh impact of capitalism on society. Politically organized farmers in the South and West were key players in demanding a number of reforms. For example, the Sherman Antitrust Act (passed by Congress in 1890) helped shape the boundaries for political and legal debates over the proper place of big business in American society. Ratified in 1913, the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution provided the legal foundation for a federal income tax. The Seventeenth Amendment, ratified in the same year, established the popular election of U.S. senators. Farming interests, as well as elements of the business community, called for the creation of the Federal Reserve System with the hopes that this entity would both stabilize the nation’s banking system and improve access to credit. Between 1911 and 1920, thirty-nine states followed the lead of Illinois, which was the first to create a statewide system of pensions for mothers with children.

While changes such as these took place at the state and national levels, in cities like New York and Chicago reformers attacked urban social problems. Lillian Wald and Jane Addams, inspired by Toynbee Hall in the East End of London, organized efforts to address the welfare of urban families and immigrants. The American settlement house movement, unlike its English counterpart, was led largely by women. Addams’s Hull House, for example, strove to provide Chicago’s residents with social and educational programs that, as Addams put it, would “express in social service and in terms of action the spirit of Christ.” Rooted in the social gospel and a vision of the interconnectedness of society, the settlement house movement joined campaigns for better housing, improved public health, legislation to regulate factories, and racial equality.

Other groups also aimed at aiding specific parts of society. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), incorporated in 1911, built directly on the work of the National Negro Committee, which was formed in New York City in 1909 at Lillian Wald’s Henry Street Settlement House. The NAACP brought together African Americans like Ida B. Wells and W.E.B. DuBois with white reformers like Wald, journalist William English Walling, and others to address the status of African Americans in a deeply segregated society.

A number of progressives who were active in the labor and business communities drew on similar ideas of social connectedness, as well as those of antimonopoly and social efficiency. University of Wisconsin labor economist John Commons joined with progressives like Addams, Irene Osgood, and Richard T. Ely in founding the American Association for Labor Legislation (AALL) in 1906. Supported by money from John D. Rockefeller and Elbert Gary, the AALL served as a kind of clearinghouse, translating concerns over issues like unemployment into concrete policy proposals. Organized labor, long suspicious of the power of the state (government troops were often deployed to crush strikes), was similarly skeptical of the AALL’s mixture of socially minded expertise and capitalist funding. Samuel Gompers, the head of the AFL, resigned from the AALL in 1915, charging that it ought to be called the “American Association for the Assassination of Labor Legislation.”

While organizations like the AALL tried to change public policy, some business leaders sought to temper the harsh excesses of capitalism and bring stability to their workforces by adopting progressive policies within their own firms. U.S. Steel and International Harvester, for example, provided their employees with wage increases, a promotion structure, paid vacations, pension plans, and even occasionally tried to implement company-sponsored unions. This “welfare capitalism,” as it was called, hindered the creation of robust employee solidarities within independent unions and generally increased employee loyalty to the company. Firms that engaged in these practices viewed welfare capitalism as a good investment – an efficient use of the company’s resources to purchase labor peace.

This period of progressive activity, usually defined by historians as stretching from about 1880 to 1920, contained many contradictory impulses. These attempts to improve society, however, are crucial for understanding the flowering of reform that occurred during the New Deal. Two points stand out. First, poor implementation hindered many Progressive Era measures. Specifically, the federal government’s half-hearted efforts to constrain the authority of big business and the forces of the private market resulted in the failure of many policies. For example, the Sherman Antitrust Act, created to address John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Trust, was at first rarely enforced – between 1890 and 1901 the federal government brought only eighteen prosecutions. Of these cases, four were brought against striking labor unions rather than large corporations that commanded near-monopoly power. Poor implementation was not the only problem. The federal government during the Progressive Era was, in a word, small. In 1900, only about 250,000 people worked as civil service employees for the federal government – this in a nation of 76 million people and in an economy with a GDP of $20.6 billion ($422.8 billion in 2005 dollars). For all these shortcomings, however, this period is worth noting for a second key point: it provides essential historical context for the New Deal. Progressive reformers, imperfections aside, generated a wealth of plans, ideas, and methods for addressing the excesses of capitalism. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, these ideas inspired a number of New Dealers as they wrestled with capitalism in their own historical moment. While these plans would provide intellectual encouragement, many New Dealers also drew on a rather different experience that preceded the Great Depression – that of mobilizing the power of the nation-state during a moment of extreme crisis. This experience of the Progressive Era was not one of economic depression or unemployment. It was found in the crucible of war.

The emergence of the United States onto the global scene in 1917 as a combatant in World War I is remarkable for many reasons. In war, the stakes for a society are at their absolute highest – the key question, always, is how to maximize a society’s economic productivity in order to triumph militarily. Individual goals, political leaders often claim, must be put aside to advance the aims of the nation. Who benefits from war? The list of beneficiaries is rarely short, but near or at the top belongs the nation-state. As sociologist Charles Tilly famously observed, states make war but war makes the state. The power and authority of the federal government grew dramatically during the Great War. Businessmen like Robert Brookings, Bernard Baruch, and Frank Scott served in newly created government agencies like the War Industries Board (WIB). Such entities used public power to intervene directly in the private economy. Labor leaders, like the AFL’s Hugh Frayne, also served in governmental bodies like the WIB, where they discovered that the federal government could use its power to satisfy labor’s desire for increased wages and better working conditions.

While some reformers objected to American entry into the war, many others enthusiastically joined the mobilization movement. This division manifested itself in a variety of ways. The women’s suffrage movement split into two wings, with pacifists such as Jane Addams falling out of favor with Woodrow Wilson’s administration, while war supporters, such as Carrie Chapman Catt, openly declared their support for American involvement even before the United States had formally joined the conflict. Other reformers became more directly involved with the federal bureaucracy. Russell Sage Foundation researcher Mary van Kleeck, for example, supervised the federal government’s wartime employment standards and regulations for women workers while working for the Department of Labor’s newly created Women in Industry Service division, the forerunner of the U.S. Women’s Bureau. Even though much of the progressive desire to reform society fell by the wayside during the Great War, reformers gained valuable experience working for a new set of federal bureaucracies that created substantial amounts of state capacity to intervene in America’s society and economy. These experiences – and the precedents set by reformers within these new organizations during the often-confusing fog of war – would prove important during the Great Depression.

The end of the Great War established that things were changing dramatically for the United States. For at least two decades before the war, the United States had been becoming an important participant in the global marketplace. War accelerated this trend; afterward, America became a key player in global politics and held substantially more leverage in the world’s economy. The United States, however, failed to manage these new responsibilities effectively. When the war began in 1914, the world economy was truly an integrated system, as measured by the flows of trade, people, and capital across national borders. This tightly integrated system – today we often refer to this as the process of globalization – was profoundly torn asunder by the war. Or, more accurately, it was shattered by the peace settlement that concluded the war.

No person saw this postwar development more clearly, or expressed his frustrations more powerfully, than Cambridge economist John Maynard Keynes. Working as an official for the British Treasury Department, Keynes was a member of Britain’s delegation to the peace conference held in Paris. As part of his duties, Keynes made a thorough study of Germany’s ability to compensate the Allies for the cost of the war, concluding, “If Germany is to be ‘milked,’ she must not first of all be ruined.” Popular enthusiasm for “milking” Germany, however, proved too difficult to contain. As Sir Eric Geddes, the First Lord of the Admiralty, put it, “The Germans . . . are going to pay every penny; they are going to be squeezed as a lemon is squeezed – until the pips squeak. My only doubt is not whether we can squeeze hard enough, but whether there is enough juice.”

A disillusioned Keynes wrote of the harsh treaty terms, “The Peace is outrageous and impossible and can bring nothing but misfortune.” Channeling his frustration into his best-selling account of the peace conference, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, Keynes charged that the “Big Three” – Britain, the United States, and France – failed to construct a political settlement necessary for managing the economic reality facing European and global economies: A functioning German economy was a necessary condition for a sustainable peace. Given the “Carthaginian Peace” of punitive and unrealistically high wartime reparations imposed on Germany by the Allies in the Treaty of Versailles, Keynes observed, “Even capitalism . . . which plays a real part in the daily process of production, and upon which the present organization of society largely depends, is not very safe.” If Europe did not create political institutions that could cope effectively with interconnected economic realities, Keynes prophesied a grim future: “Vengeance, I dare predict, will not limp. Nothing can then delay for long that final civil war between the forces of reaction and despairing convulsions of revolution . . . which will destroy, whoever is victor, the civilization and progress of our generation.”

A conflict that Americans had initially hailed as a war that would make the world safe for democracy had thus been concluded with a peace treaty that, within a short number of years, would help accomplish the opposite. The failure of the United States to join the League of Nations rendered this new organization an ineffective player on the global scene. The destruction in Europe, coupled with the growth of the United States, meant that the war had firmly placed the United States on the global stage as the world’s largest creditor nation and as a crucial political and economic power. But the global economy, thanks to the settlement of the Great War, not only lacked larger institutional mechanisms and arrangements to ensure political and economic stability; it also rested on profoundly shaky foundations. The hyperinflation that would strike Germany in the 1920s would shake the world economic system and eventually lead to the rise to power of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party.

Taken together, the Progressive Era and the Great War had provided American reformers with a crucial set of experiences and precedents on which they would draw during the New Deal. The domestic and international developments of the 1900s and 1910s shaped the initial boundaries for what would follow in the 1930s. But what followed most immediately in the United States after the Great War was not a deep, global depression but a decade of prosperity.

The Nineteen Twenties

Historians are inordinately predisposed to carving the past up into a series of ever-more demarcated periods. “The Era of Good Feelings,” the “Progressive Era,” and the “Gilded Age” are three commonly known examples of this practice; in a similar fashion, categories like “the 1920s” and “the 1930s” animate many works of American history. In recent years, however, “the decade” has entered into popular culture as more than a ten-year period of time. It is often used to epitomize the very spirit of an age, what Germans call the Zeitgeist. Unlike experience-oriented markers of time, such as wars, famines, dynasties, or the Renaissance, to name but a few, the decade – much like the century – is a decimal-oriented chronological marker that seems to possess distinctive cultural characteristics, a category that is often legitimized simply because the calendar year ends in a zero. Selective trends or currents in popular culture are thus said to epitomize an entire decade – in this fashion, the 1970s were “The Me Decade,” and the 1980s were “The Greed Decade,” as if these tag-lines somehow convey all that need be said about these years. As historian Warren Susman once astutely observed of this shorthand style of thinking about the past, “We merrily tick off decades, give them tricky names, and assume that that is what history is all about.”

This desire to pin the tail on the Zeitgeist, as it were, has many sources. A crucial one is the marked contrast that took place many years ago, between the “prosperity decade” of the 1920s and the “depression decade” of the 1930s. Contemporaries of the period saw this contrast in sharp relief. Journalist Walter Lippmann, for example, declared in 1931 in the early months of the Great Depression, “It is now two years since hard times reached this country, and .. . . In all the vast confusion which has resulted one thing at least is certain – the world, when the readjustments are made, can not and will not be organized as it was two years ago. The post-war era of the Nineteen Twenties is over and done.” In these words, Lippmann expressed a commonly held view of the 1920s: It was a distinct period of time, bounded on one side by a war that attempted to make the world safe for democracy and on the other by a worldwide economic depression that threatened to do the opposite.

To be sure, the notion that the 1920s and the 1930s constitute legitimate and coherent periods can be a useful one, but only if employed with a healthy dose of skepticism. Readers should resist the siren calls of overly reductive and simplistic labels, and instead embrace the pleasures of complexity. While the extreme depths of the depression inclined Americans to look back at the 1920s with a great deal of nostalgia, this inclination most likely says a great deal more about the hard times of the 1930s than it does about the realities of the preceding years. Rather, the 1920s should be thought of as years that simultaneously served as a postlude to the Great War, an interlude between war and depression, and, in certain respects, a prelude to the Great Depression.

Following the Great War, the United States faced a number of domestic problems that stemmed from its involvement in the conflict. Most important, it had to convert its economy back to a peacetime footing. This was a difficult task, given prevailing attitudes toward the limited role of government in the economy. President Woodrow Wilson, for example, announced to Congress that the federal government could not determine the process of the postwar conversion “any better than [the conversion] will direct itself.” The conversion did not direct itself smoothly, to say the least. As the demand created by the war disappeared, the pace of industrial output fell and unemployment shot up. Unemployment rose from a 1919 level of about 2 percent to more than 12 percent in 1921 – an increase of roughly 600 percent. (Economists who assume a “natural” rate of unemployment usually hold that 5 percent unemployment means an economy is running at full capacity.) At the close of the war, war-related industries, such as railroads and mining, were particularly hurt. Farmers, for their part, suffered throughout the 1920s, facing the collapse of agricultural prices, renewed international competition, and the forces of increased debt and consolidation at home.

Having just borne witness to great upheaval in Europe – not only the Great War but also the Russian Revolution of 1917 – Americans warily confronted a labor movement at home that had been briefly empowered by its participation in the bureaucracies created by war. A dramatic, nationwide wave of strikes and open violence – nearly 20 percent of all workers were on strike at some point in 1919 – led to increased fear of communist subversion and a backlash of repression. During this “Red Scare,” the government arrested about 6,000 people in raids against radical activity, and it eventually deported about 600 from the country. Politically, the nation embraced the business-friendly policies of Republican presidents Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge. Harding proclaimed that business practices would be a model for American government, calling for “Less government in business and more business in government.” Coolidge, Harding’s successor, proclaimed that “Civilization and profit go hand in hand,” and “This is a business country and it wants a business government.” While the reform impulse had led to the passage of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth amendments to the Constitution (prohibiting the production and consumption of alcohol and granting women the right to vote) in 1919 and 1920, respectively, many of the reforms and achievements of the Progressive Era fell by the wayside during the 1920s. Coolidge, for example, appointed lobbyists and representatives of industry to the Federal Trade Commission, which in the 1920s shifted its mission from prosecuting antitrust violations to advising businesses how best to avoid antitrust prosecution.

The renewed popularity of business during the 1920s had several sources, not least of which was the revival of the nation’s economy following the postwar recession, which came to a close in 1921. The ensuing years witnessed the growth of affluence, albeit one that was not widely shared. The U.S. economy grew by about 40 percent in the 1920s. Life expectancy rose. Electrification spread across the country’s cities and made some inroads into rural areas, spurring consumers to buy new mass-produced goods like radios and refrigerators, often with the assistance of installment buying on credit. The construction industry positively boomed with the building of new homes and, in some cities, skyscrapers.

The nation’s reading habits reflected these developments. During the 1920s, the sophisticated fiction of Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald never cracked the top-ten list of best sellers. While critics like the acerbic H. L. Mencken mocked the American middle class as a small-minded “booboisie,” the literary themes that sold well featured a comforting and romanticized view of American traditions – the cowboy stories of Zane Grey, for example, showed a deep reverence for the masculine, independent frontiersman. If a historian had to choose a “book of the decade” to somehow epitomize the 1920s, it would be hard to do better than The Man Nobody Knows (1925). Written by advertising man Bruce Barton, the book carried with it the endorsement of prominent clergy and sold about 500,000 copies. In his book, Barton described Jesus Christ as a great model for his readers, proclaiming him a top-notch exemplar for American business, in particular. Barton equated Christ’s parables with effective advertising, describing Jesus as a world-class salesman and personnel manager for his work supervising his sales force (the apostles). In one stroke, Barton presented Americans with a way to reconcile religious beliefs with visions of global commercial success.

Today, 1920s America is often remembered as the “Jazz Age,” portrayed as a festive era full of bootleg liquor, Babe Ruth gobbling hotdogs and clouting home runs for the New York Yankees, and sexy “flappers” (independent women who cut their hair and wore daringly revealing dresses) smoking tobacco and drinking alcohol with gusto. These cultural developments were indeed often entertaining, and were important in their own right, but focusing on them to the exclusion of other developments can lead to a kind of tunnel vision, seriously diminishing our ability to view the period in a broader historical perspective. After all, for all that a social elite enthusiastically embraced aspects of modern culture, per capita consumption of alcohol decreased during these years as great numbers of Americans turned to religious fundamentalism and middlebrow culture and literature. As historian David Kennedy has put it, an overemphasis on the cultural developments of the 1920s in our collective memory has “contributed to an artificial chronological isolation that has proved perversely persistent.” As Kennedy has observed, a culturally driven narrative of the 1920s has caused these years, like the sword Excalibur, to rise “unanchored and unbridged out of the lake of time.” While European nations during these years had their moments of cultural efflorescence, perhaps best exemplified by the avant-garde explorations of Weimar Germany, in the main these countries did not suffer from a similar outbreak of cultural hoopla or ballyhoo. Rather, nations such as France, Germany, and Britain spent the 1920s absorbing – socially, demographically, and culturally – the loss of an entire generation of men in the Great War. The United States, comparatively speaking, was able to indulge itself in a way that European nations were not.

The 1920s were prosperous years of interlude between war and economic collapse, but they should also be thought of as a time that bore the seeds of the Great Depression. Internationally, the settlement achieved at Versailles did little to ensure a long and lasting peace – indeed in the short run the world’s economy was left severely out of balance. While statesmen made a number of efforts to repair this dysfunction, these attempts were partial at best, severely incomplete at worst. By and large, though, these imbalances in the global economic system, along with the weaknesses in the United States’ economy, emerged only in retrospect, after the Great Depression had arrived.

The Great Depression Arrives

Although the 1920s had seen a great deal of economic growth, this growth rested on some pretty shaky foundations. While the arrival of the Great Depression has traditionally been associated with “Black Tuesday” – the horrific stock market crash that culminated on Tuesday, October 29, 1929 – the causes of the Great Depression reach far back before the events of this single day. Although historians and economists still continue to disagree about what, exactly, caused the Great Depression and about the precise reasons for the Depression’s length and severity, we can attempt to identify and evaluate several possible explanatory factors. The Great Depression can be understood as a kind of “perfect storm” – a combination of horrifically bad timing, the outcome of dimly understood economic changes and partially perceived structural weaknesses, and the product of poor decision-making by American elites in government and business – in short, as the economic equivalent of a disaster like Hurricane Katrina.

During the last half of the 1920s the American economy experienced a wave of change that was both broad and deep. Spending in more traditional sectors of the economy, such as textiles and steel, was gradually being supplemented and replaced by spending in newer sectors: such as mass-produced automobiles and household appliances, processed foods, tobacco, medical care, and recreation. This broad economic transition was a gradual, incomplete process – and the collapse of the economy in 1929, taken in combination with this fragile transition, represents one possible explanation for the Depression’s extraordinary length. These newer economic sectors were not large enough, nor did they employ enough workers relative to the overall size of the economy, to be able to pull the nation out of its downward spiral.

The stock market crash did not “cause” the Depression in the strict sense of the word, but at the time many people strongly sensed that the impressive run-up and subsequent collapse in stock prices somehow played a key role in bringing about the disaster. Although only about 3 percent of Americans owned stock directly at the time of the crash, a far greater number of people perceived the stock market as an important measure of the nation’s economic health. In 1928, stock prices had rocketed upwards, and they kept going up during the first months of 1929. More and more people were buying stocks, not because of the underlying fundamental qualities of particular companies, but rather simply as speculative investments. Speculation led to increasing numbers of people buying stocks “on margin,” putting up only a fraction (sometimes as little as 10 percent) of the stock’s purchase price and borrowing the remainder in the hopes of scoring big returns. Only three days before the stock market plunged, Yale economist Irving Fisher infamously proclaimed that the stock market had reached “a permanently high plateau.” While the stock market’s collapse grabbed headlines and unsettled conventional wisdom, it also signaled deeper problems in the nation’s financial system.

Although the United States did have the equivalent of a central bank, the Federal Reserve, the nation’s banking system was composed of many small, independent banks and few institutional mechanisms for dealing with large numbers of bank failures. About half of the nation’s approximately twenty-five thousand commercial banks failed or merged with their competitors between 1929 and 1933, in the process wiping out the savings of countless Americans. By 1929, the distribution of the nation’s income was highly unequal, a direct legacy of the 1920s economy. The income of the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans grew 53 percent between 1920 and 1929, while the incomes of the rest of the population remained more or less static. This left the nation bereft of broad-based purchasing power when the Depression hit, with too few consumers available to pull the economy out of its slump. And for their part, many bankers, businessmen, and government officials were, as economist John Kenneth Galbraith has put it, burdened with a “poor state of economic intelligence.” The scale of the Depression, as we shall see, outstripped the ability of many to comprehend what was going on. The Federal Reserve, for example, raised interest rates in 1931 to stabilize the value of the dollar relative to other currencies, but in so doing constrained the availability of credit to businesses and further hurt the overall economy.

Finally, the global economic and political context of the Depression hindered efforts at economic recovery. Many governments embraced high tariffs, which hurt trade between nations. The United States, for example, adopted the ill-timed Smoot-Hawley Tariff in 1930. Alongside high tariffs, the adherence of many countries to the gold standard inhibited economic activity around the world. The gold standard was a set of arrangements that, in theory, facilitated trade by requiring each nation to maintain a reserve of gold to back its currency. The Great War had decimated many reserves. Lacking a nation that could serve as a “lender of last resort,” the interwar financial system suffered from a lack of cooperation. Central players, such as Britain, France, and Germany, were so divided over issues of war debts and reparation payments that the gold standard, rather than facilitating trade, became a set of “golden fetters,” drowning national economies in the treacherous ocean of the Great Depression. The interlinked nature of the global economy served to turn recession into worldwide depression, as the 1931 financial crisis spread like a contagion from Vienna to Berlin, on to London, and then to New York, destabilizing financial institutions and crippling the confidence of investors and business executives around the world. As a result, the economy of the United States, as well as those of many nations, was in crisis.

The structures of capitalism had appeared to collapse, as the beliefs and institutions central to its operation seemed no longer to work. The sectoral changes in the United States’ economy, the stock market’s collapse, the weak banking system, and global adherence to the gold standard all served to bring about the Great Depression. In his classic work, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1942), the economist Joseph Schumpeter likened capitalism to a natural ecosystem, where constant change and tumult are defining characteristics. Capitalism, Schumpeter wrote, is a “perennial gale of creative destruction,” a constant whirlwind in which the economy, driven by entrepreneurial energy, incessantly destroys older ways of doing business and replaces them with new ones. But during the Great Depression the destructive aspects of capitalism vastly outnumbered and outpaced the creative ones. This severe imbalance between creation and destruction threatened capitalism’s very existence. At its core, the belief of stakeholders – consumers, workers, and employers – in any capitalist system is crucial to its functioning. A future-oriented system (investments, for instance, are exercises in deferred gratification), capitalism depends on trust. Readily available credit, for example, encourages businesses to invest and consumers to spend. It encourages people to take risks. In a sense, credit represents optimistic belief in the possibilities of the future – indeed, the Latin root of credit is the verb credere, “to believe.” The Great Depression threatened people’s belief in the ability of capitalism to realize these possibilities. Schumpeter’s perennial gale of creative destruction, for unprecedented numbers of people, was replaced by a horrific and devastating storm of destruction.

Depression and Destruction

The Great Depression was the deepest and most sustained economic downturn in the twentieth century, severely affecting all developed nations and lasting from about 1929 to 1941. In the United States, just between the years 1929 and 1933, over one hundred thousand businesses were forced to close. Corporate profits plummeted 90 percent, from $10 billion to $1 billion, while unemployment climbed to record heights. In 1933, about 30 percent of the nonfarm work force was unemployed, and roughly the same percentage could only find part-time work. During the Great Depression, authorities estimated that between four hundred thousand and two million Americans became transients, people who simply drifted from place to place, wandering across the nation in search of opportunity. Non-governmental welfare schemes, whether ethnically based benefit societies, private charities, or company-funded benefit systems, were utterly overwhelmed.

Business, the engine of America’s economy, came to a stop. Business confidence in the economy completely evaporated. While the nation’s gross national product (GNP) dropped a seismic 31 percent between 1929 and 1933, national investment (a direct reflection of business confidence, as at this point the nation’s business firms made nearly all the key decisions affecting investment in the economy) dropped a shattering 87 percent. These figures start to hint at the psychological aspects of the early years of the Depression. The collapse in investment, evaporating as it did by a factor of nearly 90 percent in about four years, tells us that business executives were nearly united in their belief that the economy was not only doing badly, it was doing so badly that

Table 1.1 Unemployment, 1929–1945

Year

Number of unemployed workers, in thousands

Unemployment as a percentage of the civilian labor force

Unemployment as a percentage of the civilian private nonfarm labor force

1929

1,383

2.89

4.05

1930

4,340

8.94

12.39

1931

7,721

15.65

21.74

1932

11,468

22.89

31.71

1933

10,635

20.90

30.02

1934

8.366

16.20

23.64

1935

7,523

14.39

21.13

1936

5,286

9.97

14.88

1937

4,937

9.18

13.25

1938

6,799

12.47

18.27

1939

6,225

11.27

16.27

1940

5,290

9.51

13.54

1941

3,351

5.99

8.39

1942

1,746

3.10

4.28

1943

985

1.77

2.44

1944

670

1.23

1.69

1945

1,040

1.93

2.64

Source: Table Ba470–477, Historical Statistics of the United States, Millennial Edition On Line, edited by Susan B. Carter, Scott Sigmund Gartner, Michael R. Haines, Alan L. Olmstead, Richard Sutch, and Gavin Wright. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

there was no basis for believing that things might get better. The smart move was not to invest capital in new equipment or facilities in hopes of reaping increased profits, but rather not to spend a firm’s capital at all. It is difficult for historians to quantify such elusive qualities of the human condition as “confidence,” “belief,” or “trust,” but the snapshots that these figures provide come pretty close to capturing what happened to these values in America, as the initial days of the Depression turned to weeks, then to months, then to year after crushing year.

These numbers indicate the human costs of the Depression. The growing masses of the unemployed and homeless people literally rooted around in garbage dumps, looking for food for their

Table 1.2 Real Estate Foreclosures of Nonfarm Properties, 1926–1945

Year

Number

1926

68,100

1927

91,000

1928

116,000

1929

134,900

1930

150,000

1931

193,800

1932

248,700

1933

252,400

1934

230,350

1935

228,713

1936

185,439

1937

151,366

1938

118,357

1939

100,410

1940

75,556

1941

58,559

1942

41,997

1943

25,281

1944

17,153

1945

12,706

Source: Table Dc1255–1270, Historical Statistics of the United States, Millennial Edition on Line, edited by Susan B. Carter, Scott Sigmund Gartner, Michael R. Haines, Alan L. Olmstead, Richard Sutch, and Gavin Wright. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

families. As bankruptcies and foreclosures became commonplace, the rate of suicides also increased. For example, the Hanrahan Bridge in the city of Memphis became such a common location for city residents looking to end it all that the press regularly printed the phone numbers of preachers, in hopes of deterring the jumpers. Hope was in short supply, however, as the Memphis newspaper headline, “Memphis Preacher Jumps Off,” begins to indicate. Enormous lines formed at soup kitchens, as the out-of-work hunted for basic sustenance. Reformers like Lillian Wald, confronted with the deprivation and the despair, thought these

Table 1.3 Farm Real Estate: Land Transfers, 1929–1941

Year

Forced Sales and Related Defaults, per 1,000 Farms

1929

19.5

1930

20.8

1931

26.1

1932

41.7

1933

54.1

1934

39.1

1935

28.3

1936

26.2

1937

22.4

1938

17.4

1939

17.0

1940

15.9

1941

13.9

Source: Broadus Mitchell, Depression Decade: From New Era through New Deal, 1929–1941 (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1947), p. 444.

Table 1.4 Wholesale Prices, Agricultural and Industrial, 1929–1941 (Index numbers 1926 = 100)

Year

All Commodities Other Than Farm Products

Farm Products

All Commodities

1929

93.3

104.9

95.3

1930

85.9

88.3

86.4

1931

74.6

64.8

73.0

1932

68.3

48.2

64.8

1933

69.0

51.4

65.9

1934

76.9

65.3

74.9

1935

80.2

78.8

80.0

1936

80.7

80.9

80.8

1937

86.2

86.4

86.3

1938

80.6

68.5

78.6

1939

79.5

65.3

77.1

1940

80.8

67.7

78.6

1941

88.3

82.4

87.3

Source: Broadus Mitchell, Depression Decade: From New Era through New Deal, 1929–1941 (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1947), p. 448.

Figure 1.1  Bankruptcy cases, 1905 to 1948. Source: Tables of Bankruptcy Statistics, U.S. Administrative Office of the United States Courts, June 30, 1948. Prepared in accordance with Sec. 53 of the Bankruptcy Act. (1948).

scenes seemed like a nightmare that was not possible in America. Wald declared that it all “might have come out of the tales of old Russia.” Throngs of people set up provisional encampments on the fringes of cities, living in rudimentary shelters or the tattered remnants of tents. Disease and malnutrition flourished in urban America, and conditions were not much better in rural areas of the country. Although farmers often had adequate food and shelter, they had little money. As a result, as times worsened and agricultural prices dropped, farmers began to default on their mortgage payments, losing title to their land. Net farm income plummeted 60 percent between 1929 and 1932, and about one third of the nation’s farmers lost their farms. Women and minorities generally suffered at worse rates than the general population during the Great Depression, as racism and patriarchy flourished during the hard times.

In the first three-plus years of the Great Depression, however, Americans were apparently fortunate in one important respect. As their economy collapsed, Americans seemed lucky indeed to have as president a leader with the ideal combination of experience and intelligence to meet the crisis of the Great Depression head-on: Herbert Hoover.

Crisis Politics, 1929–1933

President Herbert Hoover (1874–1964) was a capable, knowledgeable, and compassionate man. Although both of his parents had died by the time he was nine years old, in many ways Hoover lived the American Dream. A Quaker, Hoover spent his childhood in Iowa and, after the deaths of his parents, was raised by relatives in Oregon. He did not attend high school, but rather educated himself, working as a bookkeeper and attending night classes when possible. Hoover then went to college at Stanford University, studying mining engineering. He took his knowledge abroad, working in the mining industry, and ultimately became a self-made millionaire.

A progressive-minded Republican, Hoover entered public service in 1914. During the Great War and afterward, Hoover demonstrated that he very much deserved the nicknames “The Great Engineer” and “The Great Humanitarian.” Hoover selflessly and efficiently undertook the work of coordinating the evacuation of Americans from Europe at the war’s outbreak and subsequently led the effort of coordinating food relief for destitute Europeans in the war’s aftermath, saving between fifteen and twenty million children from starvation. Hoover’s appeal and popularity was such that in 1920 Franklin D. Roosevelt, then the vice-presidential candidate for the Democratic Party, indicated that he would endorse Hoover if he chose to run for the presidency. During the 1920s, Hoover served as Secretary of Commerce, holding the cabinet post for both presidents Harding and Coolidge. As commerce secretary, Hoover worked hard to bring together experts on the economy, industry, and labor, seeking to publicize the most effective ideas on relieving unemployment and managing the ups and downs of the business cycle. In 1927, Hoover again claimed the national spotlight, this time for his brilliant and decisive work in coordinating federal, local, and private relief efforts in the wake of a national disaster, the great flood of the Mississippi River and the ensuing devastation of the Gulf Coast.

Hoover was resoundingly elected president in 1928. His supporters promoted his candidacy with the slogan “A chicken in every pot and a car in every garage,” reflecting the abundance and the consumer-oriented economy of the 1920s. He took the oath of office in March 1929, and in his inaugural address outlined a belief in limited government and a deep respect for the capacity for Americans to help themselves. “Progress is born of cooperation in the community,” Hoover declared, “not from governmental restraints. The Government should assist and encourage these movements of collective self-help by itself cooperating with them.” The thirty-first president, Hoover was perhaps the most qualified person to ever occupy the White House up to that point. The horrific extremes of the Great Depression, however, soon exposed Hoover’s ideology as thoroughly inadequate to the challenges of his historic moment.

Hoover clung to his beliefs during the early period of the Depression. In his December 1930 State of the Union address, Hoover reaffirmed his position on government:

Economic depression cannot be cured by legislative action or executive pronouncement. Economic wounds must be healed by the action of the cells of the economic body – the producers and consumers themselves. Recovery can be expedited and its effects mitigated by cooperative action. That cooperation requires that every individual should sustain faith and courage; that each should maintain his self-reliance; that each and every one should search for methods of improving his business or service; that the vast majority whose income is unimpaired should not hoard out of fear, but should pursue their normal living and recreations; that each should seek to assist his neighbors who may be less fortunate; that each industry should assist its own employees; that each community and each State should assume its full responsibilities for organization of employment and relief of distress with that sturdiness and independence which built a great Nation.

While this approach may have suited America in the 1920s, the Great Depression betrayed Hoover’s thinking as a dead and rotting ideology, reflecting a “pre-crash” mentality. Hoover tried vigorously to gather knowledge about the crisis and to coordinate the activities of private charities and local and state governments. These efforts, however, proved unequal to the task of fighting the Depression. Unemployment grew from 2.9 percent in 1929 to 8.9 percent in 1930, 15.7 percent in 1931, and a staggering 22.9 percent in 1932.

Undeterred, Hoover maintained that knowledge, patience, and optimism were the solutions to the economic crisis. Hoover pledged not to accept his presidential salary as a gesture of solidarity with those who were suffering. He called leading businessmen to the White House to exhort them to be patriotic and invest in the nation’s economy. Hoover peppered his speeches and public pronouncements with optimistic predictions of the impending return of prosperity, at times blaming Democrats in Congress for obstructing recovery:

I wish to present to you the evidence that the measures and the policies of the Republican administration are winning this major battle for recovery, and we are taking care of distress in the meantime. It can be demonstrated that the tide has turned and that the gigantic forces of depression are today in retreat. Our measures and policies have demonstrated their effectiveness. They have preserved the American people from certain chaos. They have preserved a final fortress of stability in the world.

The main factor arresting the recovery, according to Hoover, was “the opposition of selfish groups and sections of our country and the unwillingness of a Democratic House of Representatives to cooperate” with Hoover’s proposals.

As the months turned into years, Hoover became more isolated in the trappings of the presidency and was forced to reconcile some of his ideology with reality. He grew depressed and had trouble sleeping, weighed down by the personal connections people made between him and the Depression. For example, the rag-tag settlements that people huddled in became known as “Hoovervilles.” The great humanitarian, the great engineer, Hoover tried all that he could conceive in order to spur the economy out of its slump. He even began to jettison his long-held belief in limited government, going so far as to endorse small amounts of direct relief to the unemployed and creating the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, a kind of “emergency bank” designed to address directly the dire economic crisis. The RFC, in theory, would use its capital (initially $2 billion) to offer low-interest loans to stabilize troubled banks and thus restore confidence in the economy.

Hoover was sincere in his beliefs and tried to be flexible in order to solve the problem of the Depression. He did the best he could to mobilize the resources of the nation, whether spiritual, economic, or intellectual, but he failed utterly to halt the spiraling economic collapse. His failure was ultimately one of an outmoded ideology – public policies that rested on moral suasion, limited federal intervention, and the generosity of private charities were just too limited and ineffective to make any headway against the Great Depression. The tax base of cities, localities, and states had been devastated by the Depression, and the federal government’s efforts to stimulate recovery and relief were too halting, too out-of-scale to the gargantuan problem to have an impact. Hoover’s strategy, to use expert knowledge and public authority to coordinate and mobilize private organizations, worked in countering the great Mississippi river flood of 1927, but the storm of the Great Depression dwarfed all previous disasters, whether natural or man-made. Effective measures for countering the Depression simply would not come from the brilliant and perceptive Iowa Quaker. Rather, they would come from a rich country squire from upstate New York – Franklin D. Roosevelt.

FDR (1882–1945) was not as smart as Hoover, but he turned out to be a far more effective president. As Oliver Wendell Holmes is reputed to have said, Roosevelt may have had a second-class intellect, but he was blessed with a first-class temperament. Born in 1882 to James and Sara Roosevelt, FDR grew up on the family’s estate in Hyde Park, in the Hudson River valley. His parents sent him to a private school in Massachusetts, Groton, where, he subsequently claimed, he imbibed the values promoted by Groton’s headmaster, Reverend Endicott Peabody. Groton, modeled after private English schools like Eton, sought to inculcate in its upper-class students the values of public service and Christian fellowship. In 1900, following his education at Groton, Roosevelt went to college at Harvard, where he edited the school newspaper, earned middling-to-poor grades, and belonged to a number of social clubs. In fact, he was not a serious student of much of anything. Confident, social, and outgoing, FDR enjoyed what today we might call “the college experience” instead of the pursuit of academic study for its own sake. In his senior year he became engaged to his distant cousin, Eleanor Roosevelt, who was given away at their 1905 wedding by their famous relative, President Teddy Roosevelt, with Endicott Peabody conducting the ceremony.

Eleanor (1884–1962), who would become known for her independence, sharp political instincts, and eloquent outspokenness while first lady, grew up shy, awkward, and insecure. Her mother died when she was a child, and her relationship with her father, Elliott, was strained. His bouts of alcoholism and womanizing, along with the sternness of the grandmother who raised her after her mother’s death, most likely reinforced Eleanor’s introspective nature. Franklin and Eleanor’s marriage is one of the most celebrated partnerships in American history, but it began somewhat awkwardly. After honeymooning in Europe the newlyweds set up housekeeping in a New York City brownstone purchased for them by Franklin’s mother Sara, who intended to keep a close eye on the couple from her adjoining brownstone.

After dabbling in law, FDR went into politics. He served in the New York state legislature and began to forge a reputation as a reformer, his Democratic party membership marking a departure from the largely Republican politics of his extended family. During Woodrow Wilson’s presidency, Franklin took a post in the administration as an assistant secretary of the navy, holding this office during the Great War. While Franklin and Eleanor’s family grew during these years, with the arrival of five children (a sixth died at the age of seven months), their marriage was changed forever by Franklin’s affair with Eleanor’s social secretary and friend, Lucy Mercer. Although Eleanor and Franklin would remain husband and wife after Eleanor discovered the affair in 1918, their union took on more of the characteristics of a partnership – formal, at times friendly – but one without the intimacy of their earlier years together.

FDR rose to national attention in 1920, when he ran as the Democratic vice-presidential nominee. Campaigning vigorously, Franklin traveled the nation and made many political contacts in the service of a losing cause. Following the defeat of the Democratic ticket, FDR returned to private life and dabbled in a number of ill-conceived business ventures. In 1921, though, FDR faced the battle of his life after contracting polio while on vacation off the coast of Maine. He would never recover, but he threw himself into all sorts of efforts designed to rehabilitate his now-paralyzed legs. Roosevelt became a kind of champion for the cause of disabled people, eventually founding the March of Dimes in 1938. Although the media did not print photographs of FDR in his wheelchair, many Americans were drawn to the dignity and optimism with which he faced his illness. For example, he took care to appear to “walk” for short distances in his public appearances, wearing heavy braces on his legs underneath his pants, leaning heavily on crutches, and at times holding firmly to the arm of an assistant. While it is unclear how much polio changed FDR’s character or political outlook, it does seem likely that, in humanizing a wealthy member of elite society to millions of Americans, polio proved a political asset of sorts.

FDR remade himself in polio’s wake. Eleanor and his close confidants, such as his aide Louis Howe, rallied to his side and took on the additional work of maintaining FDR’s network of political friendships. Roosevelt returned to the national spotlight with a rousing speech at the 1924 Democratic convention on behalf of New York Governor Al Smith’s bid for the presidential nomination. Although Smith, whom FDR dubbed “the happy warrior of the political battlefield,” failed to win the nomination, Roosevelt’s optimism and charisma were again made clear to all in the Democratic Party. Four years later, FDR ran and won the governorship of New York, replacing Smith, who became the Democratic presidential nominee and promptly lost resoundingly to Herbert Hoover. As governor, FDR developed a number of policies for battling the Great Depression, most notably creating the Temporary Emergency Relief Administration (TERA), headed by social worker Harry Hopkins, to address the crisis of mass unemployment.

Reelected as governor in 1930, FDR began to plant the seeds of his own campaign for the presidency. In May 1932 at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, Roosevelt declared, “The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something. The millions who are in want will not stand by silently forever while the things to satisfy their needs are within easy reach.” In accepting the Democratic nomination in July 1932, FDR announced “I pledge you, I pledge myself to a new deal for the American people. Let us all here assembled constitute ourselves prophets of a new order of competence and of courage.” During Roosevelt’s campaign, however, it was unclear what, specifically, would constitute this new deal. FDR, perceiving Hoover’s deep unpopularity, adopted a cautious campaign strategy that focused on avoiding saying anything that could be construed as controversial. A concrete definition of this new deal – beyond that it would apparently consist of bold experimentation and that it would constitute a new order of competence and of courage – would have to wait until after the November elections. There were two clues, however: FDR, in his acceptance speech to the Democratic convention, stressed that he would focus on providing work and security to Americans.

By November 1932, Hoover had presided over thirty-six months of Depression and skyrocketing unemployment. As the votes were counted, it was clear that Roosevelt won a resounding triumph, taking 57 percent of the popular vote (Hoover received 40 percent) and winning 42 of the nation’s 48 states. In the House of Representatives, Democrats returned with control of 313 of the body’s 435 seats, as 101 Republicans went down to defeat. Democrats also took control of the Senate, where Republicans lost 12 seats. Overall, though, The New Republic reflected the opinions of many when it observed, “All informed observers agree that the country did not vote for Roosevelt; it voted against Hoover.” Across the country, then, people anxiously waited to see what would happen next.

2 Saving Capitalism, 1933–1934

The multiyear collapse of capitalism was a global phenomenon that shook the United States to its core. Americans looked out at an international economic and monetary system that lacked a credible leader, a “lender of last resort” that might be able to stabilize the world’s economy. Trade between nations fell off sharply, as countries sacrificed the goal of preserving global economic stability in favor of doomed attempts to preserve the health of their own national economies. While the world’s economic system spiraled downward, nations raised tariffs and devalued their currencies in often-fruitless efforts to carve out islands of stability within the hurricane of worldwide depression.

In the United States, the skyrocketing increases in personal bankruptcies, bank failures, farm foreclosures, and unemployment all combined to generate a disturbing and widespread crisis of confidence in the basic institutions that made up the fabric of society. In 1932 this discontent surfaced within the American political system. Voters expressed a deep and broad-based dissatisfaction with incumbent president Herbert Hoover, resoundingly turning him out of office. They expected his replacement, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, to lift up a nation reeling from the Great Depression. On the day of his inauguration, March 4, 1933, Americans waited anxiously to see what FDR would have to say, to see what he would begin to do, as their president. To understand how FDR and his New Dealers began to undertake the work of saving capitalism, one must take a step back and attempt to comprehend first exactly what challenges they faced.

While the Great Depression had struck all developed nations, not all nations had responded in precisely the same way. Britain maintained its parliamentary democracy, intervening in the economy in limited ways under the ineffectual leadership of Prime Minister James Ramsay MacDonald. Other nations experienced more extreme upheavals. In Italy, Benito Mussolini took advantage of the downturn to further consolidate his power, imposing high tariffs and ramping up public works programs (such as draining the Pontine Marshes) to generate employment. In Germany, the Great Depression helped to open the way for Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party to seize power, fulfilling John Maynard Keynes’s fears that the only success of the Peace of Versailles only success was in planting the seeds for future global instability. While creating a one-party dictatorship and destroying democratic institutions, Hitler undertook public works programs (such as building a national highway system, the Autobahn) and commenced a “battle for work,” led by Hjalmar Schacht, Hitler’s minister of economics, to reduce unemployment.

FDR’s administration responded to the Great Depression with a sweeping program of what political scientists, sociologists, and historians have called “state building.” With the New Deal, reformers addressed the failures of the capitalist market system by expanding the capacities of the federal government to shape society. In making these reforms, however, New Dealers did not act as anticapitalist radicals. Rather, drawing on an understanding (often a partial one) of how the economy and society worked, they attempted to save capitalism – not only for capitalists, but also from them. For its energetic pursuit of pragmatic reform in the 1930s, the New Deal would serve throughout the ensuing decade as an inspiration to a number of other nations struggling with the Great Depression. In France, Léon Blum’s Popular Front government was called “The French New Deal.” The national unity government of Paul Van Zeeland in Belgium was attacked by its opponents as “a slavish copy of the American New Deal” for its active pursuit of social welfare policies. And in the United Kingdom, David Lloyd George unsuccessfully called for a “New Deal” for Great Britain, pressing for a greater commitment to Keynesian spending. Delegations from Western Europe, Mexico, China, the Soviet Union, North Africa, and the Middle East came during the late 1930s and early 1940s to visit the network of dams constructed by the Tennessee Valley Authority, with the hope of implementing such New Deal policies at home. The president of Mexico wrote to FDR, praising “the magnanimous work of your administration in favor of the unemployed, the workers, and the forgotten man in general.” But we are getting slightly ahead of our story.

The New Deal was a unique episode in the history of American state building for a combination of two reasons. First, unlike previous expansions of federal power, the New Deal was not a response to wartime emergency. In responding to the collapse of capitalism and the failures of the market, the New Deal marks an extraordinary moment in the history of American reform, where the power of government expanded in a time of economic (and not wartime) crisis. Previous expansions of federal power were responses to wars such as World War I or the Civil War, while other episodes of reform, such as the Progressive Era or the Great Society of the 1960s, came at times of comparative economic calm or even economic prosperity. Second, the New Deal, while it addressed the economic crisis of the Great Depression, was in a profound sense a political undertaking. Although on many levels a project to save capitalism, the New Deal was also the political program of the Democratic Party, which in 1932 gained the presidency for the first time in twelve years. Understanding these points – the New Deal as economic reform and the New Deal as political project – helps to make sense of the many different aspects of the New Deal that we will explore in the pages that follow.

The Interregnum of Despair: The “Last” One Hundred Seventeen Days

A span of 117 days passed between FDR’s election in 1932 and his inauguration in March 1933. Although we remember FDR today in part for the path-breaking First Hundred Days following his inauguration, the 117 days preceding this marker are equally important. This bleak period – one historian has labeled it “the interregnum of despair” – marked one of the lowest points of the Great Depression. (Thanks to the 1933 ratification of the Twentieth Amendment to the Constitution, which moved inauguration day to January 20, these 117 days would be the last such lengthy period between November elections and the swearing-in of a new president.)

While voters had overwhelmingly repudiated Hoover’s presidency, they faced a nearly four-month wait until he would leave office. In the meantime, economic conditions continued to worsen, and the American banking system teetered on the verge of complete failure. Even the bitterly cold winter was one of the worst on record. This interregnum, following the election and preceding the inauguration, marked a crucial moment for the New Deal. During these weeks, FDR and his advisors began to draw together their plans for the country and started to lay the foundations for their policies.

The seeds of these plans had already been planted and began sprouting during FDR’s presidential campaign. Crucial to this work was FDR’s “brains trust” (subsequently shortened to “brain trust”), a collection of advisors who had joined Roosevelt during the race for the White House. The brain trust, recruited by longtime New York politico and FDR advisor Samuel Rosenman, was made up of academic experts who rejected Hoover’s philosophical approach to governing. Rosenman first recruited Barnard political scientist Raymond Moley, who in turn brought into the fold Columbia professors Rexford Tugwell (an agricultural economist) and Adolf Berle (an expert in financial regulation and author, with Gardiner Means, of The Modern Corporation and Private Property). The three professors were then joined by Basil O’Connor, Roosevelt’s former law partner. While Moley, Tugwell, and Berle had their differences, all three were historical institutionalists who believed that markets were inherently imperfect and that poorly constructed institutions and regulations could severely hurt the economy, an intellectual position that the experience of the first thirty-six months of the Depression had powerfully validated. During the campaign, though, FDR’s advisors were often flummoxed by his casual optimism and occasional indifference to intellectual consistency. On the eve of an important campaign address, for example, FDR directed Moley to reconcile two drafts of the speech (one pro-tariff and one anti-tariff) by asking him to “weave them together,” seemingly not grasping the impossibility of this task. On another occasion, Roosevelt gave a vigorous address calling for fiscal conservatism, denouncing the Hoover administration as the greatest spending administration in history.

Campaigns, of course, are a different undertaking from governing – or at least, they used to be. Fundamentally, as former New York governor Mario Cuomo has observed, American politicians campaign in poetry but must govern in prose. Following election day, FDR and his advisors began to craft the prose of concrete policies that would accomplish the general goals – work and security – outlined in FDR’s campaign poesy. He signaled that government would assume some of the economic and social roles that business had once owned. As FDR had put it during a campaign address to the Commonwealth Club of California, “The day of the great promoter or the financial Titan, to whom we granted everything if only he would build, or develop, is over.” In contrast, he proposed, “Our task now is not discovery, or exploitation of natural resources, or necessarily producing more goods. It is the soberer, less dramatic business of administering resources and plants already in hand, of seeking to reestablish foreign markets for our surplus production, of meeting the problem of underconsumption, of adjusting production to consumption, of distributing wealth and products more equitably, of adapting existing economic organizations to the service of the people.” To achieve these ends, Roosevelt declared that the federal government needed to develop “an economic declaration of rights,” as safeguarding the rights of individuals “to make a comfortable living” was simply “the minimum requirement of a more permanently safe order of things.”

During the interregnum, the incoming administration also had to wrestle with Hoover, who made several attempts to persuade FDR to adopt his approach with respect to a balanced budget, adherence to the gold standard, and the renegotiation of the enormous debts still owed to the United States in the wake of the Great War. While Roosevelt kept Hoover at arm’s length during this period, a few early New Deal measures, as we shall see, actually reflected deep continuities with some of the plans developed by Hoover’s administration.

As if the incoming president did not have enough to deal with, on February 15, 1933, just over two weeks before he was to take office, FDR survived an assassination attempt by disturbed immigrant Guiseppe Zangara. (If Zangara had succeeded, one can imagine how different things might have been if vice-president elect John Nance Garner, a conservative Texan, had then ascended to the presidency.) FDR’s confident response to the attempt on his life rallied public confidence, thanks in part to news media accounts that emphasized his courage. Having survived the 117 days between his election and inauguration day, FDR could at last turn to the task of becoming president.

In his inaugural address, FDR delivered one of the great pieces of political rhetoric in the nation’s history. In a single speech, he managed to inspire confidence in his audience, present a diagnosis of the Depression, and propose a plan of action for the New Deal. In response to what he termed “the present situation of our Nation,” FDR optimistically declared his “firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself – nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” Roosevelt seemed to suggest that the Depression could be conquered if Americans simply faced the disaster with courage. FDR proceeded to do this explicitly, outlining the crushing state of the union with a succinct clarity:

Values have shrunken to fantastic levels; taxes have risen; our ability to pay has fallen; government of all kinds is faced by serious curtailment of income; the means of exchange are frozen in the currents of trade; the withered leaves of industrial enterprise lie on every side; farmers find no markets for their produce; the savings of many years in thousands of families are gone. More important, a host of unemployed citizens face the grim problem of existence, and an equally great number toil with little return. Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment.

These failures were not, FDR stressed, the result of a shortage of resources, but rather were principally a failure of leadership. “Plenty is at our doorstep,” Roosevelt observed, “but a generous use of it languishes in the very sight of the supply.” The cause of this failure of the market economy? Roosevelt delivered his diagnosis: “Primarily this is because rulers of the exchange of mankind’s goods have failed through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and have abdicated.” With this abdication – one that FDR, drawing on Biblical imagery, likened to the money changers fleeing from the temple – Americans “may now restore that temple to the ancient truths,” adding “The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.”

What to do, then? Roosevelt turned to his brief for the New Deal. “Our greatest primary task,” FDR stated, “is to put people to work,” declaring “This is no unsolvable problem if we face it wisely and courageously.” But FDR did not simply call for the government to create employment for employment’s sake. Rather, he argued that this employment must have a greater purpose. It must be tied to “accomplishing greatly needed projects to stimulate and reorganize the use of our natural resources.”

To accomplish the imperatives of creating work and security, and thereby restore people’s confidence in capitalism, the New Dealers would have to fight the Great Depression on two main fronts: righting the economy and stimulating business. Through public works programs that produced greatly needed projects, the New Deal would attempt to develop the nation’s infrastructure and grapple with the problem of mass unemployment. In the first two years of his presidency, FDR and the New Dealers primarily attacked the Depression with programs to shore up capitalism and address the collapse of the economy. In the first one hundred days of his presidency, these plans began to take shape.

Taking Charge: The First Hundred Days

While we remember FDR’s first inaugural address today for his confident assertion that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” the passage that actually received the most applause from the assembled masses was Roosevelt’s proclamation that he was open to the possibility of seizing emergency power and acting as if the Great Depression were equivalent to a state of war. Eleanor Roosevelt, for her part, was troubled by the enthusiastic reaction to this statement. “It was very, very solemn,” Eleanor recalled, “and a little terrifying. The crowds were so tremendous, and you felt that they would do anything if only someone would tell them what to do! I felt that particularly because, when Franklin got to that part of his speech in which he said it might become necessary for him to assume powers ordinarily granted to a President only in wartime, he received his biggest demonstration.”

Following the inauguration, FDR sought to capitalize on this atmosphere of crisis and desperation. He called the Congress into a special session, to begin on March 9, designed to deal with the collapse of the nation’s banking system. During this session, though, Roosevelt and his supporters in Congress ended up producing fifteen substantial legislative measures that addressed the crisis of the Depression in industry and in agriculture, easing the suffering of both urban and rural Americans. When it came to a close on June 16, one hundred days later, FDR declared that the special session “has proven that our form of government can rise to an emergency and can carry through a broad program in record time.”

While Congress voted on each piece of legislation quickly (congressmen sometimes voting on bills without any detailed knowledge of their contents), humorist Will Rodgers went too far when he joked that “Congress doesn’t pass legislation any more, they just wave at the bills as they go by.” In fact, all but two of the bills passed during the first one hundred days actually evolved from measures originally championed by congressmen and senators, and in some cases were opposed by FDR and received only his reluctant approval.

In short, the notion that the first hundred days of the New Deal were the creation of FDR alone is a myth. While Roosevelt’s leadership was important, the early New Deal had a number of fathers (and mothers), both within Congress and without. Newly elected congressmen confronted FDR’s fledgling administration with a variety of views. More liberal members of Congress like New York senator Robert Wagner pushed for policies that would address the crisis of the Depression in urban America. Progressive Republicans, like Nebraska senator George Norris and Wisconsin senator Robert La Follette Jr., were eager to implement long-blocked reform efforts, such as using federal authority to underwrite the development of public utilities. In the House of Representatives, Democrats like Texas’s Sam Rayburn and Maryland’s David Lewis worked with their fellow congressmen to champion the New Deal on Capitol Hill. (Republicans, their ranks decimated in the 1932 elections, offered little resistance during the special session.)

Within FDR’s administration, a number of new officials and cabinet appointees began to emerge as important players in New Deal politics. Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes hailed from Chicago and brought with him to Washington a sensibility honed by a long career as a progressive Republican. A past president of the Chicago branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Ickes had been active in the city’s community of reformers. Frances Perkins, the first woman ever to hold a cabinet post, overcame opposition from labor unions to become secretary of labor. A veteran of reform politics in New York, Perkins possessed sensitive political antennae, along with a sincere concern for working-class Americans. The new director of the budget was Lewis Douglas, who had served as Arizona’s sole congressman from 1927 to 1932. A fiscal conservative, Douglas enjoyed regular access to the Oval Office and was a champion of early New Deal efforts to restrain government spending, reinforcing FDR’s belief in economic orthodoxy.

A number of FDR’s political advisors from the campaign made the transition to Washington as well. Eleanor Roosevelt created a place for herself as one of the most politically active – and savvy – First Ladies ever to occupy the White House. After overcoming her fears that the demands of her new role would be all consuming, Eleanor came to champion the cause of minorities, women, and everyday Americans. Often she would deposit detailed memos on important issues into a dedicated reading basket, placed by her husband’s bed, for his review. FDR’s long-serving political advisor, Louis Howe, had been a friend to both Franklin and Eleanor since 1911. In the White House, he assumed the title “Chief White House Secretary,” a role similar to the chief-of-staff position in the modern presidency. James Farley, who had help run FDR’s two gubernatorial campaigns and his presidential campaign, became the head of the Democratic National Committee and joined the administration as postmaster general, a post with impressive opportunities for using patronage appointments for rewarding stalwart political supporters.

Roosevelt’s administration faced a number of pressures, not least from the Democratic Party itself. After being out of power for twelve years, Democrats were enthused about the prospects that a return to the presidency and majorities in both houses of Congress promised. A range of constituencies and factions in society also welcomed FDR’s administration, although for different reasons. Organized labor wanted greater benefits for its unemployed members and looked to the federal government to provide more jobs, desires that coincided with those of the many non-union workers who had found themselves out of work. At the same time, however, organized labor did not want the federal government to get into the business of providing the unemployed with skills or training that might prove a threat to the job prospects of union members. The business community had a complicated relationship with Roosevelt and his New Deal. For all of the hostility that many businessmen had toward FDR (famously describing him as “a traitor to his class” for his alleged betrayal of his wealthy brethren) during the first years of the New Deal, it is no exaggeration to say that many in the business community actually welcomed the new Democratic administration. After thirty-six months of Depression under Hoover, the promise of better times ahead with FDR was initially quite enticing. Prominent businessmen, such as Bank of America’s A.P. Giannini, IBM’s Thomas Watson, J.P. Morgan investment banker Russell Leffingwell, and department store magnet Edward Filene, supported FDR. A number of entrepreneurs set aside their political allegiances and focused on building their businesses, founding companies – including Ryder Truck, Continental Airlines, US Airways (founded as Allegheny Airlines in 1937), Owens-Corning, Polaroid, Texas Instruments (founded as Geophysical Service, Inc., in 1930), and Hewlett-Packard – that would eventually become some of the largest in the nation. A number of chain stores and consumer-goods firms also did relatively well during the 1930s, including Albertson’s Supermarkets, Smith’s Food and Drug Centers, Long’s Drug Stores, Dillard’s Department Stores, Tyson Foods, and Sara Lee. These companies also grew and prospered during the Great Depression, eventually joining Fortune magazine’s list of the nation’s 500 largest firms. Other businessmen however – most notably the DuPont family – threw their support behind the conservative American Liberty League, which the DuPonts created in order to portray the New Deal as an attempt to destroy America’s system of government and set in its place totalitarian rule.

Reformers, for their part, also varied in their attitudes toward the New Deal. In general, younger reformers were more favorably disposed to the New Deal than were their older counterparts, who had lived through the Progressive Era. One historian found that, out of 105 progressives that were still alive in the 1930s, only 40 supported FDR’s reform agenda, with 60 opposing it. In general, the older generation of reformers wanted to improve society by changing people’s morals; New Dealers, in contrast, wanted to reform society by fixing political institutions and better regulating the market economy.

As he called Congress into a special session, FDR and his advisors set out to tackle the most immediate of the many crises facing the nation: the utter collapse of the banking system in the weeks leading up to inauguration day. In his inaugural address, Roosevelt had used Biblical imagery to blame bankers and economic elites for shirking their responsibilities to society, charging, “The money changers have fled their high seats in the temple of our civilization.” The role of tough rhetoric in FDR’s handling of the banking crisis provides a clue to the importance of political symbolism in the New Deal. To save the banking system, Roosevelt and his advisors did not adopt radical measures that might have followed from FDR’s assertive language; rather, they adapted the plans fashioned by Hoover’s Treasury Department. In crafting a policy solution, FDR first chose to emulate the actions taken in nearly all of the forty-eight states, which had already declared “banking holidays” by the time FDR made this a national measure on March 5. This quick fix reduced public anxiety and gave regulators and bankers a chance to regroup. The Emergency Banking Relief Act of 1933 was the first measure considered by the special session of Congress just four days later. The central provisions of the act implemented policy measures first developed in Hoover’s administration between 1931 and 1933: the national bank holiday, the evaluation of bank soundness by the federal government’s comptroller of the currency, and the expansion of RFC and Federal Reserve authority to buy stock in banking companies and issue additional currency, respectively, in order to encourage a functioning system of credit.

In presenting this solution to the American public, Roosevelt masterfully deployed political rhetoric and symbolism to deflect criticism that he was acting too radically. In so doing, FDR also obscured the fact that his plan was deeply rooted in policies crafted by his predecessor’s administration, as well as in measures first formulated at the state level. Over the radio, Roosevelt simply and confidently reassured citizens that they could trust the nation’s banks because of the action taken by their government. “We shall be engaged not merely in reopening sound banks but in the creation of more sound banks through reorganization,” he declared. “I can assure you, my friends, that it is safer to keep your money in a reopened bank than it is to keep it under the mattress.” Critics on the Left were disappointed that FDR had not attempted anything like a full-scale nationalization or takeover of the banking system. One congressman described this hectic few days of activity derisively, observing, “The President drove the money changers out of the Capitol on March fourth – and they were back on the ninth.”

Most Americans, however, received Roosevelt’s presentation of his plan with great enthusiasm, considering it neither too radical nor too conservative. As humorist Will Rogers put it, “Our President took such a dry subject as banking and made everybody understand it, even the bankers.” Americans deluged the White House with letters of support for both his plan and his style. One Republican woman wrote from Pennsylvania to ask Roosevelt, “Won’t you please keep on talking to us in one-syllable words, and take us into your confidence? That is what the garden variety of us need so much.” By the time the nation’s banks began to reopen on March 13, the panic had subsided.

Throughout his presidency, as he had with respect to the banking crisis, FDR would rely on the power of rhetoric and political symbolism to shape public opinion. Radio proved a key component in Roosevelt’s approach: about 60 percent of Americans owned a radio in 1933 (this would rise to about 90 percent by FDR’s death). Addressing the country over the airwaves allowed FDR to sidestep the nation’s largely conservative newspaper owners. While the actual content of the New Deal’s specific reforms were not always faithfully represented by Roosevelt’s language, Americans did not seem to mind. They continued to gather around the family radio to listen to FDR’s “fireside chats,” a phrase that soon became a part of popular culture. (Groucho Marx would later joke, “You have no fireplace? How do you listen to the president’s speeches?”) FDR followed up the emergency banking legislation by turning to his campaign pledge to balance the budget. The Economy Act, largely drafted by Lewis Douglas, slashed payments to the nation’s large veteran population (these payments made up about 25 percent of the federal budget) and cut the salaries of federal employees. While precisely the opposite of what any modern economist would advise today, the Economy Act represented Roosevelt’s affection for economic orthodoxy and made good on his campaign pledges to control government spending.

Congress would subsequently force FDR to consider further reform to the banking system and push him beyond his own beliefs about the proper role of government in the economy. The federal insurance of bank deposits, one of the most memorable and popular reforms of the New Deal, was originally opposed by Roosevelt, who considered it unworkable and too expensive. Virginia senator Carter Glass and Alabama congressman Henry Steagall nevertheless included this program in the Banking Act of 1933, which strove to minimize the risk that the banking system posed to account holders and to the nation’s economy. In addition to insuring account holders against bank failures, the Glass-Steagall Act, as the legislation was commonly called, also prohibited commercial banks, which held the checking and savings accounts of regular people, from engaging in the riskier field of securities trading and investment banking. Glass-Steagall’s formal separation of commercial from investment banking, along with the federal government’s promise of insurance coverage to ordinary depositors, would help bring stability to the nation’s banking system for the next sixty-three years. When it became apparent that Congress was going to pass Glass-Steagall regardless of FDR’s opinion, the president altered course and decided to sign the bill into law.

With the nation’s banking system effectively stabilized, the New Dealers attempted to inject confidence into the United States’ stock market. The Securities Act of 1933, informally known as the “Truth in Securities Act,” was drafted by Benjamin Cohen, a brilliant young lawyer and protégé of Harvard Law School professor Felix Frankfurter, and New Dealers Thomas Corcoran and James M. Landis, another Frankfurter disciple and a Harvard Law professor. The act expanded the authority of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), requiring corporations to register their securities dealings and make detailed disclosures of financial data with the FTC, thus eliminating fraudulent activities in the nation’s capital markets while providing investors with reliable information. The act, along with the subsequent Securities Act of 1934, which would create the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), was spectacularly successful. The SEC, from its creation through 1980, was consistently rated as a well-run agency and has deservedly received much credit for successfully regulating the stock market, providing a framework that stimulated investment, channeled the nation’s savings to firms, and put capital to work. Both laws drew upon ideas that originated with Louis Brandeis, the Progressive Era champion of reform who believed in the power of transparent and accurate information to benefit the public good. As Brandeis wrote in his Other People’s Money, “Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.” Sam Rayburn, who championed the legislation in Congress, caught the prevailing mood when he announced, “Today we are forced to recognize that the hired managers of great corporations are not as wise, not as conservative, and sometimes not as trustworthy as millions of people have been persuaded to believe.”

While the securities legislation was a Brandeisian scheme and the bank rescue a Hoover-inspired measure dressed up with Roosevelt’s rhetoric, both reforms, in effect, brought to bear the power of the government on the private economy, fixing markets that were profoundly broken. Of all the measures passed during the first one hundred days, however, the New Dealers’ central attempt to address the crisis of the Depression in 1933 and 1934 was a far more substantial undertaking than either the banking bailout or the regulation of the stock market. On the one hand, this recovery legislation was a more innovative and extensive attempt to use the power of the public to intervene in the economy, but on the other, it was one that again drew upon established notions about reform.

Economic Recovery: Business, Labor, and Consumers

The outpouring of legislation that marked Roosevelt’s first one hundred days in office culminated in a sweeping attempt to use federal authority to stabilize the floundering economy. Reformers, businessmen, organized labor, and consumer organizations all wanted the government to assist business and labor, as both groups had been hammered by the severity of the Depression. The New Dealers addressed these desires by developing codes of competition to regulate prices, wages, and working conditions in a range of occupations and businesses. While these industrial codes would in theory help fight the Depression by ending “cutthroat competition,” the federal government would also begin to inject money into the economy by funding public works projects that would develop the nation’s infrastructure and put people back to work. Roosevelt described the resulting (and sprawling) measure that reached his desk, the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), as “the most important and far-reaching legislation ever enacted by the American Congress.”

FDR was right. Despite its shortcomings, the NIRA is best thought of as the public policy cornerstone of the New Deal’s early years (1933–1935). A closer look at its origins, its impact, and its legacy provides a deeper understanding of what the New Dealers were trying to accomplish as they first took power and began to try to save capitalism. Title I of the NIRA amounted to a virtual declaration of war on the Depression, while Title II expanded and formalized the New Deal’s public works policy. In tackling the Depression head-on, the NIRA’s Title I set out a series of goals for business and labor, requiring that workers and firms collaborate in setting prices, wages, hours, and production goals in order to stimulate both consumption and production of agricultural and industrial products. To accomplish this, FDR created the National Recovery Administration (NRA) and placed it in charge of carrying out Title I of the NIRA. In the spirit of FDR’s “rational experimentation,” the NRA had a two-year initial lifespan written in to its authorizing legislation. The NRA’s origins were as complicated as its ambitions to shape the economy were bold, and its implementation of NIRA’s Title I reflected a number of competing interests, particularly the power of big business.

The ways people understood the causes of the Depression directly shaped the range of possible solutions that people proposed. The NRA’s codes of competition reflected the state of intellectual debate on this vital subject, as experts argued about the true roots of the Depression: Did they lie in industry’s overproduction of goods and agriculture’s overproduction of crops? Or could the Depression be traced to a failure of society, to a sudden propensity of people to underconsume the products of a modern economy? These different understandings of causation appeared as two sides of the same coin, and the NRA’s industrial codes attempted to satisfy supporters of each explanation. As Rexford Tugwell put it, “there was a good deal more” in the NRA “than met the eye,” for “converging in it were several streams of thought developed by individuals or groups who hoped to serve one or another interest, not all of which were by any means public.”

The blueprint for the NRA lay not in utopian reform schemes or the ideas hatched by Roosevelt’s brain trust, but rather could be found in the nation’s experience with industrial self-government during World War I. In theory, the NRA, like the War Industries Board of World War I, aimed to create a kind of rationalized “business commonwealth” via collective planning. The NRA’s goal was to restore a system of economic competition that might safeguard smaller businesses, individual consumers, and workers. The reality, however, was somewhat different, as established interests and powerful firms soon dominated the code-writing process, while smaller businesses, workers, and consumers lost out.

Indeed, much of the implementation of the ideals expressed in NIRA’s Title I fell egregiously short of success. The inherent structural problems built into the recovery legislation, as well as poor leadership, limited its impact on society. As a newly created agency, the NRA did not possess the robust capacities of more established government bureaucracies, like the Department of Agriculture, but its shortcomings lay less in this deficit than they did in the nature of the “benefit” that the NRA provided businesses. The NRA’s industrial codes, which in effect suspended the nation’s antitrust laws, provided (at best) an indirect boost to economic activity. Other New Deal agencies, by contrast – the public works agencies and the Agricultural Adjustment Agency, for example – shaped society by directly injecting money into the economy. In short, fueling the economy with cash ultimately had a greater impact on recovery than did changing the legal code.

When big businesses quickly dominated the code-writing process, shaping the definition of “competition” to their liking at the expense of smaller competitors, labor, and consumers, New Dealers were left with a paucity of tools to effectively shape the rules of the marketplace, as well as with a shortage of the administrative talent to take charge of running things. Roosevelt appointed former War Industries Board member General Hugh Johnson to run the NRA. Johnson at first rallied much of the nation to his cause, effectively using public relations to build enthusiasm for the recovery program. The blue eagle, symbolizing the NRA, appeared in store windows of participating businesses, along with proclamations that “We Do Our Part.” Parades rallied NRA supporters in the nation’s streets, and enthusiasm appeared in somewhat unlikely areas of popular culture – for example, the new owners of Philadelphia’s professional football team named their club the Eagles, giving a small indication of the recovery effort’s early popularity.

Johnson, however, turned out to be the wrong person for his job. Excessive drinking accentuated Johnson’s bad temper, led to physical exhaustion, and hurt his ability to pay attention to detail. Johnson’s extramarital affair with his secretary likely did not help the NRA’s leader focus on his responsibilities. While the public did indeed rally behind the government, this early burst of support soon ran out of steam, as consumers, workers, and smaller businesses found that the new organization did not function in their interest. Consumers and their representatives were not able to exert measurable influence on the NRA. Workers, who were nominally guaranteed the right to bargain collectively by Section 7(a) of Title I, likewise found that the NRA delivered little tangible assistance. Smaller businesses found themselves at the mercy of the power of larger firms. When Johnson stepped down from his position in September 1934, the National Industrial Recovery Board was created to administer the recovery program. Although the Recovery Board attempted to revise the industrial codes and reverse the monopolistic effects that the NRA had had on the economy, this shift in course met with little success. The power of larger firms was, at this point, too entrenched in the administrative process of the NRA for the Recovery Board to weaken. Given its limited impact on the economy, there was little political or popular enthusiasm for continuing the NRA when its two-year charter approached expiration in 1935. Many New Dealers were, in fact, privately relieved when the Supreme Court declared the NRA unconstitutional in Schechter Poultry Corporation v. United States (1935), a case we shall examine in more detail in Chapter 5. When the Court struck down Title I of the NIRA legislation, however, it left standing the remainder of this key New Deal policy measure, which authorized a far-reaching program of public works construction.

The New Deal and Public Works

The Federal Emergency Administration of Public Works – commonly referred to as the Public Works Administration (PWA) – was the New Deal’s first substantial effort to address the crisis of the Great Depression through the construction of public works projects. Created by Title II of the National Industrial Recovery Act, the PWA attempted to increase productivity and employment in construction-related industries, a key economic sector. The economic stimulus provided by public works construction was originally intended to work in concert with the industrial codes enacted under of Title I of the NIRA, which tried to raise prices and wages by regulating competition. While the PWA proved effective in generating infrastructure, critics of the agency charged that it was too slow and ineffective in reducing unemployment. In response to this criticism, FDR put Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) head Harry Hopkins in charge of the short-lived Civil Works Administration (CWA) and, subsequently, the Works Progress Administration (WPA).

The notion that public works projects could be deployed to counter drastic swings in the business cycle was rooted in progressive ideas about the economy. The American Association for Labor Legislation, for example, had long advocated the maintenance of a “shelf” of plans and blueprints for public works projects, ready to be taken down and rolled out in the event of an economic downturn. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation’s division of self-liquidating public works, created under Herbert Hoover, operated in this progressive tradition as well, funding projects such as bridges, dams, and toll roads that could generate revenue to pay for their construction. Upon its creation, the PWA incorporated many of the plans and personnel of the RFC’s division into its own organization.

The PWA evolved from the Hoover administration’s efforts to fight the Depression by creating the RFC and passing the Emergency Relief and Construction Act in 1932. Modeled after the War Finance Corporation of World War I, the RFC provided loans to banks and railroads. Although the ERCA was not a rousing success, it broadened the powers of the RFC. The Act’s first title provided for $300 million to be loaned to the states for direct and work relief, at 3 percent interest, with the federal government to be repaid out of future federal allotments for highways. Title II allowed for $1.5 billion to be loaned to the states for self-liquidating public works projects such as dams, bridges, and roads, with the potential to make back the costs of their construction. The third title appropriated $322 million for national public works projects such as Hoover Dam, hospitals, military airports and bases, and other public buildings, bridges, and utilities, to stimulate the heavy construction industry. Although the $300 million from Title I was distributed to the states for relief, the second title’s strict self-liquidating requirement and higher interest rates resulted in only $147 million in projects approved (and of that, only $15.7 million spent) by the end of December 1932. Title III was even less of a success, with scarcely $6 million spent on public works. Despite these financial shortcomings, however, the ERCA established an important precedent. The RFC, under Hoover, had created a new division to supervise the construction of self-liquidating public works, forging direct financial relationships between the federal government and state and local levels of government. The New Deal expanded and nourished these relationships.

During the weeks following FDR’s inauguration, many New Dealers supported public works programs, but often with different justifications and different visions for their purpose and implementation. The head of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, Harry Hopkins, thought public works could quickly put people back to work. This philosophy shaped Hopkins’s subsequent leadership of the CWA and the WPA. The Interior Secretary and head of the PWA, Harold Ickes, envisioned public works more as an opportunity to improve the nation’s infrastructure and stimulate employment in fields related to the construction industry. Hugh Johnson, in charge of the National Recovery Administration, departed from both of these rationales. Johnson thought that the proper role of public works spending was to serve as a complement to the NRA’s industrial codes, providing a two-pronged effort to revitalize the nation’s industrial firms.

While these New Dealers approved of public works, the fiscally conservative director of the Bureau of the Budget, Lewis Douglas, was deeply skeptical of large government expenditures and pushed for reductions in public works spending. FDR was sympathetic to Douglas’s belief in fiscal orthodoxy, but public works captured his imagination and interest, and he was personally involved with them. Before his inauguration he toured Muscle Shoals, Alabama, with Senator George Norris, and after taking office he championed the creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority. FDR delivered speeches at project dedications and personally approved PWA allotments, regularly conferring with Ickes over the details of projects. The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was one of Roosevelt’s favorite New Deal measures. He believed that fresh air and hard work on various forestry projects rebuilt the morale of unemployed young men.

While the FERA and the Civilian Conservation Corps provided immediate relief and short-term work to the unemployed, the PWA operated by carefully reviewing plans submitted by states and localities. The PWA then commissioned selected projects to be constructed by private contractors. The PWA relied not on social welfare professionals, but rather on people with a background in civil engineering and construction, drawing its personnel from the Army Corps of Engineers, private engineers, and municipal officials with experience in public works construction. The PWA’s emphasis on the capacity of public works to provide necessary municipal improvements, employment on work sites, and indirect employment in related industries relied on a generation of thinking articulated by such engineers and economists as Otto T. Mallery, Leo Wolman, Arthur D. Gayer, and John Kenneth Galbraith. The PWA was also committed to national planning, superseding the planning board created by the 1931 Employment Stabilization Act with the National Resources Planning Board. Frederick Delano, Charles Merriam, and Wesley Clair Mitchell composed the NRPB’s advisory committee, and Mallery soon found a position on the planning board’s public works committee.

Outside the government, a number of groups were interested in the PWA’s public works projects. In the construction industry, professional building contractors welcomed a chance to go back to work on government contracts, while organized labor, especially the American Federation of Labor building unions (including the powerful carpenter and bricklayer unions), similarly looked forward to a return to employment. Organizations such as the National Unemployment League, the United Relief Program, the National Conference of Catholic Charities, and the Joint Committee on Unemployment thought that public works would provide the broad-based relief for unemployment.

The PWA concentrated on heavy construction and large-scale building. The PWA also directed monies toward public housing projects, flood control and reclamation projects, and a modernization program for the nation’s railroads. And it paid for the construction of several vessels for the Navy. Notable projects funded by the PWA include the overseas highway connecting Key West to Florida, the Grand Coulee Dam, the Lincoln Tunnel, the Triborough Bridge, and the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. Armed with an initial appropriation of $3.3 billion, the PWA gradually deployed its funds in the form of loans and grants in 3,068 of the nation’s 3,071 counties.

By 1939 the PWA had authorized the construction of 34,508 projects, costing about $6 billion dollars, and had completed 34,448 of them. Ickes’ agency funded 17,831 projects costing $1.9 billion, built by federal agencies, and 16,677 projects costing $4.2 billion that were sponsored by non-federal bodies. Streets and highways were the most common PWA projects, amounting to 33 percent of all PWA projects and more than 15 percent of total PWA spending. Educational buildings were the next most common undertakings (22 percent of all PWA projects), constituting about 14 percent of PWA spending. By July 1936 one or more PWA school project had been placed in 47 percent of all counties. The PWA explicitly targeted some of its schools and several of its hospital projects for African-Americans, building them in 24 states but concentrating its efforts in North Carolina, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Missouri, and Tennessee.

The PWA pioneered funding non-federal and federal hydroelectric projects. These non-federal projects included California’s Hetch Hetchy and Imperial hydroelectric projects, South Carolina’s Santee-Cooper project, the Grand River Dam in Oklahoma, the sprawling Lower Colorado River Authority, as well as projects in Arizona, Idaho, Illinois, Maine, Michigan, Nebraska, Oregon, Utah, Virginia, and Washington. Federal projects included California’s huge Shasta Dam, Montana’s Fort Peck Dam, and the Bonneville Dam project, which covered Washington and Oregon. While flood control and reclamation projects only composed 1.4 percent of PWA projects, these undertakings accounted for 10.4 percent of all PWA spending.

Public buildings, along with sewer and water projects, also received PWA funds, constituting 25.3 percent of PWA projects and 20.3 percent of PWA spending. During the period 1933–1940, the PWA enabled about 80 percent of all sewer construction in the nation, allotting funds for more than 1,500 projects. Although the PWA did sponsor a housing program, it was small. The PWA’s seven limited-dividend federal housing projects accounted for 0.02 percent of all PWA projects and 0.2 percent of total PWA spending, while the fifty-one federal low-cost housing projects sponsored by PWA constituted 0.15 percent of all projects and 3.2 percent of all PWA spending. PWA funds also went to building vessels for the Navy (0.75 percent of all projects received 6.4 percent of PWA funds), including the aircraft carriers Yorktown and Enterprise, and for the modernization of the nation’s railroads (0.09 percent of all projects constituted 4.7 percent of PWA funds). Overall, however, the projects most favored by the PWA were streets, highways, roads, and bridges; schools; and public buildings such as court houses, post offices, auditoriums, armories, city halls, prisons, community centers, and government office buildings.

Between 1933 and 1938, the PWA generated an average of 535,000 jobs on-site and 641,000 off the project site, for a total average of 1,176,000 employed. During the same period the FERA, CWA, and WPA had a higher average on-site employment of 1,422,000, but only employed 220,000 off of project sites, for a total average of 1,642,000 employed. The PWA’s greater ability to generate off-site employment was due to the many different materials required for the projects it built. Between 1933 and 1939, the PWA’s projects generated over $2.1 billion in orders for construction materials. Items made from iron and steel, such as nails, rails, pipes, and structural steel, accounted for about one-third of these orders. Stone, clay, and glass products such as brick, cement, concrete, marble, and tile made up the same proportion of materials ordered, with the remainder of materials consisting of heavy machinery, wiring, lumber, and other products.

While public works were composed of these physical commodities, they were also deeply political. The New Deal, of course, was a response to the Great Depression, but it was also the program of the Democratic Party, and public works construction altered the relationships between state building and political party building at the federal, state, and local levels. Considered on a per capita basis, it is clear that sparsely populated western states that were the sites of substantial PWA construction, such as Montana, Nevada, and Wyoming, benefited from PWA spending. Previous analyses of New Deal spending have concurred that this distribution stemmed in part from political advantages (Nevada Senator Key Pittman, for example, was president pro tempore of the Senate). More directly, though, these western states were swing states in a political universe where other regions were known quantities. As such, the West could be wooed by the New Deal with a small absolute amount of funds that, per capita, turned out to be quite large indeed. Nevada, for example, ranked forty-sixth in the absolute allocation of funds, but first in per capita allocation. Interestingly, however, several southern states – Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia – emerge as rather unlikely per capita beneficiaries of PWA spending.

The South had been characterized, in the words of FDR, as “the Nation’s No. 1 economic problem,” reluctant to accept federal funds and the threat to local control over race relations that these funds implied. A review of PWA spending, however, indicates that some southern states had a marked preference for Ickes’s public works program, even though that program maintained quotas for black employment on PWA contracts. In 1956, William Faulkner declared of the South, “Our economy is no longer agricultural. Our economy is the federal government.” As early as the 1930s, however, in the realm of public works, the federal government was already making important inroads into the South.

Local communities, regardless of their political allegiances, wanted federal funds in order to combat the ravages of the Great Depression. Communities often had to vote in special elections to issue bonds in order to allow them to raise the money necessary to attract federal matching funds for building public works projects. In 83 percent of these special elections conducted in the 1930s, communities voted to contribute their own money in order to construct infrastructure and to relieve unemployment. Or, as one concerned resident of Chula Vista, California, put it, to obtain a PWA grant, the residents of Chula Vista “went to the polls and voted to bond themselves in the amount of $107,000 to enter into the spirit of the New Deal.” For Chula Vista, the spirit of the New Deal meant the improvement of local streets by private contractors employing a combination of skilled labor and workers taken from the relief rolls, funded by a mixture of federal grants, loans, and locally issued bonds.

Concerned about the potential for public works to lead to waste and graft, Ickes was cautious about spending federal monies, leading to much criticism that the PWA was simply moving too slowly to meet the crisis of the Depression. Business Week, for example, complained that Ickes was essentially “running a fire department on the principles of a good, sound bond house.” Responding to this criticism and to the harsh winter of 1933–1934, FDR gave more responsibility for fighting the Depression to Harry Hopkins. Despite falling out of favor with President Roosevelt, Ickes remained in charge of the PWA through 1939, when the agency was placed under the auspices of the Federal Works Agency, a new organization created to consolidate the New Deal’s commitment to public works construction.

Depression, Discontent, and Politics

While FDR and his advisors focused on combating the Great Depression within the United States, during their first months in office they also began to take some small steps to manage the nation’s place within the world’s political economy. In his March 1933 inaugural address, Roosevelt devoted only a few words to the rest of the globe, declaring only, “I shall spare no effort to restore world trade by international economic readjustment.” In April, Roosevelt devalued the dollar, taking the nation’s currency off the international gold standard. This move, FDR hoped, would help the American economy by inflating the value of the dollar, making American goods cheaper overseas and boosting economic activity at home. In June 1933, Roosevelt thwarted efforts at the World Economic Conference in London to reach agreement on a revised gold standard, designed to provide more stability to international trade. He proclaimed instead that the “sound internal economic system of a nation is a greater factor in its well-being than the price of its currency.” This embrace of economic nationalism, FDR and some of his advisors hoped, would insulate the United States’ economy from a potential flood of cheap imports and give other New Deal measures a chance to raise the prices of domestic goods and services in agriculture and industry, thus stimulating recovery. John Maynard Keynes, a champion of expansionary economic policies, offered support for FDR’s approach in an article that ran in the London Daily Mail with the headline, “President Roosevelt is Magnificently Right,” but most international observers of the global economy criticized the new president for his isolationist course of action.

Roosevelt’s early approach to international affairs frustrated his secretary of state, Cordell Hull. A Wilsonian internationalist, Hull returned from the London Economic Conference determined to win Roosevelt’s support for lowering tariffs and promoting freer trading relations with other countries. Instead of trying to negotiate multilateral reductions in tariff levels, Hull proposed legislation that would give the president wide-ranging authority to make bilateral and reciprocal reductions in duties assessed on specific commodities. The Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act, enacted in June 1934, did just this, setting the United States on a course towards lowering barriers to free trade, particularly in its relations with Latin American nations, Britain, and Canada. Similarly, the Export-Import Bank, created in February 1934, was designed to encourage the sale of U.S.-produced goods abroad, lending capital for this purpose to foreign governments. These internationally oriented policies and programs would become more important later in the 1930s with the approach of World War II.

Domestically, during Roosevelt’s first two years in office the New Dealers concentrated on relieving unemployment (with FERA, the PWA, CCC, and CWA), stimulating economic recovery (via the NRA and the PWA), and making some attempts to reform the nation’s financial system (providing bank deposit insurance, stabilizing the banking system, and bringing reforms to the stock market). In its attempts to put people back to work, the New Deal avoided antagonizing organized labor. During the 1930s, the New Dealers never ventured to retrain unemployed people or provide them with skills that would help them improve their prospects in the private labor market. FDR even went so far as to appoint Robert Fechner as head of the CCC. Fechner, the former head of the American Federation of Labor’s machinists division, was chosen to run the CCC in order to reassure organized labor that the New Deal had no interest in helping unemployed Americans knock a union member out of work.

As focused as they were on industry, reformers generally saw the Depression as a problem that had deeply shaken America in both the urban and rural areas. Indeed, many New Dealers viewed the economy as a series of linked, interdependent actors, institutions, and regions. While conditions were quite bad in the nation’s cities, in certain respects things were even worse on the nation’s farms. In 1933, the farm foreclosure rate was double what it was only two years earlier. Though the New Deal began to reverse some people’s sense of despair, providing better prospects for a number of Americans, the voices of discontented others became louder in both urban and rural America.

To understand the Depression’s impact on the farming, it is worth noting first and foremost that farming in the United States was very much an industry. The 1920s were years when smaller family farms had suffered the twin impacts of consolidation and competition. Larger agricultural concerns bought up smaller competitors and deployed the power of technology to dominate the marketplace, both in capitalizing on impressive advances in crops, such as varieties of hybrid grains, and in taking advantage of economies of scale in harvesting crops and bringing them to market. Agricultural prices had collapsed after World War I, and many ordinary American farmers never really enjoyed any of the thinly shared prosperity that existed during the years between the war and depression. As one California farmer put it, “We no longer raise wheat here, we manufacture it. . . . We are not husbandmen, we are not farmers.”

The New Deal’s plan for saving capitalism on the nation’s farms could be found in a piece of legislation passed during the first hundred days, the Agricultural Adjustment Act. Backed by the large American Farm Bureau Federation and the National Farmers’ Union, the act aimed to put the force of law behind the long-standing desire of farmers to raise the price of their crops. As Title I of the Act proclaimed, its goal was “relieving the existing national economic emergency by increasing agricultural purchasing power.” Via a tax on agricultural processors, the federal government would make “marketing agreements” with farmers, paying them subsidies to reduce their production and thereby raising prices. The Agricultural Adjustment Agency (AAA), created to administer the Act, initially identified seven “basic commodities” to focus on: wheat, cotton, field corn, hogs, rice, tobacco, and dairy products. George Peek, who had helped run farm policy for the War Industries Board from 1917 to 1918, was placed in charge of the AAA.

In a nation with millions of hungry and unemployed people, the New Deal’s agricultural policy had a number of unintended consequences as it tried to reshape the market. Most controversially, the AAA endorsed the slaughter of baby pigs, the plowing under of cotton, and the pouring of milk down drains. Each measure was intended to constrict supply, raise prices, and thus boost the incomes of suffering farmers. The destruction of food in the midst of an economic collapse was not a political asset for the New Deal, to put it mildly. The best rationale that Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace could muster was to state, “The plowing under of 10 million acres of growing cotton in August, 1933, and the slaughter of 6 million little pigs in September . . . were not acts of idealism in any sane society. They were emergency acts made necessary by the almost insane lack of world statesmanship during the period from 1920 to 1932.”

In addition to the terrible publicity that greeted these AAA decisions, the New Deal’s agriculture policy often led to other unexpected outcomes. Government subsidies that were paid to farmers were not always passed along to those who worked the land. Poor Black tenant farmers, for example, were often thrown off the land they had worked when their landlords simply pocketed the government’s checks and decided it was a better investment to not plant at all. While the New Deal’s agricultural policy injected money into the rural farm economy, these funds rarely reached those who needed them the most. Although it provided a short-term economic stimulus in rural areas, the AAA did not bring about a far-reaching restructuring of the nation’s farm economy. When urban reformers on the AAA’s staff, including Jerome Frank, Gardner Jackson, and Alger Hiss, attempted in 1935 to shift policy so as to provide additional assistance to poor tenant farmers, their efforts were quashed by Peek’s successor, Chester Davis. New Deal agricultural policy ultimately benefitted large commercial farmers instead of the poor and farm laborers.

Like the NIRA’s Title I, the Agricultural Adjustment Act was also declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. While Congress revised and passed new legislation in 1936 and 1938 to deal with the agricultural crisis, the nation’s farmers continued to suffer throughout the Depression. Associations of farmers fought back to the best of their abilities. In Iowa, the Farmers’ Holiday Association, led by Milo Reno, tried to demonstrate the plight of the farmer, including the foreclosures, to the American people by pushing for the declaration of a “holiday” in 1933 with the slogan “Stay at Home – Buy Nothing – Sell Nothing.” In the drought-stricken Great Plains, large numbers of rural Americans responded to the Great Depression by abandoning their homes and traveling west. In 1935 and 1936, over 86,000 people arrived in California, many via Route 66. John Steinbeck immortalized this journey in his novel The Grapes of Wrath.

While the nation’s cities made it through the terrible winter of 1933–1934 with the help of the short-lived Civil Works Administration, the spring and summer of 1934 brought with them increasing turbulence in the form of massive strikes. These strikes, particularly in Toledo, Minneapolis, and San Francisco, seemed to signal the eruption of militant class struggle between the forces of labor and capital. With the passage of section 7(a) of the NIRA’s Title I, it appeared that organized labor finally had the legal and political space necessary for direct action. In Toledo, Ohio, the National Guard used tear gas to drive striking autoworkers from the streets of the city. Two people were killed and over six hundred were injured. The reporter for the London Daily News declared that “Toledo (Ohio) is in the grip of civil war.” In San Francisco, with the militant longshoremen’s union in the vanguard, a general workers strike ultimately shut down the entire city for four days. Confrontations between strikers and the police turned violent, with police killing two people and wounding others. The teamsters union took center stage in Minneapolis, shutting down the city in a general strike. City police shot fifty protestors in the back, and Minnesota governor Floyd Olson declared martial law in Minneapolis and St. Paul in an attempt to contain the violence.

In all three cases, organized labor was striking for the principle of union recognition by management. This marked a significant step forward for unions, which previously had often struck only over “bread and butter” issues, such as increased wages or shorter hours.

To many observers who read about these events – and the nationwide United Textile Workers strike – in the summer of 1934, the nation seemed on the brink of something big. While many viewed these events as the first shots in an impending class war, it is important not to generalize too widely from a limited set of exceptional events. Indeed, for all that this conflict captured the contemporary imagination, one could point to a range of evidence that signaled that these were, as one historian has put it, “not so ‘turbulent years.’” The labor conflicts of 1934 did not measure up to the strikes of 1919, either in the numbers of workers who took part or the lengths of the strikes. As commissioner of labor statistics Isidor Lubin reported to FDR, only seven out of every one thousand workers had participated in the 1934 strike wave. Furthermore, if one surveyed ten major industries in the American economy, Lubin found, “comparing the number employed with the number actually involved in strikes, one reaches the conclusion that for every thousand workers employed in those industries only five were affected by strikes,” or one-half of one percent.

In the immediate short run of the summer of 1934 things did seem grave. Major American cities had been brought to a standstill by the clash between labor and capital, with levels of violence at least reminiscent of those last experienced in 1919. While the New Deal seemed to be having an impact, with unemployment falling (if still quite high), and the economy starting to show signs of recovery, many – indeed, most – Americans were still suffering from the hammer blows of an economic downturn that had begun almost five years earlier.

As the nation approached the midterm elections in the fall of 1934, no one knew which direction the country might take. Would all of this violent upheaval manifest itself in the electoral system? And, if so, how? In 1933 and 1934, the New Deal had begun the task of reconstructing capitalism. No New Dealer, whether a savvy politico like James Farley or an intellectual brains truster like Rexford Tugwell, had proposed or even contemplated an extreme step like nationalizing America’s core industries or launching a full-scale government takeover of the nation’s financial markets. Rather, the early New Deal drew upon a mixture of ideas and by and large turned to policies and methods first developed during the Hoover administration or implemented during World War I. This use of public authority to reshape the framework and boundaries of the private marketplace – the core of the early New Deal – would be voted upon by Americans at the ballot box.

3 The New Deal at High Tide, 1934–1936

Although the New Deal’s impact on American society was long-lasting, its apex was quite brief, beginning with the midterm elections of 1934 and concluding with FDR’s reelection in 1936. Why was the New Deal’s “high tide” so brief? The answer, in a word, was politics. Politics shaped American society and culture in a number of important respects during the Great Depression. Roosevelt and the Democratic Party scored unprecedented electoral victories in 1934. Instead of losing influence in these midterm elections, Democrats actually gained seats in both houses of Congress. Jimmy Walker, the former mayor of New York City, wrote gleefully to FDR advisor James Farley in the wake of the ballot counting, “That wasn’t an election, it was a census taking.” With this political advantage, New Dealers seized the moment: “Boys, this is our hour,” Harry Hopkins told his staff. “We’ve got to get everything we want – a works program, social security, wages and hours, everything – now or never.”

The strengthened Congressional majorities renewed and inspired reformers, who overcame many of the obstacles inherent in the American political system to craft a set of landmark achievements, highlighted by the 1935 Social Security Act. In so doing, New Dealers secured for the Democratic Party the long-term allegiance of many Americans, who returned FDR to the presidency in 1936 in a truly resounding fashion. These triumphs, both at the ballot box and in creating new institutions, were political to the core. However, the forces that these reforms unleashed would soon constrain the options available to the New Dealers. This chapter probes the ways party politics shaped the reforms initiated during FDR’s “second hundred days,” which followed the 1934 midterm elections.

Despite the New Deal’s failure to end the Great Depression, its successful expansion of the federal government alleviated a great deal of suffering, while also providing substantial political benefits to the Democratic Party. The New Deal electoral coalition, for example, expanded the role of women and African-Americans in the Democratic Party. These changes led to some of the most important and long-standing achievements of the New Deal, such as the creation of Social Security, legal support for organized labor, and the changing role of public works policy during these years. The reelection of Franklin Roosevelt in 1936 marked the high point of the New Deal, demonstrating the ability of FDR and his advisors to remake American politics while transforming the nation’s society, economy, and landscape. These achievements, however, stimulated opposition to the New Deal from the Left and the Right.

The 1934 Midterm Elections

If in 1932 the American electorate voted against Hoover and the Republicans more than they supported FDR and the Democrats, 1934 signaled the beginning of an important shift in American politics. The 1934 midterm elections were part of a long-term political realignment provoked in part by the economic collapse and the Democratic response to it. The result of this realignment – the famous “New Deal coalition,” created during the Great Depression and composed of white urban ethnics (mainly located in Northern cities), African-Americans, and white Southerners – would be responsible for much of the Democratic Party’s electoral successes during the following four decades. While these changes are easy to see in hindsight, people at the time could not be sure how things might turn out.

Indeed, if the contemporary global context provided any clues to which way the United States might turn in 1934, they were scarcely encouraging. The people of Germany, Italy, and Russia seemed to have embraced their dictators, while democratic nations like Britain and France seemed to be muddling through, at best.

In the United States, Republicans viewed the 1934 elections as pivotal. During the first two years of the New Deal, some Republicans from the party’s progressive wing regularly supported New Deal measures. George Norris, the Republican senator from Nebraska, had long supported the establishment of the Tennessee Valley Authority and was pleased to see FDR spend some of his political capital on it. With public generation of electrical power on a massive scale now a reality, Norris happily cast his lot with FDR’s Democrats. Similarly, other progressive Republicans, such as Wisconsin’s Robert La Follete Jr. and California’s Hiram Johnson, supported the New Deal.

Most Republicans, however, spent the first two years of the New Deal attacking FDR. The criticism mounted by the DuPont-backed American Liberty League focused on the fiscal irresponsibility of the New Deal. The chairman of the League’s Illinois chapter declared, “You can’t recover prosperity by seizing the accumulation of the thrifty and distributing it to the thriftless and the unlucky.” The League asserted that the nation’s businessmen had been sidelined from public debate. American business, “which bears the responsibility for the paychecks of private employment,” the League thundered, “has little voice in government.” FDR joked that the American Liberty League championed private property and individual liberty as if it had decided to uphold only two of the Ten Commandments. As the 1934 midterm elections approached, Republicans candidates campaigned on the issues of patronage and waste in the implementation of New Deal relief programs. One Republican pamphlet observed that “Political set-ups to shovel out public funds and put people on the public payrolls as a favor have all ended the same way,” asking, “Are taxpayers to finance a paternalistic organization to carry the 1934 elections?”

Although he was soundly defeated in 1932, Hebert Hoover soon returned to national prominence as one of FDR’s most severe critics. Hoover charged that while the New Deal’s policies “do not necessarily lead to the European forms of Fascism, of Socialism, or of Communism . . . they certainly lead definitely from the path of liberty.” Hoover warned Americans that what they had witnessed thus far were only the first steps towards totalitarian rule, arguing, “The appetite for power grows with every opportunity to assume it, and power over the rights of men leads not to humility but to arrogance, and arrogance incessantly demands more power. A few steps so dislocate social forces that some form of despotism becomes inevitable and Liberty dies.”

Democratic supporters of FDR and the New Deal campaigned in 1934 on Roosevelt’s enormous personal popularity and made the best case they could for the policies that they had enacted. For example, Joseph Guffey, whom Pennsylvania voters sent to the Senate in 1934, presented himself to the electorate as the humble follower of “God’s inspired servant,” as he referred to FDR. Responding to the charges of Henry Fletcher, the chair of the Republican National Committee, New Dealer Harry Hopkins offered a stinging defense of the New Deal: “With the smug complacency which apparently goes with the chairmanship of the National Republican Committee, Mr. Fletcher has seen fit to accuse me of playing politics because I am feeding the hungry, clothing the naked and sheltering the destitute, regardless of their sex, age, creed, color, race or place of residence,” Hopkins declared. “If that be politics, I plead guilty, but decline to enter into argument with Mr. Fletcher.” Driving home his point, Hopkins pointed to the harsh realities created by the Great Depression – and, by implication, the failure of the Hoover administration – declaring, “Hunger is not debatable.”

When he campaigned, FDR stressed the American character of the New Deal’s reforms. Speaking at the opening of a new veterans hospital in Roanoke, Virginia – a public works project built by the New Deal – Roosevelt declared, “You see before you today a monument which is a very definite representation of the national policy of your government, that its disabled and sick veterans shall be accorded the best treatment which medical and surgical science can possibly supply.” Having located himself firmly in the patriotic tradition of American politics, FDR connected this tradition to his New Deal:

In a larger sense these buildings are a symbol of the broader policy, the policy that the Government is seeking to give aid not only to the veterans of its wars, but also to hundreds of thousands of other citizens – men, women and children who are handicapped by environment or by circumstance and are lacking today in what reasonable people call the essentials of modern civilization.. . . In one sense these men and women and children that I am talking about are not forgotten people – I believe you have heard that phrase before – for the very good reason that we have known of their existence and have appreciated their plight for many years. But, in another sense they have been forgotten, for it has only been in recent years that Government, as such, has undertaken to help them on a national scale.. . . You have heard it said that we must restore prosperity. You have heard some kind people say that the country is distinctly better off from a material point of view than it was last year. I am inclined to agree with them.. . . It must remain our constant objective to eliminate the causes of depression and the drags on prosperity. It must be our constant objective to do what we can to raise these people up to a higher standard of living, to a better chance in life.

The Democrats prevailed in the 1934 elections, triumphing in a landslide of unprecedented dimensions. After polls closed, Democrats held 69 of the Senate’s 96 seats. In the House, 322 of the nation’s 435 representatives were Democrats, and ten more were members of progressive third parties. The Republican Party had been routed. One might analyze the meaning of the 1934 elections in many ways, but it seems clear that FDR’s public presentation – one of confidence, of security, of pragmatic experimentation – had struck a resonant chord with the voters. The personal appeal of FDR and his wife, Eleanor, were in fact a foundational component of the New Deal electoral coalition.

The New Deal Coalition

Many people seemed to feel a real connection with both Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, and many even wrote to them as if they knew them personally. The White House, which soon after FDR took office was receiving between five thousand and eight thousand pieces of mail each day, was forced to expand the number of staffers who dealt with mail from one person to fifty. In an age when public opinion polling was still little known (“scientific” polling began around 1935), FDR relied on analyses of his mail by his staff and read selected letters himself in order to keep track of the public’s mood. As Roosevelt put it, the immense amount of mail he received constituted the “most perfect index to the state of mind of the people.” While clerks handled much of this mail, forwarding letters on to the government department or agency best suited to reply to them, many letters were read and answered by presidential assistants and secretaries in the White House. Given the volume of correspondence, many of these replies were formulaic. Louis Howe, FDR’s close advisor, recalled that FDR would often answer letters himself. “I have seen him spend precious moments,” Howe remembered, “poring over letters scribbled on butcher paper or ruled pages torn from a cheap pad, often directing special attention or replies to the writers of such letters.”

FDR and Eleanor greatly valued the letters that people sent them. FDR’s personal reading of selected letters, and of the “mail briefs” that his staff prepared for him to summarize main themes in his correspondence, gave him a sense of the national mood. Speaking to a group of newspaper editors, he once declared, “I am more closely in touch with public opinion in the United States than any individual in this room.” In the Roosevelts’ first year in the White House, Eleanor alone received about three hundred thousand letters. She made time in her busy schedule to read about fifty pieces of her mail each day, often sharing the more interesting letters she received with FDR. She believed that “the times were too serious and the requests too desperate” to simply ignore these letters.

From the perspective of the New Dealers, it is hard to underestimate the boost that the 1934 victories gave their program of reform. They had done more than solidify their support in Congress, they had increased it, and they had increased it substantially. With this strengthened position in the American political system, many reformers turned their thoughts to what they might achieve next. As Arthur Krock, the New York Times political columnist put it in his analysis of the midterms, “The President and his New Deal, in its first electoral test yesterday, won the most overwhelming victory in the history of American politics. A record-breaking number of voters for an off-year election gave the President a clear mandate to proceed with his policies in his own way, and, in giving that mandate, they literally destroyed the right wing of the Republican party.” With their votes, Krock concluded, “the people of the United States invested the President with the greatest power that has ever been given to a Chief Executive on the submission of his case.” As James Farley reflected on the new political landscape: “Famous Republican figures have been toppled into oblivion. In fact, we must wonder whom they have left that the country has ever heard of.”

While the rhetoric and style of their campaign was important, the Democrats’ victory did not stem from the power of their discourse alone. By November 1934, the programs and policies of the New Deal had delivered enough tangible aid and intangible hope to have a major impact on the electorate. The New Dealers had also worked hard during their first two years in office to build the organizational strength of the Democratic Party, often relying on the political benefits that New Deal programs could deliver. As Virginia senator Carter Glass once quipped, the road to hell was often lined with post offices. In other words, creating jobs and stimulating the economy by building public works projects was not only good policy for the New Deal, it was also good politics.

The coalition depended not just on patronage, but also on the men who coordinated it. While the complexities inherent in building a new bureaucracy led to many delays in getting public works construction underway, the Public Works Administration’s organization and projects, once functioning, played a key role in building and solidifying the Democratic Party at federal, state, and local levels of government. Central to brokering this relationship between government and party was Emil E. Hurja, who coordinated patronage during the early stages of the PWA. Hurja was in charge of distributing patronage appointments for the Democratic Party, not only placing people in Harold Ickes’s Interior Department and the PWA, but also consulting with Postmaster General James Farley and New Dealer Rexford Tugwell about appointments in Tugwell’s Resettlement Administration. Although Hurja is little remembered today, in 1935 one journalist observed that he was “as much a product of the New Deal as Rex Tugwell . . . an actuarial antidote to the nonpolitically minded and impractical brain trusters and reformers.” While this statement contrasts Hurja with a stereotypical view of Tugwell, the general point about Hurja’s importance is well taken.

Michigan born, Hurja was the son of immigrants from Finland. Following his graduation from the University of Washington, he served in the army in World War I, owned a newspaper in Texas, and worked on Wall Street, analyzing mining and oil stocks. After working for James Farley and the Democratic Party during the 1932 campaign, Hurja became one of Ickes’s two administrative assistants at the PWA. Hurja’s official job duties were described on an organization chart as “Coordination between Federal State Representatives, Regional Offices, State officials & Public Bodies & the Public Works Administration.”

While the PWA created new ties between the federal government and localities by distributing federal grants and loans, the large number of appointments required by the PWA led to a silent upheaval in the distribution of patronage by the Democratic Party. The task of staffing the PWA was suffused with political considerations. While Postmaster General Farley approved all state-level appointments to the PWA, party pollster Hurja correlated job offers by congressional district, past election returns, and the loyalty of the applicant’s congressman to Roosevelt. In the opinion of biographer Melvin Holli, Hurja was thus able “to transform spoilsmanship into a quasi-scientific exercise in personnel management.”

Relying on Hurja’s careful statistical calculations and Farley’s political power, Democrats steered government relief funds toward states that might be leaning against them in upcoming elections. The influx of money into Louisiana after Huey Long’s death, for example, was dubbed the “Second Louisiana Purchase,” a reference to the local Democratic Party’s use of federal relief dollars to solidify its political machine.

Hurja kept records of the distribution of PWA funds for federal and nonfederal projects by state, displaying them in carefully drawn bar charts. Hurja also tracked the number of PWA employees in Washington, D.C., tallying their home states and recording whether they had been “endorsed” by a home-state congressman or senator. Hurja, in fact, began filling jobs in the PWA while he was still working as a special assistant in the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. The RFC, a precursor to the PWA as the central clearinghouse for approval of federal public works projects, thus also set an important precedent in the dispensing of patronage. Hurja mailed lists of engineers directly to Major Philip B. Fleming of the Army Corps of Engineers, who worked for the PWA for many years and eventually ran the Federal Works Administration from 1941 to 1949. After reviewing the list of prescreened candidates, Fleming contacted Hurja to confirm, or reject, appointments from the list of recommended engineers.

By January 1934, however, journalists in Washington were reporting that Hurja was planning to leave the PWA, “after an unhappy five months as ‘patronage man’ in the Interior Department.” Hurja was rumored by some to be considering running for a Michigan senate seat; others reported that he desired to be appointed envoy to Finland. Farley was more than happy to welcome Hurja and his political expertise back to the Democratic National Committee. Hurja’s vast circle of acquaintances and his personal relationships with virtually every senator and congressman made him the ideal candidate to take over much of Farley’s detailed preparations for the upcoming 1934 congressional elections. When Hurja returned to the DNC, Thomas Corcoran wrote to Felix Frankfurter that Hurja was “now the real head of the Democratic National Committee.” By 1936 the Saturday Evening Post agreed with Corcoran, proclaiming Hurja “the New Deal’s Political Doctor.” Hurja’s careful record keeping, the Post reported, showed “not only how the vital organs or the New Deal are doing but how each muscle, nerve and cell is getting along.”

While Emil Hurja played an important role in Washington, D.C., connecting the PWA’s bureaucracy and projects to the larger task of building and solidifying the Democratic Party at the federal, state, and local levels of government, much of the hard work of party building transpired outside the nation’s capital. The growing involvement between these different levels of government led National Planning Board member Louis Brownlow to observe that, if the early New Deal was a period in which “it has been said that the federal government has discovered the cities, it is equally true that the cities have discovered the federal government.” The nation’s mayors were especially interested in the PWA’s potential to aid the cities, banding together in 1933 to form the United States Conference of Mayors. This development, one political scientist has declared, made 1933 “the most eventful [year] for municipal affairs in the twentieth century.”

Local and state politicians also looked to federal public works funds to advance their own interests. In Chicago, for example, local politicians seized upon the PWA as a vehicle for improving the Democratic Party’s fortunes. The precedent for this kind of opportunism had been set in a number of scandals that had beset the Civil Works Administration, most notably a kickback scheme involving truck rentals in Chicago. While both Harold Ickes and Harry Hopkins often brought in presumably nonpartisan army officers from the Army Corps of Engineers to oversee problematic relief and public works programs, the PWA and the CWA were just as often content to turn projects over local political machines, either Democratic and Republican, so long as major scandals were avoided.

The absence of major scandals, however, did not indicate that New Deal public works program were free from politics. The Democratic Party in Chicago, for example, called on PWA employees and the personnel in other local agencies, such as the Chicago Sanitary District, to raise party funds. As one of several overlapping governmental authorities in Chicago, the Sanitary District served as a public body separate from city government, borrowing money and supervising projects such as canal construction. All but three of the Sanitary District’s twenty-seven engineers regularly paid dues to various local Democratic organizations. To be sure, as FDR pointed out, the New Deal “never had a Teapot Dome scandal.” But the New Deal’s works programs did reshape the nation’s political landscape, increasing the political possibilities that were available to local interests at the precinct level.

FDR and the New Deal invested a great deal of attention and resources in bringing together the coalition of voters that have subsequently been labeled the “New Deal coalition.” Catholics, who during the 1930s constituted about two-thirds of all union members, were represented in FDR’s appointments. Roosevelt’s first choice as attorney general was Thomas Walsh, a devout Catholic from Montana who was well known for his work in exposing the Teapot Dome scandal in the 1920s. In addition to the political savvy that FDR advisor James Farley brought to his work in the New Deal, his Catholicism also helped signal to Catholics that they were welcome in public life. Indeed, 51 of the 196 judges that FDR appointed to the federal bench throughout his presidency were Catholic. Similarly, FDR appointed between four thousand and five thousand Jews to positions throughout his administration, many of them with expertise in social work, economics, or law. Roosevelt’s opponents noted this fact with derision, referring with scorn to FDR’s “Jew Deal.”

Many first- and second-generation Americans, who originally hailed from eastern and southern Europe, reacted positively to these new trends in the nation’s politics. FDR and the Democratic Party increasingly began to attract the votes of the nation’s working class, building support among non-native born, less educated, and more urban citizens, as well as among Catholics and Jews. This realignment began with Al Smith’s presidential candidacy in 1928 (Smith was the first Catholic to run for the office), but FDR and the New Dealers accelerated it. The 1935 National Labor Relations Act, although initially opposed by FDR, also helped to build increased support for the Democratic Party among union members. Drafted by New York senator Robert Wagner, this measure restored into law section 7(a) of the National Industrial Recovery Act’s Title I, which had been struck down by the Supreme Court. Armed with this more robust assurance of labor’s right to organize and bargain collectively with employers, union officials stepped up their efforts to recruit new members, telling workers “FDR wants you to join a union.” With this change in the nation’s labor laws, Roosevelt – a wealthy man from upstate New York – became beloved by many of the nation’s workers. More important, the Wagner Act allowed organized labor to begin its journey to becoming “Big Labor,” which, along with “Big Government” and “Big Business,” would help define the contours of the American political economy after World War II.

In addition to winning the votes of workers, Roosevelt and the Democratic Party also worked to win the votes of women and, to an extent, African-Americans. Molly Dewson, head of the Democratic National Committee’s Women’s Division, was in charge of patronage appointments for women. Dewson wanted to provide positions for women who shared her beliefs in social justice, as well as building the foundations for a new cohort of women leaders in the Democratic Party. Dewson was a pragmatist. She once told FDR’s aide, Marvin McIntyre, “Mac, I am not a feminist. I am a practical politician out to build up the Democratic Party where it sorely needs it.” Writing to Eleanor Roosevelt, Dewson declared “I feel that the women’s vote is going to be important four years from now [in the 1936 elections] and that we must look after our able organization women.” Dewson provided strong behind-the-scenes backing for the high-profile appointments of Francis Perkins, the first woman to serve in the cabinet, and Ruth Bryan Owen, the first woman foreign ambassador (to Denmark), as well as placing Democratic Party stalwarts like Sue Shelton White and Ellen Sullivan Woodward in New Deal organizations such as the NRA and the FERA.

With Dewson’s leadership, the Women’s Division of the Democratic Party did its best to spend its political capital on appointments for its members. “The Women’s Division has something to say about these things,” Dewson told Perkins, as “We did a lot to elect [FDR]. I know I did, and he knows I did.” Eleanor Roosevelt broke with past tradition for first ladies and in 1934 campaigned vigorously on behalf Caroline O’Day in her successful race for a Congressional seat from New York. Eleanor’s daily syndicated newspaper column, “My Day,” also proved a popular and effective forum for women during the New Deal, helping to underscore the legitimacy of women in public life. Although the public influence of Dewson’s network of women began to fade in 1936, during the first years of the New Deal it did crucial work in consolidating and building the strength of the Democratic Party.

While African-Americans welcomed the relief measures of the New Deal, it took several electoral cycles for their party allegiances to switch. In 1932, about 77 percent of African-Americans voted for Hoover, demonstrating the persistent appeal of the “Party of Lincoln” even in the depths of the Great Depression. As Frederick Douglass once said of the African-American affection for the political party that had presided over the end of slavery, “The Republican Party is the ship; all else is the sea.” This line of thinking held sway, as Robert Vann, the editor of the African-American Pittsburgh Courier, urged his readers to reconsider: “My friends, go turn Lincoln’s picture to the wall . . . that debt has been paid in full.”

Once in office, Roosevelt and the New Dealers did not make particularly focused attempts at winning the votes of African-Americans. Rexford Tugwell recalled FDR’s position on race relations: “I wouldn’t say that he took no interest in the race problem, but he didn’t consider it was important politically, never as far as I knew.” To be sure, Franklin and Eleanor were effective practitioners of symbolic politics and reached out to African-Americans in a number of ways. For example, the Roosevelts hosted the first-ever visit of Haiti’s president at the White House, and they made a habit of making short public appearances before groups of African-Americans, such as listening attentively to the singing of Fisk University’s glee club. For the most part, however, the New Dealers viewed African-American issues as a variation on the economic problems facing almost all citizens during the Depression. As Eleanor put it, since “colored people, not only in the South, but in the North as well have been economically at a low level . . . they have been physically and intellectually at a low level” as well. As the New Deal helped disadvantaged Americans, the Roosevelts thought, it would help African-Americans as well.

By the middle of the 1930s, over forty African-Americans had been appointed to prominent positions within New Deal agencies, including economist Robert Weaver, educator Mary Mcleod Bethune, and journalist Robert Vann. This “black cabinet,” as it was called, FDR and Eleanor’s personal appeal, and the positive impact of some New Deal relief programs helped to slowly realign the political preferences of the nation’s African-American population. Democrats used the power of patronage to shift African-American allegiances as well. For example, in Pennsylvania, one political reporter noted in 1936, “In less than two years, the Democrats have given the Negro political leaders more jobs . . . than the Republicans gave them in forty-two.” By 1936, African-Americans were voting in record numbers for Democrats, with FDR receiving 76 percent of the northern African-American vote in 1936 election. The hardship of the Depression, coupled with the popularity of FDR and the New Deal, changed the landscape of American politics.

For African-Americans substantial advances in their status would await World War II and the civil rights movement of the postwar years. During the Great Depression, FDR and the Democratic Party won African-American votes, but consistently refrained from addressing issues of great importance to African-Americans, such as disfranchisement, segregation, and lynching. In part this state of affairs reflected the limited political views of white New Dealers, as discussed above, but it also indicates the strong hold of white southern Democrats on the legislative process during the 1930s. Democrats such as Mississippi senator Theodore Bilbo were outspoken champions of segregation and white supremacy, and throughout the 1930s Southern whites chaired most of the committees in both the House and the Senate. To pass their reforms and programs into law, New Dealers chose to accommodate politicians like Bilbo.

The possible political choices open to African-Americans during the 1930s were, to put it mildly, severely constrained. The failure of the Republican Party to help African-Americans suffering from the Depression was clear, and the political party that was by far the most progressive on racial issues during the 1930s – the Communist Party – did not have any substantial presence or influence in the American political system. Given the political options available then, many African-American voters in the North acted pragmatically and threw their support to FDR and the Democratic Party. As an officer of the NAACP put it, “It is true that the millennium in race relations did not arrive under Roosevelt.. . . But cynics and scoffers to the contrary, the great body of Negro citizens made progress.”

This wide-ranging realignment of the American political universe presented opportunities for FDR and the Democrats to solidify their power, but it also presented them with new threats. New communities of citizens voting enthusiastically for the New Deal forged a political landscape where the Republican Party was becoming increasingly crippled, while voices on the political Left were rising in volume and importance. One result of this change was that Roosevelt, following the 1934 elections, moved to preempt dissent on his Left while crafting a range of programs designed to address the crisis of the Great Depression. To understand the nature of these new policies, we must first understand the nature of this dissent.

Voices of Discontent

For all FDR’s popularity, he was a tremendously controversial politician. While most Americans embraced FDR and his personal, plainspoken style, the New Deal was still a charged subject for many Americans throughout the 1930s. Those to the right of the New Deal objected that Roosevelt and his advisors were going too far in altering the fundamental nature of American society. Those to the New Deal’s left charged that FDR was not going far enough. Too often, they claimed, Roosevelt accommodated rather than challenged established interests, and too often, he failed to be aggressive enough in addressing the economic crisis. On both the left and the right, many Americans became fascinated with charismatic, colorful leaders who gave voice to their discontent.

On the left, longtime socialist muckraker Upton Sinclair, old-age pension advocate Francis Townsend, and Louisiana politician Huey Long attracted large numbers of followers and nationwide attention. Sinclair, known for his best-selling 1906 novel The Jungle, came back into the public eye in the early 1930s, most notably in 1934 when he ran for governor of California as the Democratic candidate. Townsend, an elderly California physician and gadfly, captured the nation’s imagination with his plan to provide a regular income for the nation’s poor and elderly population. Long, perhaps the most charismatic of these three men, had risen to prominence in Louisiana politics by attacking the Standard Oil Corporation on behalf of the state’s poor and working-class citizens.

During the 1930s, each man advocated policies to the left of the New Deal. The surprising success of Sinclair’s gubernatorial campaign featured a well-received piece of propaganda authored by Sinclair in 1933: I, Governor of California, and How I Ended Poverty: A True Story of the Future. Sinclair’s platform consisted of his EPIC plan, which promised to “End Poverty in California” by basing the state’s economy on production for use rather than for profit. Sinclair called for high taxes on the rich, public pensions for the unemployed, poor, and elderly, and for the creation of a number of new public institutions that would confiscate “idle” factories and land and establish lodging and jobs for the unemployed, thus creating economic cooperatives that workers and farmers would run themselves. Running in 1934 as a socialist in the Democratic primary, Sinclair shocked the party’s establishment by winning the nomination. In the general election, the nation watched as a coalition of mainstream California Democrats and Republicans, backed by the finances of the state’s business community, mocked Sinclair (whom they called “Sincliar”) and labeled his plan as “Easy Pickings in California.” They asserted that, if enacted, Sinclair’s plans would simply draw into the state thousands of poor people looking for a handout. Though he lost the election, Sinclair drew a great deal of public attention to his radical proposals and demonstrated to many – and, not least, to the New Dealers – the potential appeal of extreme ideas in a time of crisis. Even in the face of well-funded mainstream opposition, Sinclair piled up 880,000 votes to his Republican opponent’s 1,139,000. Sinclair, ever the activist, subsequently published an acerbic memoir of the experience, I, Candidate for Governor, and How I Got Licked.

Townsend, a resident of Long Beach, California, initially relied upon the power of his typewriter to rise to public notice. In late 1933, Townsend sent a series of letters to the editor of his local newspaper, the Telegraph, laying out his plan to pay senior citizens (sixty years and older) a pension of $200 each month, to be funded by a vaguely explained “transaction tax.” Townsend, who was nearly destitute and sixty-seven years old himself, claimed that his plan would help put money back into the economy and fight the Depression. Within a few days of publication, Townsend’s plan attracted the support of a petition of two thousand signatures, and Townsend quickly joined with his part-time employer, real estate broker Robert Clements, to create Old Age Revolving Pensions, Inc. (OARP). By early 1935, there were about 1,200 local clubs affiliating with OARP, with nearly half a million members. By 1936, over two million people had joined Townsend’s movement, forming about 7,000 clubs. Townsend assured his followers that the elderly “had more buying experience than those of younger years . . . they could become a research, educational, and corrective force in both a material and spiritual way.” The religious and patriotic overtones of Townsend’s movement was also reflected in the newspaper that Clements and Townsend began to publish, as well as in the buttons, songs, license plates, and other tchotchkes that the two men sold to promote their cause. Eventually Townsend and his cause claimed the attention of Roosevelt and his advisors, most notably when a version of Townsend’s plan was introduced as Congressional legislation in early 1935.

While both Townsend and Sinclair commanded nationwide attention, Louisiana politician Huey Long surpassed both men in his hold on the public imagination. A charismatic and ambitious lawyer, Long made his name early in his political career by attacking one of Louisiana’s biggest businesses, Standard Oil, charging that it was a corrupt parasite feeding on the state’s populace. Long’s slogan, “Every man a king, but no one wears a crown,” rallied citizens to his cause, and in 1928 he was elected governor. In office, he combined his concern for the poor with his ruthless desire to accumulate personal power. Elected to the Senate in 1930, Long decided to consolidate his hold on power in Louisiana before taking his seat, and thus did not arrive in Washington until 1932. At first a supporter of Roosevelt, Long broke with FDR in 1933. In early 1934 he formed the Share Our Wealth Society, designed to advocate for the redistribution of wealth to level society – or, as Long put it, to make sure that there were “none too poor and none too rich.” By 1935, over seven million Americans belonged to one of the 27,000 local branches started of Long’s organization. Although Long vigorously called for the taxing of the rich in order to give assistance to the poor, he cast his plan in plain, all-American language. Long claimed that “we aim to carry out the guaranties of our immortal Declaration of Independence and our Constitution of the United States . . . we will make the works and compacts of the Pilgrim fathers, taken from the laws of God, from which we were warned never to depart, breathe into our Government again that spirit of liberty, justice, and mercy which they inspired in our founders in the days when they gave life and hope to our country.” Although an assassin’s bullet cut short Long’s life in late 1935, Long’s popularity and the positive reception he received from many Americans deeply troubled Roosevelt and his advisors.

Opponents on the right also bedeviled FDR and the New Deal, though these individuals often possessed less charisma and far fewer followers than characters like Sinclair, Townsend, or Long. Herbert Hoover, as we have seen, reemerged from his involuntary retirement to continue to articulate his philosophy during Roosevelt’s presidency, often crafting harsh criticisms of FDR and the New Deal. While Hoover used the language of philosophy and political theory to liken FDR to a despot, other conservatives were more direct. For example, the American Liberty League, financed by the DuPont family from their corporate coffers and led by conservative Democrats such as Jouett Shouse and John J. Raskob, bluntly railed, “The New Deal represents the attempt in America to set up a totalitarian government, one which recognizes no sphere of individual or business life as immune from governmental authority and which submerges the welfare of the individual to that of the government.” Supporters of the American Liberty League viewed FDR as someone who had betrayed the interests of his fellow wealthy citizens. One retired DuPont executive wrote to Raskob of the problems FDR had caused him: “Five negroes on my place in South Carolina refused work this spring . . . saying they had easy jobs with the government.. . . A cook on my houseboat at Fort Myers quit because the government was paying him a dollar an hour as a painter.”

For their part, the National Association of Manufacturers defended and promoted business interests during the Depression, advocating that American manufacturers should undertake “an active campaign of education” to advance their goals and stop the “revolutionary” interventions of the New Deal in the field of labor relations. Conservative publishers, such as Robert McCormick and his Chicago Tribune, often sounded similar themes in their newspapers and periodicals. As the Tribune editorialized about the NRA, the New Deal’s reforms revealed “the shadow of Hitler on the government’s walls.” These public relations campaigns and attacks against FDR were not terribly effective. In fact, at times some businessmen worried that they had the opposite effect. As Texas manufacturer Milo Perkins worried, “The capitalist system can be destroyed more effectively by having men of means defend it than by importing a million Reds from Moscow to attack it.”

While Hoover, the American Liberty League, the National Association of Manufacturers, and publishers like McCormick were unable to draw ordinary Americans to their cause, other conservatives also found it difficult to rally popular support against FDR during the Depression. Republicans in Congress were much fewer in number following the 1932 elections, and their most conservative members had been turned out of office. (Four progressive Republican senators – Wisconsin’s Robert La Follette, Jr., Nebraska’s George Norris, New Mexico’s Bronson Cutting, and California’s Hiram Johnson – had even campaigned on FDR’s behalf against Hoover.) Conservative southern Democrats, such as Virginia senator Carter Glass, at times criticized FDR but also supported many elements of the New Deal, particularly when it involved increased federal spending in their home states.

Individualist-minded libertarian conservatives, such as Albert Jay Nock, questioned the very legitimacy of Roosevelt’s resounding electoral victories. FDR’s 1932 triumph, with 57 percent of the popular vote, was labeled by Nock as a “coup d’etat.” In 1935, Nock brought his criticisms of the New Deal together for his book, Our Enemy, The State. “Suppose,” Nock wrote, “Mr. Roosevelt should defend his regime by publicly reasserting Hegel’s dictum that ‘the State alone possesses rights, because it is the strongest.’ One can hardly imagine that our public would get that down without a great deal of retching.” Nevertheless, Nock continued, “how far, really, is that doctrine alien to our public’s actual acquiescences? Surely not far.” While libertarian novelist and playwright Ayn Rand voted for FDR in 1932, she soon became uncomfortable with the New Deal and its reforms, writing to a friend in 1936, “You have no idea how radical and pro-Soviet New York is – particularly, as everyone admits, in the last three years. Perhaps Mr. Roosevelt had nothing to do with it, but it’s a funny coincidence, isn’t it?” Intellectuals such as Nock and Rand, however, had a minimal impact on public discourse during the 1930s.

More extremist right-wing activists, such as Elizabeth Dilling, gained more visibility. These extremists often shared a common set of traits: they were racist, anti-Semitic, and anticommunist, and their rhetoric relied on Manichean divisions, conspiracy theories, and character assassination. Dilling, a religiously inspired superpatriot, is perhaps best remembered as the basis for the character Adelaide Tarr Gimmitch in Sinclair Lewis’s novel It Can’t Happen Here. In her 1934 work, The Red Network, Dilling warned against the threats presented by communists and their sympathizers, who for Dilling ranged from Jane Addams and Eleanor Roosevelt to Mahatma Gandhi and Sigmund Freud. Dilling broadcast her fears on the radio and toured the country to speak about the dangers posed by this growing conspiracy to remake the United States into a communist state, becoming a nationally known figure in the process. Dilling had little use for mainstream conservatives; Republicans such as Robert Taft and Arthur Vandenburg were “too liberal” for her taste.

Given these different kinds of opponents on the Left and the Right, Roosevelt and the New Dealers viewed their triumph in the 1934 midterm elections as an opportunity to craft new policies that could accomplish two goals: first, to more effectively provide relief and stimulate recovery from the Great Depression, and second, to seize the moment to preempt their most important political opponents – those on the Left.

Public Works: The Works Progress Administration

To accomplish these goals, the New Dealers focused on three main policy arenas: public works, social security, and taxation. In the first two years of Roosevelt’s presidency, New Dealers had attempted to address the most important symptom of the Depression – mass unemployment – by trying to put people back to work. This effort relied on the Public Works Administration (PWA), run by Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, but also drew upon other programs – the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), the grants in aid made by the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), and the short-lived Civil Works Administration (CWA), run during the severe winter of 1933–1934 by Harry Hopkins. Hopkins, a rail-thin coffee drinker and enthusiastic cigarette smoker, had worked for FDR when he was governor of New York and subsequently joined FDR’s presidential administration as the head of FERA. As Roosevelt and his advisors weighed how to move forward in the wake of the 1934 elections, debates about public works policy quickly became a furious and, at times, personal argument between Ickes and Hopkins.

During the previous two years, the Public Works Administration and Ickes had gained a reputation for moving too slowly against the depression. Ickes, a progressive Republican from Chicago, took great pride in his cautious approach. A veteran of the Chicago political scene, Ickes knew from first-hand observation how public spending could all too swiftly lead to public corruption and vowed to avoid this latter phenomenon while running the PWA. As criticism of Ickes’s slow progress grew louder, the stock of Harry Hopkins and his approach to public works rose. In running the CWA, Hopkins had relied (as had Ickes’s PWA) on the advice of the engineering community, turning to officers from the Army Corps of Engineers and civil engineering experts to effectively expedite construction on public works projects and swiftly provide employment.

The Works Progress Administration (WPA, 1935–1943) became the central program in the New Deal’s effort to combat unemployment. During its eight-year existence, the WPA spent over $10 billion constructing public works projects such as roads, sewers, buildings, and airports. At its high point in 1938 the WPA employed around 3 million people; over its life span the WPA estimated that it employed about one-third of all unemployed workers, providing wages to 8.5 million families. While three-quarters of its funds went to pay for traditional public works construction, providing between 75 and 80 percent of all WPA jobs, the WPA spent 25 percent of its resources on service, or white-collar, projects such as sewing programs, research and records projects, and arts projects. These included the famous Federal Writers’ Project, which produced the American Guide series, and the Federal Art, Theater, and Music projects.

The establishment of the WPA by Executive Order 7034 on May 6, 1935 grew out of the Roosevelt administration’s previous experience dealing with unemployment. In 1933, FDR put Harry Hopkins in charge of the FERA and, when it looked like special measures were needed during the brutal winter of 1933–1934, gave him the task of running the CWA. Both organizations tried to ease the burdens of unemployment by providing jobs on public works projects. Hopkins, a social worker from Iowa who had administered relief in New York State when FDR was governor, possessed both idealistic fervor and a keen sense of political realism. As one observer famously put it, Hopkins “had the purity of St. Francis of Assisi combined with the sharp shrewdness of a race track tout.”

Following the large electoral victories for the Democrats in 1934, Hopkins and other New Dealers made the case to FDR for strengthening the federal government’s commitment to work relief in place of a simple dole. In response to FDR’s January 4, 1935 message to Congress, the House and Senate passed the 1935 Emergency Relief Appropriation (ERA) Act, appropriating $4.88 billion. Hopkins and the head of the Public Works Administration, Harold Ickes, immediately set to work lobbying FDR, each seeking to be put in charge of this new works program. By April, Roosevelt accommodated their rivalry by creating a new layer of bureaucracy. Frank C. Walker, a Democratic lawyer with a talent for soothing egos, was placed in charge of a new Division of Application and Information (DAI). Walker’s DAI screened project applications and sent them to an Advisory Committee on Allotments (ACA), chaired by Ickes, which reviewed them and passed its recommendation along to FDR. Hopkins’s Works Progress Administration was then to be in charge of expediting selected projects and running smaller public works projects directly. FDR’s desire to reduce unemployment through public works, however, led him to favor Hopkins’s WPA and to slight Ickes, who envisioned public works as an efficient way for government to expand the nation’s infrastructure. A September 1935 conference at FDR’s Hyde Park residence, attended by the president, Walker, Ickes, Hopkins, Acting Budget Director Daniel Bell, economist Rexford Tugwell, and others, resolved the confusing situation by giving clear preference to the WPA and rendering the ACA and DAI irrelevant.

The WPA built on the organization of the FERA and the CWA, drawing on much of the same administrative personnel. The WPA was federally administered and organized by region and state, with a separate organization for New York City. The Senate confirmed all WPA staffers – generally state administrators – who made more than $5,000 a year. The WPA contained engineering and construction, service projects, finance, employment, management, statistics, research, investigation, information, and legal divisions. In 1941 the WPA established a division of training and reemployment after the program was authorized to train workers for defense industry work. Hopkins’s key aides included such figures as Aubrey Williams, who also ran the National Youth Administration, as well as Ellen Sullivan Woodward, Florence Kerr, Corrington Gill, and Jacob Baker. Hopkins also drew on engineering expertise, particularly relying on Army Corps of Engineers Colonel Francis C. Harrington, who eventually would replace Hopkins as the head of the WPA at the end of 1938. Although hesitant initially, Hopkins embraced the notion of using army engineers in the WPA. Army Corps of Engineer officers, for instance, ran the WPA in New York City and Los Angeles. These men had the technical know-how to speed the execution of public works projects, and their air of military and scientific authority helped quiet charges of political favoritism in the WPA.

To receive a work assignment on a WPA project, a person had to apply to a local public welfare agency and be certified through a means test as eligible for public relief. Employment was limited to one member from a family, usually the head of the household, and workers had to be physically able to perform the labor required by their assignments. People serving prison sentences were prohibited from working for the WPA, a requirement adopted to prevent convict labor. Workers had to register with the United States Employment Service, be at least sixteen years old (the minimum age was raised to eighteen in 1938), and generally could not collect Social Security or unemployment benefits while working on WPA projects. The 1937 ERA Act granted an employment preference to veterans, while the 1939 ERA Act no longer permitted aliens to be employed by the WPA and prohibited the employment of Communists and members of Nazi Bund organizations. The 1939 ERA Act further mandated that all WPA workers with at least eighteen consecutive months employment be laid off, so that work could be spread over a larger pool of recipients. Workers were paid a security wage based on their occupation and location and generally made around $55 a month for doing between 120 and 140 hours of work. In response to pressure from organized labor, however, the WPA allowed skilled workers to make their monthly security wage in fewer hours of work by paying them at prevailing hourly rates of pay. In order to employ enough skilled labor on projects, 10 percent of project workers were exempt from the WPA’s need requirements. After 1937, this exemption was lowered to 5 percent. Over time, the WPA made access to government-funded employment more difficult for some but easier for others.

While the WPA primarily employed white men, it did provide work to women and African-Americans. Through 1940, women composed between 12 and 18 percent of WPA employment rolls. They chiefly worked on sewing projects or did clerical tasks. African-American workers made up just over 14 percent of the WPA workforce in February 1939. This figure rose to nearly 20 percent in late 1942, as white men returned to work in defense-related occupations.

The WPA service projects can be divided into three groups: public activities (writing, arts, theater, and music projects; adult education; and recreational and library staffing), research and records (historical records surveys; economic and social surveys; and research assistance at state universities), and welfare projects (school lunch programs; gardening and canning; and public health work). Music, theater, art, writing, and historical records survey projects were administered under the WPA’s Federal Project Number One, or “Federal One” as it was called. The Writers’ Project, headed by Henry Alsberg, produced fifty-one volumes in the American Guide series of travel guidebooks, written by such authors as Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Saul Bellow. The Writers’ Project also recorded regional folklore, compiled indexes and encyclopedias, and interviewed ex-slaves. Russian-born violinist Nikolai Sokoloff ran the WPA’s Music Project, which employed out-of-work musicians in ensembles or as music teachers. WPA orchestras in Buffalo, Oklahoma, and Utah remained successful organizations after the WPA was liquidated in 1943. The WPA Art Project, directed by Holger Cahill, produced such artifacts as oil paintings, murals, sculptures, mosaics, stained glass windows, tapestries, rugs, ceramics, posters, and pottery. In all, over 2,500 murals were placed in public buildings, and more than 18,000 sculptures and 108,000 easel works were created by WPA artists. The WPA Theater Project, led by Hallie Flanagan, concentrated on the areas with the highest unemployment in the theatrical professions: New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles. It mounted such socially inspired productions as The Cradle Will Rock, Power, One-Third of a Nation, Triple-A Plowed Under, and It Can’t Happen Here. The theater projects were shut down in 1939 after charges of Communist influence were aired in the House before Martin Dies’s Committee on Un-American Activities and Clifton Woodrum’s Subcommittee on Appropriations.

While the WPA’s cultural activities attracted a lot of attention, the vast majority of the WPA’s efforts were devoted to constructing public works projects. Unlike the PWA, which privately contracted its public works, the WPA built its projects by force account, directly paying for labor and materials. In theory, the WPA was supposed to handle smaller projects costing $25,000 or less, while the PWA took on the larger, more expensive projects. Hopkins got around this obstacle, however, by dividing bigger projects – such as the airport the WPA built at La Guardia Field in New York – into several discrete segments. Municipal and state government sponsors of WPA projects contributed around 22 percent of the total project cost, when measured over the lifespan of the WPA.

The WPA performed work on a variety of projects, including municipal and engineering projects, airports, public buildings, highways and roads, conservation projects, and engineering surveys. The WPA built around 24,000 miles of sidewalks and paths and improved 7,000 miles more, and it built or improved around 28,000 miles of curb. About 500 water-treatment plants, 1,800 pumping stations, and 19,700 miles of water mains and distribution lines were created or improved by the organization. Over 350 new airport landing fields were constructed, and almost 700 were improved or expanded. The WPA built almost 40,000 new public buildings, such as schools, hospitals, dormitories, and government office buildings. Road and highway building were the most common WPA projects, because these were easy to plan and could employ large numbers of unskilled workers. The WPA built or improved around 572,000 miles of rural roads, 124,000 bridges and viaducts, and over 1,000 tunnels across the nation.

With the creation of the WPA in 1935, the New Deal put $4.8 billion toward using public works in the fight to remove people from the unemployment rolls. Departing from Ickes and the PWA’s approach, the WPA avoided private contractors and built its projects by directly employing its own workforce. Generally, the WPA avoided heavier construction projects in order to put the maximum possible number of people to work. Three quarters of the WPA’s funds went to traditional public works construction such as roads and buildings, while the remainder went to a series of “white collar” or professional projects such as the Federal Writers Project.

Social Security

Today we think of Social Security as the preeminent achievement of the New Deal era, and for many reasons. The program presently covers nearly all working Americans and their families, with almost 58 million people receiving payments from the program as of 2013. If Social Security payments to the elderly were eliminated today, about 40 percent of the nation’s retirees would drop below the poverty line. Given its widespread reach and its eventual role in reducing poverty among the elderly, many consider the passage of the Social Security Act in 1935 to mark the beginning of the modern American welfare state. Americans across the political spectrum now value the program, and attempts by politicians to alter its terms have rarely met with success – indeed, Social Security has become, to quote Thomas “Tip” O’Neill, speaker of the house from 1977 to 1987, the “third rail” of American politics – to touch it is to risk political suicide. These seemingly historic “truths,” however, were not always so.

Indeed, if we are to place Social Security in its proper historical context, we should think of it instead as a short-term policy tool with long-run implications. In early 1934, even before Social Security was created, the New Deal was providing assistance to over one-fifth of all Americans. Social Security was created in response to this situation – millions of Americans had been devastated by economic crisis and disaster – and was explicitly designed to ease the burden of retirement for the elderly poor, create a system of federal unemployment insurance, and provide assistance to the disabled and families with dependent children. But while social security was emphatically a product of social policy-making, it was also an act of political preemption, an ambitious effort deployed to address the “thunder on the Left” awoken by advocates such as Townsend and politicians such as Long.

The distribution of Social Security benefits also had the potential to knit together the New Deal coalition for years to come. Harry Hopkins expressed the thinking of many New Dealers on this subject when he spoke to journalist Raymond Clapper. Clapper’s raw notes of the interview give a vivid sense of Hopkins’s political realism:

Government checks of one kind or another are going into about 20,000,000 homes – which with relatives and friends creates vast group of beneficiaries, political group. Says been history in Europe that these benefits are never reduced but on contrary tend to enlarge. Politicians run for election on issue of giving more benefits – used to be tariff or abstract issues but now issue is how large a check will you give me. Few years ago were not ten men in [Congress] who favored social security, now not a one would vote against it.

While the origins of the Social Security Act should be located in the political and social context of 1934 and 1935, this legislation was also the product of long-term thinking about policy-making and the state. The Committee on Economic Security (CES), a cabinet-level body created by FDR and chaired by Labor Secretary Frances Perkins, crafted the act in the summer and fall of 1934. Perkins, a liberal of long standing, was a veteran of such organizations as Hull House and the National Consumers’ League. In running the CES, she relied on the hard work and detailed knowledge of the committee’s staff, led by University of Wisconsin professor Edwin Witte. Witte, in turn, brought together a variety of experts from different disciplines, relying especially upon fellow academics such as Barbara Armstrong and Douglas Brown, as well as people from the business world, such as pension plan expert Murray Latimer. Witte’s staff was more or less insulated from the immediate imperatives of political Washington, and they set out to design a program that reflected their deep understandings of the demographic and economic problems they faced. They wanted to build a program that rested on the sturdy foundations of expertise and administrative know-how, rather than on the shifting sands of politics.

Witte’s staff thus created a three-part plan in their legislation. The first called for old-age pensions to be paid to people older than sixty-five, beginning on January 1, 1942. These pensions, ranging between $10 and $85 a month, would be funded by a payroll tax to be paid equally by employers and employees. This payroll tax would be collected, starting in 1937, thanks to the Federal Insurance Contribution Act, or FICA. The Social Security Act also created a formal system of unemployed insurance, as well as incorporating a system of assistance for the disabled and for families with dependent children. As public administration expert and New Dealer Luther Gulick later recalled, Roosevelt was a particular fan of the payroll tax. In 1941 Gulick wrote a brief memo recounting a conversation he had with FDR about the social security funding system. “We put those pay roll contributions there so as to give the contributors a legal, moral, and political right to collect their pensions and their unemployment benefits,” FDR told him. “With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program. Those taxes aren’t a matter of economics, they’re straight politics.”

In the political universe of 1930s Washington, “straight politics” meant more than just the system of payroll tax funding. New Dealers compromised on a number of crucial points to secure passage of the Social Security Act through a Congress dominated by senior Democratic politicians from the South. Structurally organized around supporting white male breadwinners, Social Security (as designed in 1935) discriminated against women and minorities. To appease conservative Southern Democrats, Frances Perkins agreed to the exclusion of domestic and agricultural workers from the act. Similarly, agricultural workers were also exempted from the act’s unemployment insurance scheme. Workers in these economic sectors – overwhelmingly African-American and, in the case of domestic work, female – would remain outside of the social security system until 1950. As one NAACP lawyer put it, Social Security was “like a sieve with holes just big enough for the majority of Negroes to fall through.” Women, the poor, and minorities were relegated to state-administered programs; it would take a series of amendments and court cases, stretching from 1939 into the 1970s, to expand Social Security’s coverage. “Hailed as the most progressive social measure in this generation,” wrote one relief expert in 1937, Social Security “is in some respects thoroughly reactionary.” The CES’s bill, introduced in January 1935, was signed into law by FDR in August of that year.

Optimistically, at the bill’s signing Roosevelt declared that “If the Senate and the House of Representatives in this long and arduous session had done nothing more than pass this bill, the session would be regarded as historic for all time.” From the perspective of today, FDR is undoubtedly correct – social security is a crucial element of the welfare state in the United States. From the perspective of the 1930s, however, FDR’s pronouncement is grounded in hope more than fact. In the depths of the Depression, New Dealers had just created a regressive tax that would fall more heavily on the working poor than on the wealthy, and the new system of old-age pensions would not pay a dime of benefits until 1942. Social security still must be considered the most important long-run legacy of the New Deal. But, viewed in the context of the 1930s and the Great Depression, it is clear that programs such as the National Recovery Administration (1933–1935), as well as the New Deal’s commitment to public works spending, first through the Public Works Administration (1933–1949) and Works Progress Administration (1935–1943), more accurately constitute the core of the New Deal’s response to the Depression. The Social Security Act, however, did succeed in helping FDR and the Democratic Party preempt the activist appeals of those on their left. By late 1935, Gallup opinion polls showed that 84 percent of Americans approved of the New Deal’s Social Security plan, while at the same time 96 percent of Americans opposed the pension scheme proposed by Francis Townsend.

Taxes

Roosevelt’s realpolitik observations about the payroll tax, quoted above, only begin to hint at his sophisticated grasp of the politics of taxation. FDR, as historian Mark Leff has argued, was able to use the symbolic qualities of taxation as a kind of lightning rod, manipulating the issue to absorb potentially deadly political energy from the Left and the Right. Since only about 5 percent of Americans paid income tax in the 1930s (the income tax did not become a “mass tax” until the middle of World War II), taxation made an ideal vehicle for FDR and his allies to attack the nation’s wealthy elite: The income tax was a “class tax” that applied to only a small slice of the population. The number of tax returns that reported more than $50,000 of income during the 1930s was under 20,000 – this, in a nation whose 1930 population was just over 120 million people. In terms of federal revenue, far more money than the income tax was raised by regressive consumption taxes on tobacco and newly legalized alcohol, along with excise taxes levied on the producers of electricity, cars, and gasoline. The great bulk of the New Deal’s revenue, in other words, stemmed directly from regressive consumption taxes that fell on the “forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid,” a fact that severely hindered other New Deal efforts aimed at increasing the purchasing power of consumers. Nowhere were the political dynamics of taxation more evident than in the debates over the passage of the Revenue Act of 1935.

Challenged by the swelling popularity of Huey Long’s “Share Our Wealth” program, FDR and his advisors decided to attempt to, as Roosevelt put it, steal Long’s thunder to preempt any plans Long might have to run as a third-party candidate for the presidency in 1936. By attacking the entrenched interests of the wealthy – who, by 1934, were solidifying in their opposition to the New Deal – FDR and his advisors hoped to strengthen his standing with the rest of the electorate. In his June 19, 1935 message to Congress, Roosevelt therefore outlined his plans for revising the nation’s system of taxation, targeting huge incomes, inheritances, and large corporations. “Social unrest and a deepening sense of unfairness are dangers to our national life which we must minimize by rigorous methods,” FDR declared. “People know that vast personal incomes come not only through the effort or ability or luck of those who receive them, but also because of the opportunities for advantage which Government itself contributes. Therefore, the duty rests upon the Government to restrict such incomes by very high taxes.” Distinguishing his attack on elites from the economic activity performed by smaller businesses, FDR clarified, “A tax upon inherited economic power is a tax upon static wealth, not upon that dynamic wealth which makes for the healthy diffusion of economic good.”

Ultimately, the 1935 Revenue Act imposed a graduated tax (between 12.5 and 15 percent) on corporations, new taxes on dividends received by holding companies, and raised the income tax on individuals making more than $50,000, with a 79 percent tax rate to be imposed on incomes of $5,000,000 and higher. In reality, these revisions to the nation’s tax code had little impact on the actual amounts of revenue that the act would raise – Congress estimated that the Act would bring in only an additional $250 million to the nation’s coffers. This anemic result was due to the nation’s income structure: 74 percent of American households made less than $2,000 a year, and only 1 percent of all families earned a yearly income of $10,000 or more. One congressman put the numbers of the 1935 Revenue Act in plain terms: “This is a hell raiser, not a revenue raiser.” Only one person in the entire nation – John D. Rockefeller – would be subject to the highest tax rate in the act. While it is difficult to isolate and measure the impact of the 1935 Revenue Act on the economy, aggregate improvement in the nation’s GDP – the American economy grew, on average, over 8 percent each year between 1933 and 1937 – testifies to the extremely robust nature of the broader economic recovery achieved under the New Deal. Politically speaking, however, the debate surrounding the wealth tax remains a crucial subject for understanding the strategy that underwrote FDR’s political rhetoric. It anticipated the approach that the President took with respect to campaigning for reelection in 1936.

The Election of 1936

Capitalizing on the formation of the New Deal coalition and the Democratic Party’s surprisingly strong showing in the 1934 midterm elections, New Dealers pushed their advantage between 1934 and 1936. They increased their commitment to relieving unemployment and developing the nation’s infrastructure via public works programs, they created a system of social insurance, and they implemented changes to the nation’s tax laws. These policy measures were, from the perspective of FDR and the Democratic Party, smart politics. They were able to preempt possible opposition from their left and continue to render irrelevant vocal opponents of the New Deal on their right.

The impact of the New Deal’s multiple achievements was vividly apparent in FDR’s campaign for reelection in 1936. Only one Republican governor had been reelected in 1934, Alfred “Alf” Landon of Kansas. As one of the few remaining Republicans in office, Landon gained national notice and quickly became one of the front-runners for the party’s presidential nomination in 1936. As governor, Landon developed a reputation as a pragmatic leader who had welcomed elements of the New Deal. Landon’s supporters, however, began to champion him as a politician who could roll back Roosevelt’s reforms. Richard Lloyd Jones, the conservative editor of the Tulsa Tribune, began promoting Landon as a “Kansas Lincoln” who could serve as a latter-day Great Emancipator and liberate Americans from the enslavement wrought by the shackles and chains of the New Deal’s activist federal government. Landon, for his part, thought that it might very well be possible to defeat FDR, observing in June 1935 that “Politically, Mr. Roosevelt has slipped more in the last month than in any previous time. . . . If he did not have the $5 billion [public works appropriation] his election would be very much in doubt, and the waste with which that is going to be spent may at last shock the country.”

Landon was acutely aware that the Republican Party was deeply unpopular throughout the nation, but he believed that if extremists controlled the party’s nomination process “it [would] drive a lot of the moderates into the Roosevelt camp at election time.” As governor, Landon supported the New Deal’s agricultural policies and some of its efforts to address mass unemployment, but the New Deal’s expansion of federal authority deeply troubled him. In November 1935, Landon declared that “if we are going to stop the New Deal, it’s 1936 or never. . . . By 1940 the national government will have assumed so much authority [and] become so powerful that it will be useless to fight it. This country is not far from fascism.” While he believed in many of the New Deal’s goals, Landon declared that he was “thoroughly out of sympathy with its technique, its over-spending, its wastefulness, its unbalanced budget and its usurpation of the rights of states.” Writing to journalist Mark Sullivan, Landon declared, “it never was so necessary to defeat a President of the United States for a second term if we are to preserve our parliamentary government.”

Running as the Republican nominee in 1936, Landon stressed that, while he supported much of the New Deal, he thought that only Republicans could restore business confidence in the economy and deliver relief efficiently. The United States, Landon declared, required “clear-cut, definite, and vigorous administrative leadership” to eradicate government waste and make business a partner in economic recovery. Republican campaign literature reprinted Landon’s speeches and worked to underscore distinctions between the Kansas governor and FDR. The pamphlet “Landon Epigrams” supplied readers with nuggets of Landon’s wisdom, including “A people begin to decay when they do not resist burdensome taxation” and “American initiative is not a commodity to be delivered in pound packages through a governmental bureau.” Another leaflet, “Relief for Votes,” featured a picture of James Farley on the telephone (presumably directing federal relief funds to be spent on recruiting Democratic voters) alongside the questions “Will the American people accept the imputation that their votes can be bought with relief money? That you can’t beat $5 billion?” Attacking the centerpiece of New Deal policy during Roosevelt’s first term, the NRA, Landon linked the New Deal to the rise of fascism abroad, arguing that even though it had been declared unconstitutional, the NRA marked “the beginning in America of the [worldwide] movement which has been substituting arbitrary personal authority for constitutional self-government.” This movement, Landon continued, still animated the New Deal: “It lives on in the efforts of this administration to get around the decisions of the Supreme Court. . . . But above all it lives on in the spirit of the President, who has confessed to no error – who has let it be clearly known that he considered it would be a catastrophe if the American farmer should ‘once more become a lord on his own farm.’” Landon asked, “If this does not mean that the present administration wants to establish government domination of industry and agriculture, what does it mean?”

With endorsements from the 1928 Democratic presidential nominee, Al Smith, as well as from popular old-age pension advocate Francis Townsend, Landon had some reason to be optimistic about his prospects. In the closing days of the campaign, he attacked the New Deal’s affection for the “amazing” ideas of John Maynard Keynes regarding public spending. Keynes, Landon alleged, believed that if the U.S. government spent “$400 million a month, it would prime the pump and all would be well,” adding “Of course, as a foreigner, he found ardent followers in this administration, although he had none in his own government.” Keynes’s ideas, Landon continued, were “eagerly adopted” by FDR, “with one important change. The administration concluded that if $400 million a month for useful projects would be good medicine, $600 million a month thrown around at random would be even better.” Landon summarized, “We must put the spenders out. For remember: Those who preach spending, practice spending, and brag about spending, cannot stop spending. That is the lesson of history. That is the record of this administration.”

Roosevelt’s campaign strategy was as straightforward as Landon’s, but far more effective. In his speeches, FDR pointed to the accomplishments of the New Deal during his first term, portraying them not as radical, but rather as belonging firmly within the American tradition. Speaking in Chicago, Roosevelt addressed the nation’s businessmen directly, asking them (in so many words) if they were better off than they were four years ago:

Do you have a deposit in the bank? It is safer today than it has ever been in our history. . . . Are you an investor? Your stocks and bonds are up to five- and six-year high levels. Are you a merchant? Your markets have the precious life-blood of purchasing power. . . . Are you in industry? Industrial earnings, industrial profits are the highest in four, six, or even seven years!

FDR described the New Deal’s reforms as “a struggle for, and not against, American business. It is a struggle to preserve individual enterprise and economic freedom.” By the summer of 1936, the Great Depression had not been cured – but there was enough evidence to support FDR’s case that the New Deal had made positive strides against the economic disaster. Unemployment, while still high, was declining. Businesses like General Motors and U.S. Steel were experiencing their best performances since the 1929 stock market crash. With the facts on his side, Roosevelt used humor effectively to gently mock critics who charged he had not accomplished enough with the New Deal:

In the summer of 1933, a nice old gentleman wearing a silk hat fell off the end of a pier. He was unable to swim. A friend ran down the pier, dived overboard and pulled him out; but the silk hat floated off with the tide. After the old gentleman had been revived, he was effusive in his thanks. He praised his friend for saving his life. Today, three years later, the old gentleman is berating his friend because the silk hat was lost.

Alongside his centrist rhetoric, though, FDR often took on his opposition directly, attacking them as “economic royalists” who were looking to create a “new industrial dictatorship.” In so doing, Roosevelt was drawing on the style of politics he had developed in the debates over the 1935 Revenue Act, making sharp contrasts between wealthy Americans and the rest of the population. He did so succinctly at a rally in New York City’s Madison Square Garden,

Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me – and I welcome their hatred. I should like to have it said of my first Administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second Administration that in it these forces met their master.

In retrospect, the 1936 election was a critical contest, one in which we can discern the slow realignment of the nation’s electorate. Democrats were able to more effectively mobilize urban, working-class, and ethnic voters, as well as draw upon the support of African-Americans and women. Republicans, defeated resoundingly in 1932 and in 1934, had few strategic options in 1936. Landon’s candidacy, which alternated between offering a pale (and vague) imitation of FDR’s New Deal and attacking the means Roosevelt had used to bring a substantial measure of relief and recovery to the nation, failed spectacularly. FDR won 60.8 percent of the popular vote and took the electoral college with 523 votes to Landon’s eight (Landon carried only the states of Maine and Vermont). During Roosevelt’s first term, the New Deal’s policies were able to intervene in the economy with enough success to change the political allegiances of many Americans. This shift in the nation’s political economy and the nation’s politics had a number of profound consequences, not only for the backlash that soon developed against FDR and his reforms, but also for American culture and society more generally.

4 Society and Culture in the 1930s

“I am a widow with a son fourteen years of age and am trying to support him and myself and keep him in school on a very small sum which I make,” an anonymous woman wrote Eleanor Roosevelt in 1934. “I am greatly in need of a Coat. If you have one which you have laid aside from last season [I] would appreciate it so much if you would send it to me. I will pay postage if you see fit to send it.” Another woman, from Philadelphia, wrote to FDR of her family’s plight. “[T]here has been unemployment in my house for more than three years. . . . I beg of you to please help me and my family and little children for the sake of a sick mother and suffering family to give this your immediate attention so we will not be forced to move or put out in the street.” A woman from Louisiana addressed her plea to Eleanor Roosevelt, writing, “dont you know its aful to have to get out and no place to have a roof over your sick child and nothing to eat[.] I cant tell all my troubles there isnt any use we only have a few days to stay here in the house now wont you please send me some money.” A twelve-year old boy from Chicago wrote to FDR, asking for help because his family was four months behind in their rent. “Everyday the landlord rings the door bell, we don’t open the door for him. We are afraid that will be put out, been put out before, and don’t want to happen again. We haven’t paid the gas bill, and the electric bill, haven’t paid grocery bill for 3 months. . . . My father he staying home. All the time he’s crying because he can’t find work. I told him why are you crying daddy, and daddy said why shouldn’t I cry when there is nothing in the house. I feel sorry for him.” The boy concluded his letter, “Were American citizens and were born in Chicago, Ill. and I don’t know why they don’t help us. Please answer right away because we need it. will starve Thank you. God bless you.”

These dispatches from the front lines of the Great Depression, drawn from letters written by ordinary people and sent to Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, reflect the particular experiences and lives of their authors. When these letters (and the thousands more like them) are treated as a historical source, however, they serve to open up a window onto the past. They begin to hint at the multifaceted and complicated ways in which the New Deal shaped American society and culture during the 1930s. While previous chapters have focused on the political economy of the New Deal, this chapter explores the broader consequences that changes in the nation’s political economy posed for American society and culture between 1929 and 1939.

Examining the arenas of society and culture reveals two different ways of thinking about this past. First, we can find a number of truly radical changes in power relationships that took place during this period, developments that provide compelling evidence for thinking of the Great Depression as a time of tremendous social and cultural upheaval. Second, we can also see within these dramatic transformations the strong persistence of a conservative status quo. These continuities provide compelling evidence for thinking about the 1930s as a period in which – despite great upheaval – many things remained the same. How to reconcile these two seemingly opposite interpretations of history? An overarching reality connects these two interpretations: the 1930s were a period deeply marked by the phenomenon of mass unemployment, and many of the decade’s most important social and cultural developments – both conservative and radical – flowed from this reality.

The experience of mass unemployment affected all Americans. Obviously, its crushing reality most directly touched those who were thrown out of work and were unable, often for months or even for years, to find another job. Similarly, the turmoil in the labor market also affected the huge numbers of people who were able to find only part-time employment. But mass unemployment also touched the lives of those who kept their jobs, avoided losing their homes, and in other ways dodged the direct blows of the Great Depression. These people, while fortunate in both relative and absolute terms, were now living in a society transformed by the starkest kind of economic upheaval and devastation. Lines for food, homeless and destitute people roaming the streets, and the twin specters of fear and uncertainty haunted their lives as well. Even the very rich were deeply concerned about the world around them – would the Great Depression bring about a social revolt? During the 1930s, capitalism had ceased to function, and the reality that this underscored – the profound absence of security – influenced in different ways the lives of almost everyone.

In the face of all of this change, many Americans sought to achieve some kind of security in their lives. As we have seen, despite a number of political alternatives on the left and on the right, vast numbers of Americans voted for Franklin Roosevelt and the Democratic Party, embracing the potential of the New Deal to restore some measure of security to their daily existence. Americans also sought security in other ways. Perhaps the most important of these, both at the time and from our perspective today, was the renewed popularity and support of organized labor by Americans in the depths of the Great Depression.

Society: Organized Labor

On the eve of the Great Depression, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) was the largest labor organization in the United States. Founded in 1886, the AFL focused on organizing skilled white men who worked in the craft trades. Bricklayers, carpenters, plumbers, and other similar skilled occupations composed the lion’s share of the AFL’s membership. Samuel Gompers, a Jewish immigrant, led the AFL from its founding until his death in 1924. Throughout his tenure as AFL president, Gompers tried to secure economic gains for the union’s membership – improved hours, better working conditions, and higher wages, for example. “The trade union movement represents the organized economic power of the workers,” he once declared. “It is in reality the most potent and the most direct social insurance the workers can establish.” This focus on “pure and simple” unionism, coupled with a deep-seated distrust of government to achieve these ends for union members, led Gompers and the AFL to develop a philosophy of self-reliance, or “voluntarism,” as it was called. While this approach served the AFL well for many years, by the 1920s its limitations began to tell.

Following Gompers’s death in 1924, William Green, a calm and confrontation-averse former mine worker, assumed the reins of AFL leadership. As president of the AFL, Green presided over the 1920s decline in membership and preached the benefits of labor-management cooperation. With the onset of the Great Depression, AFL membership further declined, dropping by 865,000 people between 1929 and 1933 to a total of about two million members in 1933. The economic collapse devastated the AFL’s ranks, as unemployed workers, unable to pay their dues, fled the organization. Faced with the Great Depression, Green and the AFL viewed FDR and the New Deal favorably, but cautiously. Other people in labor’s ranks would have to capitalize on this sea change in the nation’s political economy in order to revitalize labor.

Indeed, it was the industrial sector of organized labor that best took advantage of the New Deal’s arrival on the political scene. Exploiting especially section 7(a) of Title I of the 1933 National Industrial Recovery Act, guaranteeing unions the right to bargain collectively, activists in industrial occupations began to expand their organization of workers and to press employers for concessions. This increased activity came to a head in 1935 at, of all places, Atlantic City, New Jersey. The American Federation of Labor met at its annual convention there. Activists such as John Lewis of the United Mineworkers, Sidney Hillman of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, and David Dubinsky of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union pushed the AFL leadership to commit significant resources to a Committee for Industrial Organization, which would attempt to organize workers by industry, rather than by skill or occupation as had been conventional AFL practice. The AFL establishment, lukewarm to such a seemingly radical idea, essentially hemmed and hawed about such an effort. This disagreement rose to full-scale conflict when Lewis – a large, physically imposing man – got into an angry exchange with William Hutcheson, the head of the powerful Carpenters Union. “Big Bill” Hutcheson, a large man who fit his nickname, squared off against Lewis in the convention hall, and Lewis decked his opponent with one powerful punch.

Having thus dispatched the leader of the most powerful of the AFL’s affiliates, Lewis departed the convention and, along with his allies, proceeded to form a new union. The Committee on Industrial Organization (subsequently the Congress of Industrial Organizations, or CIO for short), had an initial membership of about half a million workers. During the remainder of the Depression, not to mention World War II and the postwar years, the CIO proceeded to profoundly change the shape and tenor of labor relations in the United States. With powerful and charismatic leadership in Lewis, Hillman, and Dubinsky, the CIO at first relied upon their existing strengths among mineworkers and garment workers in order to build their membership. Claiming that “FDR Wants You to Join a Union,” the CIO also traded upon the great affection that many Americans held for their president, neatly sidestepping the fact that the patrician FDR was, in reality, somewhat conflicted on the subject of organized labor.

In its early years, the CIO took on many aspects of a true social movement, bringing together a wide range of supporters and committing itself to a vision of achieving some form of industrial democracy, within which their “one big union” would play a powerful role in the nation’s polity. The attractiveness of this proposition, along with brilliant and active union leaders in the auto, steel, and electrical industries, soon swelled the CIO’s ranks. The radical potential of this new kind of unionism – inclusive of unskilled workers, as well as of African-Americans and women – did have strict limits, however. For example, relatively few women or African-Americans ever would find themselves in actual leadership positions in the CIO. Furthermore, despite the CIO’s rhetorical commitment to inclusiveness, intense discrimination was often prevalent at the level of the union local. Still, in the span of just a few short years the CIO was able to transform the landscape of American industrial relations.

The American People: Dislocation and Migration

Although it is difficult to speak in broad generalities about the exact nature of the American working class during the Great Depression, there were salient characteristics and major fault lines in the nation’s labor force. For those that found employment, men who did clerical, skilled, or semiskilled work fared much better than unskilled workers. One study of Michigan men in 1935 found that the unemployment rate for clerical workers was 10 percent, the unemployment rate for skilled workers was 17 percent, and the unemployment rate for semiskilled workers was 16 percent. The unemployment rate for unskilled workers was, in contrast, a bit over 29 percent. Education mattered in determining employment prospects; workers (both men and women) with more education were better able to find work. Age also mattered; men who were older than fifty years old experienced much more difficulty in finding a job than their younger counterparts.

While every demographic group suffered from mass unemployment, women workers during the Depression faced a number of unique challenges and obstacles. Early in the Depression, women were more likely than men to be laid off, in part due to prevailing conceptions about the traditional role of men as the household’s sole breadwinner, but also, at times, due to public policies. For example, the 1932 Federal Economy Act declared that the federal civil service bureaucracy could only employ one member of any given family. Over the ensuing year, the federal government implemented this policy and fired more than 1,500 women. However, as the economic slump continued, women managed to find employment again.

Overall, women’s percentage of the total workforce increased marginally during the 1930s, rising from 24.3 percent in 1930 to 25.1 percent by 1940. What is striking about these figures is not this small increase, but the fact that, in the face of mass unemployment and widespread gender discrimination, women avoided losing substantial ground. In part, wage discrimination probably helped some women retain their jobs despite the economic collapse. During the 1930s, for example, manufacturing jobs generally paid women roughly 60 to 70 percent of what men earned, thus encouraging some employers to focus on retaining less expensive women workers while laying off their male counterparts. A 1937 study that considered all forms of employment in the paid labor market found that, on average, women made 51 cents for every dollar a man was paid. Although the percentage of women in the workforce rose only slightly during the Depression, more dramatic was the change in the kinds of women who found paid work during these years. Between 1930 and 1940, the percentage of married women in the workforce increased by one-fifth, rising from 28.8 to 35 percent of all women workers. This shift was not brought about by the Depression alone, but rather reflected sustained changes in the labor force that would continue through World War II and into the postwar years.

In general, women who managed to find jobs during the Depression worked in the clerical and domestic sectors. Many women also played central roles in certain industrial occupations, particularly in the garment trades. Women of color, when compared to white women, generally participated at higher rates in the labor market and were relegated to more demanding, more demeaning, less secure, and lower-paying forms of employment.

White men, both native and foreign-born, were hammered by the Depression. Studies of unemployment during the 1930s painted a stark picture of the statistically “typical” unemployed person: he was unskilled, white, male, in his late thirties, the sole provider for his family, and he usually found himself out of work for about two years. Many urban victims of unemployment, if they were able to do so, chose to leave the city and return to the family farm. This movement temporarily reversed long-standing national patterns of migration from rural to urban areas. In the cities, urban residents would often organize rent or tax “strikes,” banding together to protest what they saw as the severe inequity of their situation. In rural parts of America, farmers joined forces to protest the skyrocketing rates of foreclosures, forming “Farmer Holiday Associations” that called for a “holiday” from the crushing weight of loan and mortgage repayments. Still others, unable to eke out a sustainable living, simply packed up their worldly goods and left in search of better opportunities. Perhaps the most famous of these migrations was that of the Okies, the thousands of poor farmers and their families who left the heart of the Dust Bowl in drought-ridden Oklahoma, Texas, and Arkansas in order to seek their fortunes by journeying to the agricultural fields of California.

If white Americans endured hard times during the Depression, minorities such as Native Americans, Mexican-Americans, and African-Americans suffered even more. In 1930, the approximately 350,000 Native Americans in the United States faced the hardship of the Depression and a long history of mistreatment at the hands of the federal government. Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Collier, appointed by FDR in 1933, sought to change federal policy to help Native Americans strengthen and preserve traditional cultural practices, an objective advanced by the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act. Under this law, the practice of forced assimilation and the individual allotment of Native lands enacted by the 1887 Dawes Act came to an end. Tribes were authorized to elect their own governing representatives and to educate their children at home on reservation lands, instead of in boarding schools. While a number of tribes greeted this “Indian New Deal” with enthusiasm, others, including the large Navajo Nation, objected. Many Navajo resented federal regulations designed to reduce their sheep holdings. Sheep, animals with great cultural significance to the Navajo, were slaughtered by the thousands in order to stop soil erosion and halt overgrazing. Native Americans who objected to Collier’s plans charged that he and other reformers wanted to keep them “in the blanket,” substituting Native dances, crafts, and rituals for the training and education necessary for full participation in modern society. “Do you not think,” asked one assimilated Navajo, J.C. Morgan, “the Indians should be encouraged to emerge from the old paganistic life, that they should be given every opportunity to accept civilization and Christianity?” For Native opponents of Collier, the new federal policy represented yet another effort by white society to keep them isolated, poor, and uneducated.

Approximately 1.5 million Mexicans and Mexican-Americans lived in the United States in 1930, overwhelmingly concentrated in the American Southwest (Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona, and California) with the vast majority working in the agricultural sector. In California, for example, people of Mexican origin made up about 75 percent of the state’s agricultural workforce. Facing a long tradition of adversarial labor relations in farming, Mexican immigrants also encountered the obstacles of racism and discrimination. To create more jobs for whites, between 300,000 and 400,000 people of Mexican origin were repatriated back to Mexico, often with their Mexican-American children. The consequences of this migration were immediately evident. Los Angeles’s Mexican population dropped by a factor of one-third in just five years, from 1930 to 1935. In 1936, the governor of Colorado mobilized the National Guard and declared martial law along the state’s border with New Mexico to stop Mexican Americans from entering the state to find work. New Mexico, for its part, restricted the number of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans who could be considered eligible for government-sponsored relief and employment. In Texas, as one government report noted, people of Mexican origin were “segregated from the rest of the community almost as effectively as the Negro.”

Although African-Americans were not subject to deportation, they shared with Mexican-Americans the burdens of poverty, racism, and discrimination. “The Negro,” one black man recalled, “was born in depression. It didn’t mean too much to him, The Great American Depression, as you call it.” Indeed, widespread poverty, abysmal working conditions, and high unemployment had long been familiar elements of the African-American experience. During the Depression, these familiar conditions intensified. Often the last hired and first fired, African Americans suffered in numbers far disproportionate to their presence in the population. During the 1930s, African American unemployment averaged about 20 percent, while whites, desperate for any work, took many of the low-status and highly demanding jobs previously held by blacks.

The economic collapse particularly affected sectors that had employed many African-Americans, such as lumber, mining, construction, and unskilled manufacturing, thus further restricting options available to blacks. In cities, the African-American unemployment rate exceeded 50 percent and, generally, was double the white rate throughout the decade. In the rural South, where three-quarters of the nation’s African-American population was located, things were at least as bad, if not worse. Unemployment in farming was extraordinarily high, and New Deal agricultural policy served mainly to compensate white landowners while black sharecroppers received little or nothing. The constant threat of racial violence reinforced the harshness of this economic landscape. As one contemporary observer put it, with the Depression “The shotgun, the whip, the noose, and Ku Klux Klan practices were being resumed in the certainty that dead men not only tell no tales, but create vacancies.” For the most part, FDR and his advisors demonstrated little interest in challenging the status quo of Southern race relations, mainly to avoid antagonizing powerful white Southerners who held powerful positions in Congress. Nevertheless, some New Deal programs did make small strides in helping blacks. By the end of the 1930s, African Americans had benefited from programs such as public housing, as well as from New Deal public works and relief programs such as the WPA. The role of these programs, along with FDR’s personality, helped to bring African Americans into the Democratic party, as we discussed in Chapter 3. As one black preacher reportedly told his congregation, “Let Jesus lead you and Roosevelt feed you!”

African American elites became more active during the 1930s in a variety of ways. Walter White, the head of the NAACP and a good friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, urged the first lady to convince her husband to make African-American concerns a part of the public agenda. These efforts were often not successful, most notably White’s attempts to get FDR to actively support the passage of anti-lynching legislation. FDR declined to spend his political capital on this issue, but did create a civil rights division in the Justice Department in 1939. Black attempts to intervene in public affairs met with occasional success in other areas. With help from Communist Party activists, for example, a range of organizations pushed to save nine black teenagers, the “Scottsboro Boys,” from highly dubious charges of raping two white women in Alabama. While the 1930s did not see the flowering of a full-scale civil rights movement, some preconditions for future activism were established.

These early incarnations of the civil rights movement manifested themselves in the South, but their impact would be felt across the nation. At the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, activists on the left held workshops on labor organizing. In the postwar years, African-American civil rights activists, including Rosa Parks, Stokely Carmichael, and Fannie Lou Hamer, studied strategies, methods, and tactics at Highlander, techniques that they would put into action during the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s. While the CIO leadership was helpful at points in addressing the status of African-Americans, relationships on the ground, even in the North, often fell far short of unity and mutual respect. In Detroit, for example, tensions between African-American and white workers in the auto industry ran high during the late 1930s, with whites refusing to mix with blacks. These tensions erupted into a full-scale riot in 1943. Thirty-four people were killed (twenty-five of them black) and over six hundred people were injured in the three-day riot.

Social Upheaval

As time has passed, the scale and scope of social upheaval during the Great Depression has become the stuff of legend. Indeed, the casual student of the period might understandably be left with the impression that during the 1930s no one in America was ever at home – seemingly everyone, whether employed or out of work, had taken to the streets. They waited in breadlines, traveled the country in search of work, organized to demand better working conditions, or went on strike. While this impression of an active, mobile populace is rather overdrawn, it does have some basis in reality. John Steinbeck, in his novel The Grapes of Wrath, captured this underlying sense of restlessness and upheaval:

And the companies, the banks worked at their own doom and they did not know it. The fields were fruitful, and starving men moved on the roads. The granaries were full and the children of the poor grew up rachitic, and the pustules of pellagra swelled on their sides. . . . On the highways the people moved like ants and searched for work, for food. And the anger began to ferment.

In 1934, as we observed in Chapter 3, this anger began to ferment for residents of cities such as Minneapolis and San Francisco, who engaged in widespread labor protests. This pattern of activism emerged throughout the rest of the decade, and an important flash point was reached in late 1936 and early 1937.

In the winter of 1936–1937, in Flint, Michigan, a small group of autoworkers managed to pull off an altogether improbable feat: they brought General Motors – one of the most powerful (and profitable) corporations on the planet – to the bargaining table. Inspired in part by the tremendous margin of FDR’s reelection, organized labor – particularly the unions affiliated with the CIO – started to move to a more activist footing in November 1936. In different parts of the country, workers in mass production industries began to engage in freelance labor actions, holding short wildcat strikes. This activism came to a head in Flint on December 30. There, a group of workers affiliated with the tiny United Automobile Workers union (UAW) seized control of two GM facilities, Fisher Body plants #1 and #2. Once safely barricaded inside, the workers proceeded to occupy the plants for the next six weeks, utterly choking off GM’s ability to produce cars.

This sit-down strike, as it came to be called, was a triumph on several levels. The UAW capitalized on the community-wide involvement and enthusiasm of Flint’s workers. Flint was truly a “company town,” with nearly everyone and everything tied closely to the auto industry and to GM. This common interest led to a widely shared atmosphere of support for the strikers, as many autoworkers had long resented the arbitrary and often harsh conditions that characterized their labor. Workers’ families supported the strikers from outside the plants, and the wives and sisters of a number of male workers formed their own group, the Women’s Emergency Brigade, to help the sit-downers hold their advantage inside the plants. Led by a young socialist, Genora Johnson, the Women’s Emergency Brigade carried clubs and helped turn back several police attempts to retake GM’s property.

In addition to this broad solidarity, the UAW had two other factors on its side. The first was the brilliance of their strategy. In sitting down at GM’s plants, the UAW was taking the kind of direct action that would not have surprised someone like Karl Marx: the workers had seized control of the means of production. And, given the importance of the two Fisher plants to GM’s overall production line, this allowed the UAW to convert a small foothold into a powerful lever, with which they turned off GM’s means of producing car bodies for all Chevrolet, Pontiac, and Buick automobiles. With sales figures for cars actually improving in late 1936 and early 1937, GM was in danger of surrendering a potentially growing market to its competitors, Chrysler and Ford. Second, while the November 1936 elections had resoundingly confirmed FDR’s popularity, they also brought about a sea change in Michigan politics. Frank Murphy, the Democratic mayor of Detroit, had won the governor’s office. As governor, Murphy resisted GM’s entreaties for the state government to use the National Guard to crush the strikers. Murphy, along with Labor Secretary Frances Perkins and FDR himself, urged both sides to come to a peaceful settlement. These factors gave the UAW the advantage and created powerful incentives for GM to settle the strike.

When GM’s CEO, Alfred Sloan, signed a one-page agreement with the autoworkers that brought the strike to an end, the nation’s most powerful corporation had been forced to recognize the legitimacy of the UAW to bargain on behalf of its workers. This marked a huge reversal for Sloan, who had earlier termed the CIO’s goals as an “important step toward and economic and political dictatorship.” The UAW, and particularly the CIO’s John Lewis, moved swiftly to expand and capitalize on this unlikely triumph.

In the weeks following the Flint sit-down strike, workers in the steel industry soon came to a labor agreement with the huge U.S. Steel Corporation. This breakthrough, however, was soon followed by a shocking outbreak of deadly violence, as the CIO tried to organize workers at smaller steel companies. This violence climaxed in Chicago on Memorial Day, 1937. There, about two hundred city police opened fire on a throng of approximately one thousand steel workers and their families, who were marching peacefully to protest outside the Republic Steel plants on Chicago’s south side. Many were shot in the back, and dozens more were wounded as the police assaulted the crowd with their billy clubs. At the end of the day, the police had wounded thirty people (including three children), had killed ten, and had clubbed and arrested many more. Nine people were left permanently disabled by the attack. While subsequent congressional investigations found that police claims that the crowd had threatened them were exaggerated to the point of absurdity, the only legal fallout from the Memorial Day Massacre was that fifty demonstrators were fined $10 each. (A local coroner’s jury even ruled that the police killings were justifiable homicide.)

While events like the Flint sit-down strike and the Memorial Day Massacre were among the high-water marks of social turbulence during the Great Depression, upheaval was not the only development that marked these years. To make sense of just how radical or turbulent American society was during the Depression, it is helpful to view social upheaval alongside the broader changes taking place in American culture during these years.

Culture: Documenting the People

Just as different aspects of the Depression’s social history reflect both radical and conservative impulses, so too do the era’s cultural developments. While society witnessed many people taking to the streets, searching for meaning in their lives and solutions to their plight, American culture was struck in a similar fashion by the seismic political and economic aftershocks of the Great Depression. And, to be sure, some radical works of art were created during the Depression. Although the nation’s cultural production reflected the social chaos of the day, it also reflected a quiet, conservative current of endurance and stoicism in the face of disaster. Overall, two key themes run through much of the cultural production of the 1930s: “the people,” both as agents and as objects, and a focus by many artists, writers, filmmakers, and others on documenting the reality that surrounded them. For those who wrote, took photographs, made movies, staged theater, or performed music – those who produced nearly every kind of “cultural text” – older forms of narrative and cultural production no longer sufficed in the face of an economic collapse that literally defied explanation. New techniques, new forms, new subjects, and new themes had to be found.

The theme of “the people” was critical to America’s Depression-era cultural life. Perhaps no image was more evocative or central in public discourse than that of FDR’s “forgotten man.” In a radio address he made in 1932, while campaigning for the presidency, Roosevelt compared the Great Depression to the Great War, declaring “These unhappy times call for the building of plans that rest upon the forgotten, the unorganized but the indispensable units of economic power, for plans like those of 1917 that build from the bottom up and not from the top down, that put their faith once more in the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.” FDR was speaking directly to those suffering the worst from the Depression, to those he would later describe as the one-third of the nation that was ill-housed, ill-clad, and ill-nourished. But he was also speaking to anyone who felt the Depression’s sting – and to those who feared it. By focusing on the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid, Roosevelt proposed a collective way out of the Depression, one that would work by reviving the purchasing power of everyday citizens, “the infantry of our economic army,” as he put it. It was a potent example of the power of plain language to do useful political work in the broader world; it simultaneously reflected the Zeitgeist and further shaped it.

Highlighting the plight of everyday Americans had some troubling implications. Many Americans, aware of the rise of dictators such as Mussolini and Hitler to power in Europe, were disturbed by the potential for this emphasis on “the people” to be manipulated for demagogic ends. Eleanor Roosevelt was herself deeply troubled by the enormous roar that greeted her husband when he proclaimed, at his first inaugural, that in order to fight the Depression he was willing to take arbitrary executive action to meet the crisis. The novelist Sinclair Lewis caught this pessimistic mood in his 1935 novel, It Can’t Happen Here, a thinly veiled account of the real possibility of fascism taking root in the United States.

For the most part, however, artists and others who embraced the concept of “the people” were more comfortable stressing the social democratic potential of the power of everyday citizens. Thus, Ma Joad, the matriarch of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, declares in the 1940 movie adaptation of Steinbeck’s novel, “We’re the people that live. They can’t wipe us out, they can’t lick us. We’ll go on forever, Pa, cause we’re the people.” In her pictures of everyday life shot for the New Deal’s Farm Security Administration, photographer Dorothea Lange sought to portray the capacity of ordinary people to endure – and possibly triumph – over the suffering of the Depression. For example, in her now-classic photograph, “Migrant Mother,” a poor mother gazes defiantly out at a bleak horizon while her infant suckles at her breast. Filmmaker Frank Capra cast actor Jimmy Stewart as Jefferson Smith in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). Smith, the morally decent and upright head of the Boy Rangers (a fictionalized version of the Boy Scouts), is appointed to fill a vacant Senate seat. As the movie’s plot unfolds, Capra presents a story that emphasizes the abilities of ordinary people to prevail in a political system that too often served the entrenched interests of the rich and powerful.

Similarly, painter Thomas Hart Benton, working in a naturalistic style that emphasized the regional aspects of life in the United States, often created works of art that glorified the achievements of ordinary people. With “A Social History of Missouri,” Benton painted for Missouri’s state capitol building a mural that made workers and farmers the subjects of his scene. In music, regionalism influenced composers such as Aaron Copland and Ferde Grofé as they embraced material drawn from folk songs. “The people” were the subjects of Copland’s ballets Billy the Kid and Appalachian Spring, as well as of shorter pieces like “El Salón México” and “Fanfare for the Common Man”. Similarly, regionalism also drove the work of Southern Agrarian writers such as Robert Penn Warren and John Crowe Ransom. While Warren eventually embraced a progressive stance on race relations and the issue of integration after World War II, Ransom and many of the Southern Agrarians combined their affection for “the people” with a nostalgic and explicitly reactionary defense of the racist paternalism of the Old South.

As the alert reader has already noticed, much of the cultural emphasis on “the people” was decidedly not on all of the people. In FDR’s major speeches, in the overwhelming majority of Steinbeck’s fiction, in much of Lange’s photography, and in Capra’s movies and the music of Copland and others, “the people” in question were almost exclusively white. Racial and ethnic minorities were represented only rarely in the great bulk of the nation’s public discourse. This racialized boundary in American public culture might reflect any number of longer-run developments, from the increasingly homogeneous makeup of the white population (following the immigration restrictions instituted by the federal government in 1924), to the persistence and strength of American racism. Whatever its sources, however, this boundary was a very real presence in much of American culture, and in fact, a possible source of the widespread appeal of novels like The Grapes of Wrath.

For example, one might think of the “Okie narrative” in Steinbeck’s novel as a kind of resonant symbol for Depression-era populism. But why was this story such a resonant one? In part, it was the sweep of the mass migration of the Joads and their counterparts that provided a kind of storyline that lent itself to mass appeal. Coupled with this broadly appealing narrative arc, however, was the undeniable fact that Steinbeck’s cast of characters was entirely white. The Protestant, white, “plain folk” of Steinbeck’s novel can be thought of as a cultural reflection of the racial boundaries of the political and economic order constructed by the New Deal in response to the Great Depression, indicating both the limits of this order and one of the potential sources of its popularity.

Alongside the emphasis on “the people,” much Depression-era cultural production reflected a strong desire to create new cultural forms and new modes of narration. Again, the widespread breadth and depth of the Great Depression provides an explanation for this cultural development. Faced with an economic collapse that defied explanation, that defied conventional narration, artists realized that older forms of artistic work were no longer sufficient. During the Depression, writers of fiction departed from the isolation of their studies and plunged into society, trying to understand a world that had been turned upside down. As Edmund Wilson wrote, “The stock market crash was to count for us almost like a rending of the earth in preparation for the Day of Judgment.” Writers and other artists embraced what one student of the period has termed the “documentary impulse.” This “quest for social fact,” as it has been called, was underscored by the chaos created by the Depression. Fiction was now inadequate. Accounting for society’s response to the economic collapse was, for many artists, the only relevant response to the crisis of their moment.

Many different kinds of artists, therefore, looked in their work to find a new way of expressing their engagement with the realities that surrounded them. Pare Lorentz, for example, was commissioned by the Resettlement Administration to make two documentaries. The first, “The Plow that Broke the Plains,” portrayed the plight of the Dust Bowl. The second, “The River,” celebrated the accomplishments of the TVA and documented the power of the Mississippi River. Composer Virgil Thompson scored each film, drawing upon American folk music traditions and collaborating closely with Lorentz in integrating his music with the edited film. Lorentz’ script for “The River” reflected his support of the New Deal; it was modeled on the poetry of Walt Whitman and received a nomination for the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1938.

For a time, John Steinbeck abandoned fiction entirely and threw himself into journalism. Much of the realism that infuses The Grapes of Wrath, for instance, stems from Steinbeck’s documentary reportage of the plight of California’s agricultural workforce for such periodicals as The Nation. This experience led Steinbeck to bring a heightened sense of reality to his novel writing. “I’m trying to write history while it is happening,” Steinbeck said as he was drafting The Grapes of Wrath, “and I don’t want it to be wrong.” Other authors similarly took cues from current events. Meridel Le Sueur captured much of the sense of left-wing working class activism in her short story, “I Was Marching.” Drawing from her experience of the 1934 Teamsters strike in Minneapolis, Le Sueur wrote of what it was like to march in the funeral procession of two strikers who were killed by the police. “I was marching with a million hands, movements, faces, and my own movement was repeating again and again, making a new movement from these many gestures, the walking, falling back, the open mouth crying, the nostrils stretched apart, the raised hand, the blow falling, and the outstretched hand drawing me in.” The collective impulse, for Le Sueur, was impossible to resist, and she attempted to capture the thrill of participating in the mass procession for her readers. “I felt my legs straighten. I felt my feet join in that strange shuffle of thousands of bodies moving with direction, of thousands of feet, and my own breath with the gigantic breath. As if an electric charge had passed through me, my hair stood on end. I was marching.”

In his trilogy, U.S.A., author John Dos Passos likewise drew upon his impressions of what the nation was going through, crafting novels that, in bringing together personal memoir, fiction, and history, attempted to document social reality. As Dos Passos put it, “The writer who writes straight is the architect of history. . . . Those of us who have lived through [these times] have seen the years strip the bunting off the great illusions of our time. We must deal with the raw structure of history now, we must deal with it quick, before it stamps us out.” In a 1938 introduction he drafted for U.S.A., he informed his readers of his aim of documenting the present moment through his fiction, concluding, “mostly U.S.A. is the speech of the people.” Indeed, many authors were struck by the ways the Depression affected ordinary people, and strove to invent or adapt narrative forms in order to represent this suffering.

The economic collapse, authors like Sherwood Anderson found, did not awaken Americans politically so much as it reinforced existing tendencies to somehow endure the disaster. In Puzzled America, Anderson declared that “the amazing thing” about the Depression was that “there is so very little bitterness” on the part of most Americans. Many unemployed workers and farmers, authors like Anderson concluded, preferred to blame themselves rather than others for their inexplicable misfortune. For all that radical currents deeply informed Depression-era culture, an underlying strain of American conservatism and self-reliance was intertwined with this radical impulse.

If one had to choose one work that adequately reflects the complexity of American culture during the Great Depression, it would be difficult to choose a more evocative and representative text than James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. This essayistic work of prose and photography brings together two of the central themes of Depression-era culture, “the people” and “the documentary impulse.” Originally commissioned by Fortune magazine, Agee and Evans set out in 1936 to document the lives and working conditions of poor Southern sharecroppers. When Fortune declined to publish the over-long manuscript that Agee and Evans ultimately submitted, they set about expanding and publishing their work as a book. The result was a powerful combination of intensely personal writing from Agee and intimate, heart-stopping photography from Evans that documented the resilient decency of three white farm families. Published in 1941, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men has become a touchstone for thinking about the experience of the American people during the Great Depression. At a 1971 retrospective show of Evans’s work at the Museum of Modern Art, the New York Times art critic wrote, “For how many of us, I wonder, has our imagination of what the United States looked like and felt like in the nineteen-thirties been determined not by a novel or a play or a poem or a painting or even by our own memories, but by a work of a single photographer, Walker Evans?” In documenting how ordinary people experienced the Great Depression, Agee and Evans transcended conventional narrative forms and signaled the extent to which the New Deal and Great Depression remade American culture and society.

The Politics of Culture

The outpouring of cultural production during the Great Depression crossed many conventional divides. Thus far we have explored the Depression’s impact on the producers and production of culture. But how did audiences receive all of this work? This question is exceedingly difficult and complicated, but it is possible to hazard a few generalizations. Of course, one way to measure how audiences responded to different cultural forms is to look at the various measures of popularity – the lists of best-selling books, best-attended movies, and most-listened-to radio programs, for example. Viewed in this fashion, it appears that, despite the hardships that many Americans experienced during the Depression, a great number of them still managed to consume a great deal of fairly conventional cultural products. Attendance at movies, which were an affordable luxury in a time of economic crisis, shot up during the 1930s, as people sought an inexpensive escape from their troubles. Socially relevant pictures like “The River” and “The Plow that Broke the Plains” had an impact at the box office and beyond, but a huge number of popular movies, like Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Scarface, and It Happened One Night, presented audiences with more escapist fare. Many popular movies managed, to be sure, to combine escapism with political messages. The comedies of the Marx Brothers, for example, often used politics as a subject of their humor. When Groucho Marx’s character, Rufus T. Firefly, takes office as president of Freedonia in the 1933 movie Duck Soup, he sings, “The last man nearly ruined this place, he didn’t know what to do with it. If you think this country’s bad off now, just wait till I get through with it.” Firefly’s statement reflected the brutal truth that no one knew how or even if the Depression would ever end.

Other media also exemplified this desire of artists to engage the problems of the times and the audience to escape from them. In the world of publishing, novels such as The Grapes of Wrath and the U.S.A. trilogy engaged the experience of the Depression directly, but the bestselling books of the 1930s included a variety of genres. Books such as James Hilton’s Good-Bye, Mr. Chips, Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, and Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, begin to indicate the range of reader interest during the Great Depression. Radio solidified its role as a vehicle for mass culture in the 1930s, as Americans gathered around the loudspeaker not only to listen to FDR’s fireside chats, but also to take in soap operas, plays, news, and other programs. The crime-fighting exploits of The Shadow, for example, would drive the plot of one of the most popular serial radio shows.

While radio, movies, and books flourished, the Great Depression did dampen American enthusiasm for professional sports: baseball attendance plummeted 40 percent between 1930 and 1933, while player salaries dropped by 25 percent. Attendance did not return to pre-Great Depression figures until 1945. Some star players, however, were able to maintain salaries commensurate with their popularity and skill. When New York Yankee Babe Ruth was criticized in 1930 for making more money than President Hoover, Ruth responded, “I know, but I had a better year than Hoover.”

While statistical measures of audience attendance reveal valuable information relating to patterns of cultural consumption, it is far more difficult to apprehend what kinds of meanings that Depression-era audiences took away from all of these different diversions. Did the experience of popular culture help politicize Americans? If so, how, or in what ways? There is some evidence that popular culture helped native-born white and ethnic Americans to bridge their differences in such a turbulent period. In Chicago, for example, working-class people of strikingly different ethnic backgrounds went to the same movies, listened to the same radio programs, and shopped at the same chain stores. Mass culture, imbibed in this fashion, probably helped to build a kind of “culture of unity” among the American working class in places like Chicago, solidifying support for the newly formed CIO. This unity, however, rested on exceedingly fragile foundations. Only rarely did mass culture help to bridge the stark and deep racial divide between African-Americans and whites. One need look no further than the vicious race riots in 1943 Detroit, the racial strife that persisted in postwar Chicago’s public housing projects, or the struggles of African Americans in Oakland, California, to gain a fuller sense of how poorly New Deal liberalism addressed racial concerns in American society and culture.

For all that the society and culture of 1930s America was deeply marked by radical and turbulent currents of upheaval, they were equally marked by the continued resonance of conservative traditions of self-reliance and individualism. Viewing the United States’s experience of the Great Depression in global and historic contexts helps to reveal the persistence of these traditions. In contrast to other nations, like Germany, cultural production in the United States during the 1930s was not intimately intertwined with the goal of solidifying a political regime’s hold on power. Pare Lorentz’s “The River” did not, to be blunt, do the same cultural or political work in Roosevelt’s America as Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will did in Hitler’s Germany.

Historically, the experiences of World War II and the Cold War help to point out the fragility of cultural and social radicalism in 1930s America. The same forces of mass culture that may have helped ethnic workers form class solidarities during the Great Depression were quickly transformed after U.S. entry into World War II into a patriotic wartime culture that relied on demonizing Germans and, especially, Japanese as enemies. Organized labor worked closely with business and government during the war, as the CIO leadership pledged not to strike so as not to disrupt the production of war materiel. Organized labor quickly became more comfortable working for gains within bureaucratic structures and negotiations with management, rather than with taking direct industrial action on the shop floor. That strategy that culminated in the long-term contract the UAW signed with Chrysler, GM, and Ford in 1950. This accord – the famous “Treaty of Detroit” – brought union workers guaranteed cost-of-living wage increases, pensions, and unemployment benefits in exchange for labor peace and stability for the Big Three automakers. The Treaty of Detroit was a great victory for the UAW, but it also signaled that 1930s-style grassroots activism was firmly a part of history. During the Cold War, the anti-Communist imperative further disciplined radical currents in American culture and society. Movie studios blacklisted left-wing Hollywood actors and writers, denying them employment; the federal government compiled lists of potentially subversive organizations, yanking the passports of presumed radicals to restrict their movement; and the CIO voluntarily purged its membership of left-leaning unions.

The relative ease with which conservative elements brought about these transformations during and after World War II tells us something important about the United States during the Great Depression. What was different about this period? Many things, of course, but ultimately what distinguished American culture and society during the Great Depression from the periods that followed was a political economy of mass unemployment. This reality had profound political, social, and cultural consequences for the 1930s, and when this reality changed during World War II, so too did American politics, culture, and society. While the demands of wartime production at long last put an end to Depression-era unemployment rates, conservative forces did not have to wait until 1940 and U.S. entry into the war in order to reassert their power. Indeed, the late 1930s would be marked by a number of pivotal reactions against the New Deal, backlashes that would testify to the strength and limits of reform, as well as to the persistence and resonance of conservatism in American culture and society.

5 Opposition and Backlash, 1937–1939

In January 1937, Franklin Roosevelt delivered one of the more remarkable inaugural addresses in American history. After reviewing the state of the nation following his first term as president, FDR grimly turned to what he termed as “the challenge to our democracy.”

In this nation I see tens of millions of its citizens – a substantial part of its whole population – who at this very moment are denied the greater part of what the very lowest standards of today call the necessities of life. I see millions of families trying to live on incomes so meager that the pall of family disaster hangs over them day by day. I see millions whose daily lives in city and on farm continue under conditions labeled indecent by a so-called polite society half a century ago. I see millions denied education, recreation, and the opportunity to better their lot and the lot of their children. I see millions lacking the means to buy the products of farm and factory and by their poverty denying work and productiveness to many other millions.

FDR concluded, “I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.”

Why did FDR deliver a speech that seemingly dwelled on the New Deal’s failures in combating the Great Depression? Why, in a moment of great personal and professional triumph, did FDR not choose instead to emphasize the positive? After all, he had just been reelected by a huge margin, trouncing Republican Alf Landon in every state save Maine and Vermont. In his first term, FDR had cut unemployment in half. As a percentage of the civilian labor force, unemployment fell from 20.9 percent in 1933 to 9.97 percent in 1936. The nation’s economic productivity had begun to improve and, politically, Roosevelt and the Democrats passed a raft of legislation and were rewarded handsomely for their efforts at the ballot box in both the 1934 and in 1936 elections.

FDR, however, saw a tremendous opportunity in forthrightly acknowledging the bleak national landscape that remained: “It is not in despair that I paint you that picture. I paint it for you in hope – because the Nation, seeing and understanding the injustice in it, proposes to paint it out.” Following on the heels of his sweeping reelection victory, FDR and his advisors would attempt to make fundamental changes to established institutions – to the structure of the federal government, to the Supreme Court, and to the Democratic Party. Offering his listeners a benchmark by which to measure his administration’s battle against the Great Depression, Roosevelt proposed, “The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”

During Roosevelt’s second term, he and his advisors found that their great plans often foundered on the rocky shoals of fierce political opposition. This opposition grew swiftly between 1937 and 1939, turning into full-fledged backlash. During these years, FDR attempted to continue the work begun during his first term: Concerns about the unconstitutionality of New Deal laws led FDR to propose remaking the Supreme Court. Concerns about growing deficits led New Dealers to reduce public spending, triggering a severe economic downturn. Although New Dealers suffered these and other political reversals during FDR’s second term in office, they still continued to attempt – and occasionally accomplish – further reforms, particularly in the areas of public housing and labor standards. These efforts, building on earlier uses of the power of the federal government to address the calamity of the Great Depression, were pathbreaking in a number of respects. The growing strength of conservative opposition to the New Deal, however, would temper the scope of these reform measures.

Apprehension about the political direction of the Democratic Party led FDR to attempt to purge his own party of its conservative elements. Even the New Deal’s successful and popular public works programs came under intense scrutiny, as opponents made accusations that the government was building projects that were poorly constructed and a waste of money and that federal public works funds were being used to influence elections. New Dealer attempts to reorganize the executive branch of the federal government met with skepticism and hostility from an increasingly conservative – and, by this point, empowered – Congress. In each of these cases, long-frustrated conservative opponents of the New Deal took advantage of FDR’s attempts to try to accomplish too much, too quickly, and seized the openings he presented to press their advantage.

Confronting the Supreme Court

Given the deep and seemingly intractable problems that FDR outlined in his second inaugural address – a dysfunctional economy, entrenched unemployment, and widespread poverty – Roosevelt’s focus on the composition of the Supreme Court might appear odd. FDR and a number of his advisors had good reason to ponder the nature and makeup of the Court, however. A number of decisions that the Court had handed down in 1935 and 1936 threatened the ability of New Dealers to intervene in the economy. In May 1935, in Schechter Poultry Corporation v. United States, the Court ruled Title I of the National Industrial Recovery Act unconstitutional. The case focused on the ability of the Schechter brothers, who ran a poultry business, to transport slaughtered chickens across state lines, from New Jersey to New York City. While seemingly a subject of minor import, this case in fact held enormous implications. As Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes ruled in the Court’s unanimous opinion, the National Recovery Administration’s competition codes (regulating prices, hours, and wages) represented an improper delegation of Congressional power to the executive branch, as well as a violation of the Constitution’s Commerce Clause. FDR, for his part, decried the Court’s ruling, observing that “the country was in the horse-and-buggy age” when the Commerce Clause was written. “The big issue” before the nation today, he proposed, “is this: Does this decision mean that the United States Government has no control over any national economic problem?” FDR was acutely aware of the implications this issue held for the New Deal and its use of federal power:

If we accept the point of view that under no interpretation of the Constitution can the Federal Government deal with construction matters, mining matters (which means everything that comes out of the ground), manufacturing matters or agricultural matters, but that they must be left wholly to the States, the Federal Government must abandon any legislation.

The Schecter decision, invalidating one of the legislative cornerstones of the early New Deal, was followed by another judicial thunderbolt in January 1936. In United States v. Butler, the Court ruled, six to three, that the New Deal’s Agricultural Adjustment Act was unconstitutional. The AAA, by taxing the processing of agricultural crops, provided payments to farmers to encourage them to reduce their output, with the goal of raising crop prices and thus improving the general economic situation faced by farmers. Writing for the majority, Associate Justice Owen Roberts stated, “Congress has no power to enforce its commands on the farmer to the ends sought by the Agricultural Adjustment Act,” adding, “It must follow that it may not indirectly accomplish those ends by taxing and spending to purchase compliance.” Writing for the dissenting justices, Harlan Stone objected to Roberts’s reasoning, tartly observing that the nation might be better served by “the frank recognition that language, even of a constitution, may mean what it says: that the power to tax and spend includes the power to relieve a nationwide economic maladjustment by conditional gifts of money.” Roosevelt and the New Dealers could not afford to abide by the narrow interpretations offered by the Court’s conservative majority.

These Supreme Court decisions raised legitimate concerns in the minds of New Dealers, namely, that the Court would continue restricting the possibilities for the federal government to use progressive social policy to fight the Great Depression. Would the Court, for example, next rule the Wagner Act unconstitutional? What might happen to the nation’s new Social Security program? Accordingly, the 1936 Democratic Party platform laid out a possible roadmap for FDR to follow in defending the New Deal’s approach to the Great Depression:

We have sought and will continue to seek meeting these problems through legislation within the Constitution. If these problems cannot be effectively solved by legislation within the Constitution, we shall seek such clarifying amendment as will assure to the legislatures of the several states and to the Congress of the United States, each within its proper jurisdiction, the power to enact those laws which the State and Federal legislatures, within their respective spheres, shall find necessary in order adequately to regulate commerce, protect public health and safety and safeguard economic security. Thus we propose to maintain the letter and spirit of the Constitution.

Roosevelt had bolder plans. Mere days after his inauguration, FDR publicly presented his proposal for reorganizing the judicial branch of government. Declaring that the nation’s judges were threatened by overwork and the growth of the modern legal system, Roosevelt proposed that additional judges and justices be appointed to the federal courts and to the Supreme Court to increase efficiency and ease the workload facing the judiciary. If a judge with ten years of service on any federal court failed to retire within six months of turning seventy years old, FDR’s legislation proposed, the president would be able to appoint an additional judge to the bench. Not more than fifty new judges could be named to the federal judiciary under this legislation, and the total number of Supreme Court Justices was not to exceed fifteen.

The implications were immediately clear to all. With six of the nine members of the Supreme Court over seventy, if this legislation was passed FDR would be able to name six new justices immediately and almost certainly be assured of a pro-New Deal majority on the Court. This proposal quickly became known as FDR’s “Court packing plan.” Opponents of the New Deal claimed that FDR had no sincere desire to help older judges handle their dockets more efficiently and charged that the president was motivated simply by a desire to reshape the Supreme Court to his liking. While some of FDR’s supporters stuck by him and supported his proposal, many remained silent and others broke publicly with the president.

Progressive Republican Robert La Follette, Jr. was perhaps FDR’s most eloquent backer, declaring that Roosevelt’s proposal was not some maneuver designed to arrogate power to the executive branch. “Those who are opposing the President in this struggle,” Senator La Follette declared, “rise to sanctimonious heights and brand as irreverent any attack on the Supreme Court.” La Follette attempted to lay out the political principles supporting the expansion of the Court, still bristling over the Court’s anti-New Deal decisions of the previous two years:

[W]hen the Court substitutes for the will of the people of this country its own will; when it supplants the prevailing economic theory with its own smug theory of days gone by; when it decrees that it is beyond the power of the people to meet the national needs – then it has become a dictator and we have succumbed to a Fascist system of control which is inconsistent with fundamental principles upon which our government is founded. If it is irreverent to attack that dictatorship, then I am irreverent.

La Follette then turned to defending FDR from charges that the President was attempting to “pack” the Supreme Court and did so in a tour de force of rhetoric, claiming that Roosevelt’s landslide victory in the 1936 election had made the desires of the American people clear to all:

There is a lot of talk of the President “packing” the Court. Let’s not be misled by a red herring. The Court has been “packed” for years – “packed” in the interests of Economic Royalists, “packed” for the benefit of the Liberty Leaguers, “packed” in the cause of reaction and laissez-faire. Let’s be frank about this matter. The vested interests have for years prevailed in the selection of judges. Under our form of government the will of the majority should prevail. If the majority of the people want progress, they shall have it. November 3rd last made it clear and unmistakable where the vast majority of the people stand. They want to be free from the shackles of vested interests. They have rejected the Economic Royalists. In the words of Lincoln, they want a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. They cannot have it if the Supreme Court places itself above the Constitution and arrogates to itself legislative functions. One clear way in which they can have their will of last November expressed is to have the Congress “unpack” a Court which has long been “packed” by the forces of reaction.

Democratic Party Chair James Farley confidently backed up La Follette’s rhetoric with the toughness of a skilled political operator, declaring to the press, “I just want to call something to your attention regarding the Supreme Court issue. We have let the Senate talk all they want to. Then the House will take up the matter, and there they will talk until they are tired. After they are all talked out we will call the roll. You will find we have plenty of votes to put over the President’s program.” Despite the power of La Follette’s argument and Farley’s political moxie, it soon became apparent that FDR’s Court-packing plan had unleashed an unstoppable wave of opposition. Even liberal supporters of the president, such as the Democratic governor of New York, Herbert Lehman, spoke out against the plan, and the Supreme Court itself acted in two ways to help quash it. First, Chief Justice Hughes wrote a letter to Senator Burton Wheeler, indicating that the Court was more than able to keep up with its workload. This open letter put all on notice that the Court saw through FDR’s thin rationalization for his plan. Second, and more interestingly, the Court began to change its collective mind. In West Coast Hotel v. Parrish, the Court in a five to four ruling upheld the constitutionality of a Washington state minimum wage law. Chief Justice Hughes wrote the majority opinion, joined by the three justices who were most sympathetic to the New Deal (Louis Brandeis, Harlan Stone, and Benjamin Cardozo), as well as by a longtime opponent of New Deal legislation, Justice Roberts.

Roberts’s intellectual reorientation was labeled by some as “the switch in time that saved nine,” but the origins of West Coast Hotel are more complicated than this glib phrase might indicate. The Court actually had heard oral arguments in the case and had made its decision before FDR’s court-packing plan had even been announced, so it is difficult to envision how, in West Coast Hotel, Chief Justice Hughes and Associate Justice Roberts might have been responding to something they did not yet know anything about. Regardless of the circumstances of its origins, the key contribution of West Coast Hotel lay in the timing of the Court’s decision, which arrived at the peak of the debate over FDR’s plan. With the announcement of Roberts’s shift – and he had been a crucial swing vote in earlier five-to-four decisions that had struck down New Deal legislation – it seemed to many observers as if the Court was signaling to Roosevelt and the New Dealers that it was willing to rethink its opposition to reform if the New Dealers were willing to drop their insistence that the Court be restructured.

In the midst of all of this jockeying in the political and judicial arenas, Justice Willis Van Devanter announced his retirement from the Court, effective at the end of the term. With the retirement of one of the New Deal’s staunchest opponents, FDR received not only his first chance to nominate someone to the Supreme Court, but also the opportunity to make the Court more favorable to the New Deal. Before Van Devanter stepped down, the Court also upheld two more key New Deal measures, the Wagner Act and Social Security. These developments, along with the death of Senate majority leader Joseph Robinson, the man responsible for attempting to steer the Judiciary Act through the Senate, eroded FDR’s determination to pass his Court-packing plan into law. The measure ultimately died a quiet death in the Senate’s Judiciary Committee, which stripped it out of the Judiciary Act entirely.

While FDR had, in a sense, won several victories in this battle – on a substantive level, the Court was now upholding the New Deal’s legislation, and he at last had a chance to appoint new associate justices – the president and his New Deal emerged severely weakened. The Democratic Party had split over the issue, and ordinary Americans were deeply troubled by this attempt to remake one of the nation’s bedrock institutions. Coming off reelection by historic margins, FDR’s first act in his second term ultimately served to forge an alliance of Republicans and conservative Democrats, who would stand together to oppose the New Deal in the coming years.

The Roosevelt Recession

While FDR’s failed attempt to restructure the Supreme Court marked an important setback for the New Deal, it was only one of several reversals that Roosevelt and his allies suffered during his second term. Following his landslide reelection, FDR had a number of substantial reasons for viewing the New Deal’s economic policy as a real area of strength for his administration. Compared to 1933, fewer people were out of work, the nation’s economy had become more productive in each year of Roosevelt’s first term, and in short, the New Deal seemed to be working in combating the misery of the Great Depression. In 1937 and 1938, however, it would be in this area of strength – economic policy – where FDR’s team blundered next. That misstep had major consequences for the political fortunes of the New Deal.

By early 1937, Roosevelt and some of his advisors were coming to believe that the economic recovery that bloomed during his first term was becoming self-sustaining. But FDR was concerned. Despite the New Deal’s bold commitment to public spending, he himself held an orthodox commitment to fiscal discipline and balanced budgets. What if continued government spending failed to create a robust recovery, but rather only recreated the shaky boom-and-bust economy of the 1920s? Thus, as early as April 1937, Roosevelt called upon the federal government to look for ways to cut back its expenditures, with the expectation that private firms would continue to expand their hiring and purchasing. Business continued to be cautious, though, and many companies refrained from expanding their operations. But by the summer of 1937, it was clear that the New Deal’s reduction of federal spending had stimulated the economy.

Unfortunately, the new New Deal strategy had stimulated it in the wrong direction: the nation’s economy responded to the reduction in government spending with the steepest and most rapid decline of the twentieth century, one even more extreme than the 1929 collapse. In less than a year, national income dropped more than 10 percent. Industrial stocks lost 50 percent of their value, and industrial production in the economy collapsed by a factor of one-third. Four million more people lost their jobs, and as the economy spiraled downward, the New Deal’s works programs curtailed their employment as well. The New Deal further hurt the economy by reducing the purchasing power of those who were employed, as new Social Security taxes began to be withheld from workers’ paychecks just as the economy was taking such a severe downturn. In his diary, Harold Ickes recorded FDR’s thoughts on the situation: Government pump-priming had been essential in confronting the Depression when the Roosevelt administration took office in 1933, “when the water had receded to the bottom of the well,” but even by February 1938 – with the “Roosevelt Recession” in full swing – FDR thought government spending would be far less useful “with the water within twenty-five or thirty per cent of the top.” Roosevelt, Ickes reflected, “seems to have adopted a policy of watchful waiting so far as the economic situation is concerned. He knows that unemployment is increasing, that business is falling off, but he doesn’t seem to me to know just what he can or should do about it.”

FDR’s circle of advisors was more certain than the president. While the economy continued to crater throughout the last half of 1937 and the first months of 1938, a battle royal broke out for FDR’s allegiance. The Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau, made the case for refraining from intervention, arguing that the federal government should focus on balancing its budget. This position was a longstanding commitment for the conservative Morgenthau, who was fond of telling FDR, “We must get our house in order if we are going to continue our leadership for liberalism.” Morgenthau feared that overly harsh taxation and the threat of inflation would cause American businesses to refrain from investing.

A range of New Dealers stood in opposition to Morgenthau and his conservative allies in the Treasury Department. Prominent among them were Harold Ickes and Harry Hopkins, the two men in charge of the New Deal’s public works programs. Ickes and Hopkins were joined by Marriner Eccles, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, in making the case for increased spending and government intervention in order to save the nation’s economy. They were ably assisted by such reformers as Jerome Frank, Robert Jackson, Isador Lubin, and Leon Henderson. Ickes, an unabashed fan of Ferdinand Lundberg’s America’s Sixty Families, which argued that the sixty wealthiest families in the nation functioned as an oligarchy that dominated the United States, blamed the recession on business in December 1937. America, Ickes asserted, was in danger from “big business fascism” and was, in fact, witnessing the “first general sit-down strike – not of labor – not of the American people – but of the sixty families and of . . . capital.” The head of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division (and future Supreme Court justice) Robert Jackson joined Ickes in this public campaign, fleshing out the theory that capital had gone on strike. In Jackson’s view, “The only just criticism that can be made of the economic operations of the New Deal is that it set out a breakfast for the canary and let the cat steal it.” FDR began to move away from Morgenthau’s position and toward Jackson and Ickes. Speaking privately with Jackson, FDR declared, “I’m sick of sitting here kissing people’s asses to get them to do what they ought to be volunteering for the Republic.”

In February 1938, FDR received a confidential letter from English economist John Maynard Keynes. While Keynes had been developing his ideas about the relationship between government spending and the function of aggregate demand in an economy during the 1930s – publishing his masterwork The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money in 1936 – his influence in American policy-making circles was only partial. Of FDR’s circle of advisors, only Lauchlin Currie, who served as a special assistant to Marriner Eccles at the Fed, could be considered deeply knowledgeable about Keynes’s work. In Eccles, Currie found a surprisingly receptive audience for his interpretation of Keynes’s ideas. Eccles, the product of a conservative and rich Mormon family from Utah, had come to embrace a wide range of arguments that favored public spending after the Great Depression began in 1929. Along with his indirect knowledge of Keynes’s ideas, Eccles relied on a range of homegrown American arguments that supported increased spending, such as William Foster and Waddill Catchings’s 1928 book, The Road to Plenty. By 1937, Eccles had become a prominent advocate of robust federal action to stimulate the economy, arguing, “how can you prime a pump with an eye-dropper?” When Keynes’s letter arrived, FDR’s pro-spending advisors had reason to be hopeful.

In his letter to FDR, Keynes – writing as “an enthusiastic well-wisher of you and your policies” – urged FDR adopt a wide range of policies to combat the new recession: nationalizing utilities and railroads, increasing spending on public works programs in order to generate employment, and reaching an accommodation with business to stimulate private investment. Businessmen, Keynes wrote, “have a different set of delusions from politicians, and need, therefore, different handling.” And he prescribed specific instructions for their “handling”:

They are, however, much milder than politicians, at the same time allured and terrified by the glare of publicity, easily persuaded to be “patriots,” perplexed, bemused, indeed yet only too anxious to take a cheerful view, vain perhaps but very unsure of themselves, pathetically responsive to a kind word. You could do anything you liked with them, if you would treat them (even the big ones), not as wolves or tigers, but as domestic animals by nature, even though they have been badly brought up and not trained as you would wish. It is a mistake to think that they are more immoral than politicians. If you work them into the surly, obstinate, terrified mood, of which domestic animals, wrongly handled, are so capable, the nation’s burdens will notget carried to market; and in the end public opinion will veer their way.

While Keynes’s analysis of the psychological aspects of dealing with the business community probably resonated with a frustrated FDR, taken as a whole, his prescriptions were likely less influential than was the advice of pro-spending advisors such as Eccles, which finally took hold in the spring of 1938.

As the economy continued its freefall into late March 1938, Hopkins and his assistant, Aubrey Williams, visited FDR at his Southern residence in Warm Springs, Georgia. Roosevelt, aware of the economic situation and increasingly concerned about the impact it would have upon the Democratic Party’s chances in the fall midterm elections, was ready at last to take action. Hopkins and Williams pressed FDR for a major federal recommitment to public works, via the WPA and the PWA, with the aim of alleviating unemployment and stimulating the economy through increased spending on construction projects. The two advisors pushed FDR to put aside his orthodox view of the economy and to embrace a broad and deep commitment to public spending in order to stabilize the economy. FDR did so. He asked Congress to appropriate $3.75 billion for relief and public works construction and to create the Temporary National Economic Commission to investigate the power held by monopolies in the American economy. He was motivated as much by political concerns as he was by the economic logic of the case put before him.

The political calculus for the New Deal had new variables added rapidly during the seventeenth months following the 1936 elections: First, the sit-down strike in Flint, Michigan (winter 1936–1937), demonstrated to the nation the potential for organized labor to remake the established order of society. The United Auto Workers, a tiny union of approximately thirty thousand autoworkers, grew to a membership of four hundred thousand during the year following the UAW’s victory over Alfred Sloan’s General Motors at Flint. This change inspired workers in many other industries, such as steel and mining. Many industrial workers began to rally to the banner of the new Committee on Industrial Organizations (CIO), which had split off from the American Federation of Labor in 1935, but labor’s increased activism also alarmed many in the middle class. Second, the failed attempt to remake the Supreme Court, coupled with an unsuccessful effort to consolidate and reorganize the executive branch of government, gave the New Deal’s opponents ammunition for charging that FDR had aspirations to dictatorship. These charges, along with the specifics of FDR’s plans – increasing executive power at the expense of the judicial and legislative branches of government – occurred against the backdrop of fascism and dictatorship abroad: Adolf Hitler was consolidating his power in Germany, Benito Mussolini was ruling Italy, and Japan was pursuing an aggressive foreign policy in Asia. These two developments, along with the economic collapse of 1937–1938, cracked open major fissures in the New Deal’s political foundations. Regular Americans, it seemed to many politicians, were becoming deeply troubled by Roosevelt and by his New Deal.

FDR thus embraced renewed federal spending in the spring of 1938 in order to address the economic collapse, but he was just as interested in addressing the growing political weakness of the New Deal. FDR’s efforts soon extended beyond increasing spending to focus on attempts to extend the reforms from his first term.

The Changing Shape of Reform during the Late New Deal

While New Dealers suffered political setbacks between 1937 and 1939, they still managed to accomplish important reforms during these years, particularly in housing and labor standards. In grappling with the problem of housing, New Dealers were following through on a commitment to the issue that dated back to FDR’s first year in office. FDR’s administration was not the first use the federal government to intervene in the real estate market. Herbert Hoover, by signing the Federal Home Loan Bank Act in 1932, had been the first president to create a way for the federal government to regulate mortgage lenders, providing a common pool of credit in an unsuccessful attempt to halt the collapse in the nation’s housing prices. In housing policy, we again see continuities present in the New Deal’s approach to reform.

In 1933 and 1934, New Dealers built on Hoover’s first steps. They created the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC), which entered into the private market to help Americans refinance the mortgage on their home, rescuing about 10 percent of all nonfarm owner-occupied dwellings from foreclosure. In 1933 New Dealers also created a Division of Public Housing, under the Public Works Administration, and passed the National Housing Act in 1934. Between 1933 and 1937, the PWA’s Housing Division started construction on fifty-eight developments, building about twenty-five thousand units at a cost of about $129 million. Although this spending was only a tiny percentage of total federal spending on public works projects, the PWA’s Housing Division marked an important departure from past practices – for the first time, the federal government was beginning to commit itself to the direct provision of housing for lower- and middle-income Americans.

In composing the National Housing Act of 1934, which created the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), FDR drew on input from longtime public housing reformers such as Catherine Bauer, as well as advice and counsel from advisors such as Frances Perkins, Harry Hopkins, and Rexford Tugwell. The FHA did not directly inject federal funds into the market; rather, it put forward regulations for the nation’s mortgage industry by throwing federal backing behind the thirty-year amortized mortgage. This debt instrument allowed new home owners to purchase a home by putting down a fraction (usually 10 percent) of the total price and borrow the remainder through a mortgage to be paid back to the lender in uniform payments spread over a thirty-year time span. By providing federal backing and working in conjunction with the HOLC, the FHA not only promoted home ownership, it also lowered the risk for firms engaged in the business of offering mortgages. These interventions into the private market were successful, creating a great deal of middle-class support for FDR and the New Deal. In their successes, though, these measures also limited support for the federal government to truly commit itself to an extensive program of public housing. Although the New Deal would experiment with different kinds of “model communities,” such as the one constructed at Greenbelt, Maryland, by the late 1930s it was still an open question as to whether or not the federal government would attempt to construct a more robust program of public housing that might serve the needs of poorer Americans.

Enter New York senator Robert Wagner. Wagner, a champion of the new urban liberalism, was a staunch supporter of FDR and the New Deal. During his time in office he had lent his name to a number of important pieces of reform legislation, not least the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (the “Wagner Act”), which placed labor’s right to bargain collectively with employers on firmer legal ground. In 1935, Wagner had first proposed legislation mandating a permanent and direct federal commitment to public housing. The measure failed to pass in 1935 and failed again in 1936. Yet, even in the face of a growing conservative coalition of Republicans and conservative Democrats, Wagner managed to steer his public housing measure into law in 1937.

The legislative deal-making involved in the passage of the 1937 United States Housing Act, which cleared the House 275 to 86 and the Senate 64 to 16, indicated the ability of New Dealers like Wagner to continue to accomplish important reforms despite increasing opposition. Public housing reformers, including Bauer and members of such organizations as the National Public Housing Conference and the Labor Housing Conference, joined forces with elements of the business community (particularly construction firms) and labor organizations (the building trades unions of the American Federation of Labor) to stress the appeal that a program of federal public housing would have to multiple constituencies. In this way, Wagner was able to overcome the opposition of private real estate interests, who clung to their argument that the market was perfectly able to provide a surplus of vacant housing units for all who wished to rent a dwelling.

When FDR signed the Housing Act into law, Catherine Bauer declared it a “radical piece of legislation.” While the measure marked the federal government’s formal commitment to the provision of low-cost housing – a radical step, by most any measure – the text of the Act was also marked by the growing political strength of the New Deal’s opponents, particularly conservative Southern Democrats. Earlier plans to incorporate nonprofit or cooperatively run public housing ventures were struck from the final bill, as was any provision for “demonstration,” or experimental, housing projects that would have been run directly by the federal government. Instead, the housing program would largely be implemented and run at the local level, by local housing authorities. Public housing projects built in the United States during the ensuing years would clearly demonstrate the impact of this decision. Public housing strengthened and ratified racial and class segregation across the urban landscape. Also, the construction of new units of public housing was linked, at the urging of private real estate interests, to the clearance of older slums. This provision, coupled with requirements that constructed housing not exceed the low limit of $5,000 for construction costs for each unit of family housing, profoundly limited the long-run impact achieved by New Deal reforms in the area of housing. But with the passage of the United States Housing Act in 1937, New Dealers such as Wagner served notice that reform was very much alive, if not quite as healthy as it had been in the past.

Reform in the field of labor relations followed a narrative similar to the story of housing reform: a radical step forward in federal regulation was limited by the growing strength of conservative opposition, particularly from Southern Democrats. In 1937 and 1938, New Dealers struggled to bring about passage of a law that would impose federal labor standards for wages and hours. At the urging of FDR, Labor Secretary Frances Perkins and New Deal lawyer Benjamin Cohen drafted a bill regulating wages and hours. Opponents of the measure, led in part by conservative Texas Democrat Martin Dies, a member of the House’s powerful Rules Committee, refused to let the measure come to the floor of the House for a vote in the spring of 1938.

Concerns about the viability of the bill were temporarily assuaged after Senate Democrat Claude Pepper scored a resounding victory in his Florida primary. Unlike many of his Southern colleagues, Pepper had regularly stressed his support for fair labor standards legislation in his campaigning. His victory was widely viewed as a very positive sign, and Democrats rushed to support fair labor standards. In the wake of Pepper’s victory, the chair of the House Labor Committee, New Jersey Democrat Mary Norton, presented a discharge petition for the legislation. It garnered the necessary 218 signatures from her colleagues in only two and a half hours, thus bringing the bill before the House. In the ensuing debate, Democrats managed to fend off fifty attempts to weaken the bill by amendment, passing it 314 to 97.

Southern and rural interests, however, managed to shape the final bill in the conference committee with the Senate. This coalition exempted many kinds of agricultural labor from coverage, as well as domestic service jobs, the overwhelming number of which were held by African-American women. Ultimately, the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 covered only about 20 percent of the American workforce. The final bill also gave many businesses breathing space by gradually phasing in the requirement to pay higher minimum wages. Faced with this opposition, the National Consumers’ League, led by general secretary Mary Dublin, managed to organize a tremendously effective lobbying campaign. That campaign to encourage the passage of the bill into law received support from the CIO, Labor’s Nonpartisan League, Sidney Hillman’s Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, and David Dubinsky’s International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union.

The passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act was an important milestone in the history of reform. For the first time, permanent federal regulation of maximum work hours and a federal minimum wage were required under law. This victory signaled to all the potential for the New Deal to continue to implement substantial reforms and regulate capitalism.

Many Southern businessmen and politicians opposed the law. The Act called for a minimum wage of only twenty-five cents an hour, which after seven years would rise to forty cents. Hours were capped at forty-four per week, and would drop to forty after three years. Eighty percent of the workforce was not covered by the law. Southern politicians and businesses opposed federal regulation of wages and hours, not only because it would be bad for Southern companies, but also because they perceived the danger that federal laws might pose to the existing state of race relations in the South. Congressman Dies, for example, declared that “under this measure what is prescribed for one race must be prescribed for the other, and you cannot prescribe the same wages for the black man as for the white man.” The intransigence of the South – combined with the growing political power of the coalition of Republicans and Southern Democrats – convinced FDR and his advisors that reforming the Democratic Party itself was a task of crucial importance.

The Failed Purge

In 1932, Roosevelt predicted the political future of the Democratic Party. “I’ll be in the White House for eight years,” FDR expected. “When those eight years are over, there’ll be a Progressive Party, it may not be Democratic, but it will be Progressive.” While FDR and the Democrats did extremely well at the ballot box in 1932, 1934, and 1936, these victories did not bring about a full-scale makeover of Roosevelt’s Party. Although the Democratic Party brought Northern ethnics, African-Americans, and working-class people into its base during these campaigns, the party continued to rely upon the established elements of its coalition, particularly conservative Southern whites. The nature of the party’s makeup – particularly the power that senior Southern Democrats wielded in Congress on important committees necessary for advancing legislation – was a constraint that Roosevelt suffered throughout his presidency.

On June 24, 1938, FDR addressed the nation over the radio in one of his fireside chats, with the aim of removing this constraint. Of the growing opposition to the New Deal in Congress, he declared, “Never in our lifetime has such a concerted campaign of defeatism been thrown at the heads of the President and Senators and Congressmen as in the case of this Seventy-fifth Congress.” Calling his opponents “Copperheads” – the term used to describe Northern Democrats who betrayed the North and supported the Confederacy during the Civil War – Roosevelt exhorted the American people to turn out and vote in summer primary elections and in November. “As head of the Democratic Party,” FDR explained, “charged with the responsibility of carrying out the definitely liberal declaration of principles set forth in the 1936 Democratic platform, I feel that I have every right to speak in those few instances where they may be a clear-cut issue between candidates for a Democratic nomination involving these principles, or involving a clear misuse of my name.”

Americans responded to FDR’s address with a range of reactions. One Ohio man sent this telegram to the White House:

AS A CITIZEN OF THE UNITED STATES I RESENT BEING CALLED A COPPERHEAD BY ONE WHOSE EGOTISM FAST APPROACHES MANIA AS WAS AGAIN EVIDENCED BY THE EXTENSIVE USE OF FIRST PERSON SINGULAR PRONOUNS HALF TRUTHS INCONSISTENCIES AND NAME CALLINGS IN YOUR FIRESIDE CHATTER LAST NIGHT.

Other citizens were more favorably disposed. A supporter of FDR from Raleigh, North Carolina, embraced Roosevelt’s call to remove conservative Democrats from office:

I have seen men claiming to be liberal in their views from the South who have brazenly and openly betrayed the people in congress in order to curry favor with Money Kings of the nation. Most of these men owe their election to you and in the coming campaign they will be on the political platforms throughout the South proclaiming in thunder tones their loyalty to you and liberalism. All they are interested in is their own reelection and as soon as they win they will again emulate the Dog who returned to his vomit.

The 1938 electoral cycle commanded substantial national attention. What might otherwise have been a comparatively uneventful series of midterm elections quickly became a referendum on the Democratic Party, the New Deal, and FDR himself. FDR, with the support and advice of New Dealers like Ickes, Hopkins, and Thomas Corcoran (informally known as the “elimination committee”), sought to expel conservative elements from the Democratic Party. Roosevelt’s aim was to intervene in electoral races where he thought he could unseat opponents of the New Deal, and thereby remake the Democratic Party into a more effective force for liberal reform. Domestic critics, prompted by the conduct of Joseph Stalin in Russia, quickly labeled this a party “purge.” In 1938, Roosevelt campaigned vigorously in several states against conservative Democratic candidates, most notably, in Kentucky, Georgia, South Carolina, Maryland, and New York. While each state’s campaign had its own character, the stakes were perhaps at their highest for FDR in Kentucky.

Kentucky’s contest matched the new Democratic Senate majority leader, Alben Barkley, against the state’s Democratic governor, Al “Happy” Chandler. Because of Barkley’s stature in the Senate – he had become majority leader in 1937, selected with FDR’s backing – many observers viewed his fate as a barometer of the New Deal’s fortunes. Would the people of Kentucky return Roosevelt’s handpicked majority leader to the Senate? Like political campaigns in other states, the Kentucky contest featured charges against each candidate of attempting to use public funds to build a political machine: in Barkley’s case, through the WPA, and in Chandler’s, with state highway funds. This particular aspect of the Kentucky race commanded nationwide attention after a series of newspaper stories written by a committed New Dealer, syndicated columnist Thomas Stokes, exposed the role of the WPA in the campaign. Stokes won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting, and his stories led to an extensive investigation of the WPA by both the Senate and the House.

Stokes was not the only person to propel the WPA into the spotlight. He was ably assisted in this task by WPA head Harry Hopkins. During the 1938 campaigns, Hopkins, while relaxing at the race track, made a particularly ill-timed remark to a reporter about the political philosophy of the New Deal: “We shall tax and tax, spend and spend, and elect and elect,” he reportedly declared when asked to define the New Deal. Hopkins’s statement was a striking expression of how the New Deal’s public works programs not only succeeded in generating infrastructure and providing employment, but also were effective politics.

Hopkins’s statement, along with the focus of the New Deal state on generating infrastructure and jobs, made a robust case for what is now derisively referred to as “tax and spend liberalism.” In his frankness, Hopkins inadvertently clarified one of the key reasons why New Deal liberalism was at once so effective and provoked so much conflict: through its public works programs, the New Deal had regularly used the taxing and spending functions of the state to promote government-sponsored economic development and employment. This combination proved an effective policy prescription for a nation in an economic depression, as well as smart politics for the Democratic Party.

In the wake of FDR’s failed purge, broad concern over the role of public works programs grew stronger. The New Deal featured the largest number of federal government employees in history who owed their jobs purely to patronage; that is, their positions were exempt from civil service requirements. Following the Kentucky primary and the concomitant government investigations, Congress passed the Hatch Act, which FDR reluctantly approved. This measure, intended to prevent “pernicious political activities,” curtailed the federal government’s control over the political use of public works projects at the state and local levels. The Hatch Act reflects several important and overlapping developments in the late New Deal: the growing strength of conservative opposition, the often blurry line between the “political” and the “economic” in the public works programs, and the long tradition of what one historian has termed the “uneasy state” of American attitudes toward a powerful and assertive federal government.

In June 1938, Democrat Carl Hatch of New Mexico rose on the floor of the Senate to put forward an amendment to a relief-and-recovery appropriation bill, proposing that the government forbid employees of New Deal relief programs from standing as candidates or “interfering” in any primary or general election. Hatch, a supporter of the New Deal, had firsthand experience with the issue of politics in relief. Over the previous year, New Mexico’s other senator, Dennis Chavez, was embroiled in a WPA scandal that eventually resulted in seventy-three people – including several of Chavez’s relatives – being indicted for conspiracy to use the WPA in state politics. Hatch’s desire to clean up New Mexican politics meshed with a broader desire to apply moral codes of conduct to public life.

Senate majority leader Alben Barkley of Kentucky made a fervent plea against this proposal. “We all know,” Barkley said, “that there is not a state in the Union in which the political organization which is in control of the state does not prostitute for its own political purposes the employment of men and women on the highway, and within the offices constructing and conducting the highways.” However, Barkley continued, “[W]e are proposing that anybody connected with a job under WPA or PWA, or CCC or the AAA . . . shall be tied with a rope to a tree so that he is helpless and cannot even speak, unless he can whisper in the ear of somebody what his convictions are, while all these others who draw pay out of the Treasury of the United States are free to roam at will and play the political game to their heart’s content.”

Barkley thought that, since state-level politicians had ready access to patronage through state highway offices, New Dealers could not afford to disarm unilaterally. Hatch’s amendment failed to win enough backers in three separate roll-call votes. Republicans, anti–New Deal Democrats, and longtime progressive Republicans such as George Norris and Robert La Follette, supported the amendment. New Dealers opposed it. Despite this defeat, most Republicans quickly perceived that the issue of “keeping politics out of relief” could prove to be a very good issue for the Republican Party.

Ohio representative Dudley A. White delivered over CBS radio a speech entitled “Pumping the Primaries.” White seized on the spending proposal put forth by FDR and his advisors as a solution to the “Roosevelt Recession.” With the beginning of the election season, White proclaimed:

A different type of visitor began to descend upon Mr. Roosevelt, visitors interested not in relief but in votes. First one at a time and then in groups the wily political henchmen of the world’s greatest vote getting machine sat down in the White House study, bit off the ends of their cigars, and told President Roosevelt that if the depression continued, New Deal voting strength would slip badly next November. At last the warm humanitarian heart of our Chief Executive was touched. “We cannot let this continue,” he cried, and sent for his brain trust.

Soon after, as White related, the administration called for government to spend where business would not. “Roosevelt and his advisors knew exactly what they were doing. They were not priming the business pump. They were PUMPING THE PRIMARIES.” White argued that federal dollars “were not intended to revive business – they were intended to revive New Deal majorities and to punish any man who was not subservient to White House dictators.” Referring to Barkley’s speech against the Hatch amendment, White railed, “Even the Democratic floor leader of the Senate now confesses to the perversion of Federal relief for political purposes.” Adding strength to the growing surge of indignation was the abrupt announcement from the WPA’s Washington, D.C., headquarters of large pay raises for unskilled WPA workers, especially in Kentucky and Oklahoma (both hotly contested states targeted by Roosevelt’s purge). Also adding to the indignation was a speech made by the WPA’s Aubrey Williams to the union of WPA workers, the Workers Alliance, urging them to vote to “keep our friends in power.”

While Barkley was easily reelected, the Senate committee in charge of investigating the relationship between politics and the public works programs issued a preliminary report stating that both Chandler and Barkley shared responsibility for a “deplorable situation,” which “should arouse the conscience of the country.” One Kentucky politician wrote to the Senate committee, praising its efforts: “When voters are purchased as slaves with public funds or taxpayers’ money out of Federal and state treasuries, and driven like dumb cattle to vote and perpetuate a political aristocracy, that is sapping the life blood of the Republic.” Worries about the corrupting influence of centralized power on the body politic are, of course, as old as the nation itself. For opponents of the New Deal, defining federal spending on public works programs as “corruption” constituted a broad characterization of the New Deal that could be deployed widely, either on the campaign trail or in drafting the Hatch Act.

Following the reversals suffered in the passage of the Hatch Act and in the 1938 midterm elections, where FDR spent his political capital freely but with little positive result, the conservative coalition in Congress emerged stronger than before. Southern and conservative Democrats survived FDR’s attempts to unseat them. Republicans, for their part, welcomed eighty-one new members to the House and eight to the Senate, strengthening their hand. New Dealers, however, did their best to press ahead with their program of reform in the face of this opposition. Roosevelt had won reelection in 1936, proclaiming that his generation of Americans faced a rendezvous with destiny. Two years later, though, it seemed as if the New Deal was close to becoming an exhausted political program.

Conclusion

The debate within New Deal circles over the Hatch Act went to the core of questions about the political significance and viability of the WPA specifically and the New Deal in general. This debate went beyond professional politicians. One Irish-American foreman on a Boston WPA project realized what was at stake when he called together the one hundred workers under his supervision at the close of a work day in 1940. “I want to warn ye fellers against political activity,” he said. “There is a bird named Hatch who comes from Texas [sic] and is a Member of Congress. While the other Congressmen were not looking he put through a law that makes it a crime for you or me to talk politics, attend political rallies, wear the button of any candidate or even mention the name of any candidate.” If you do any of these things, he warned them, “you not only lose your job but you may go to prison and I’m telling yer to watch out.” However, the foreman concluded, “Just one more word before dismissing you, if any of you birds come back to work Election Day without having voted for a lame man, well – it will be just too bad.”

That lame man – Franklin Roosevelt – would be reelected in 1940 to an unprecedented third term as president. FDR had suffered a number of serious political reversals during his second term, between his ill-advised attempt to remake the Supreme Court, the mistaken policy decisions that caused the “Roosevelt Recession,” and his failed effort to purge the Democratic Party of conservative opponents. Despite these reversals and mistakes, Roosevelt’s third (and eventual fourth) term in office, coupled with the outbreak of World War II, would give FDR and his allies an opportunity to remake the legacies of the New Deal for the American political system, economy, and society.

6 Legacies of the New Deal

A great number of factors produced the New Deal. In a proximate sense, of course, Franklin Roosevelt and his many advisors – the New Dealers – were the people who most directly shaped the specific nature of the federal government’s response to the Great Depression. These men and women were not “anticapitalist.” Rather, they aimed to repair the capitalist system and restore American confidence in the nation’s market economy. While at times unsure of the best tools to use for this job, the New Dealers – especially Roosevelt – nevertheless embraced their task with enormous energy. The legacies of what this energy achieved have continued to resonate in the years since the 1930s. During the 1940s, New Dealers led the United States into World War II, economically, socially, and militarily mobilizing the nation for war. In the process, FDR claimed an unprecedented third and fourth term in office as the nation’s president. While the war would reshape the New Deal, the New Deal also in turn shaped important aspects of how the war effort was prosecuted, both institutionally and ideologically. After the war, the international settlement crafted in the wake of global depression and war also owed much to the New Deal, as American reformers worked with representatives from other nations to construct international institutions that might better manage the global economy. Finally, in the longer run, the political economy built by the New Dealers proved to be a vital factor in stimulating the growth and prosperity experienced not only in the United States, but also in much of the world between 1940 and 1973.

While the New Deal was a multifaceted set of public policies that tried to address the longest and deepest economic upheaval of the twentieth century, it was also a political movement. Roosevelt and his allies in the Democratic Party strove to pull the nation out of the Great Depression, but in so doing they also wanted to remake the American political system.

While FDR and his band of New Dealers might be considered the people most directly responsible for the New Deal, as both an economic and a political project, other people played vital roles in shaping this episode in American reform and politics. Labor leaders such as John Lewis and Sidney Hillman pushed the federal government to more actively address the state of organized labor and the plight of working people. Eleanor Roosevelt, along with Democratic Party officials such as Molly Dewson, worked to carve out a public role for women in the New Deal. And A. Phillip Randolph, Walter White, Mary McCloud Bethune, and other African-American leaders pressed FDR to extend New Deal benefits to black citizens. The actions of American citizens also shaped the range of political possibilities available during the 1930s, whether they were voting, striking, marching, shopping, or staying at home.

Any attempt to assess the question of historical responsibility for the New Deal must address deeper roots and causes. We would be remiss if we did not spotlight the one person without whom the New Deal would not have been possible: Herbert Hoover. Without Hoover’s miserable, inadequate, and utterly insufficient record of economic stewardship over the many months between October 1929 and March 1933, two things would not have happened. First, the nation would not have learned that Hoover’s conservative approach to managing the economy was no longer a viable proposition, either as a political ideology or as an example of effective public policy. Second, Hoover’s achievement in so thoroughly discrediting his own economic policy, over such a sustained period of time, created a huge opportunity in American politics that FDR and the Democratic Party were able to exploit during the 1930s and for years afterward. When FDR declared in his 1933 inaugural address, “This Nation is asking for action, and action now,” his proclamation resonated enormously with an American public that had, for too long, suffered Hoover’s record of insufficient response.

To many ordinary Americans, the main achievement of Hoover’s philosophy of governance lay in its impressive ability to somehow turn ordinary unemployment into “mass unemployment,” as the number of people without jobs skyrocketed to around 30 percent of the non-farm workforce by the close of Hoover’s presidency. For their part, business executives responded to Hoover’s leadership during the Great Depression by voting in the marketplace with their company pocketbooks: between 1929 and 1933 private business investment in the American economy collapsed by about 87 percent. In short, without Hoover’s multi-year record of deep and wide failure in the face of tremendous economic calamity – masses of people thrown out of work, nearly 90 percent of business investment destroyed, and the nation’s gross domestic product collapsing by a factor of one-third – the New Deal, both as a reform movement and as a political undertaking, could not have been possible. It is not at all faint praise to observe that, despite a number of shortcomings and flaws, the New Deal was a truly a profound success simply because it avoided repeating the many failures of the Hoover Administration.

The New Deal and the World

The self-inflicted political reversals suffered by FDR and his administration during his second term – the Court-packing debacle, the “Roosevelt recession,” and the failed attempt to purge the Democratic party of its conservative elements – left the New Deal battered and bruised by 1939. Given these setbacks, how did Roosevelt win a third term as president in 1940? During 1938, FDR was becoming painfully aware that the prospects for continuing a robust program of domestic reform were dimming. While notable measures, such as the Housing Act of 1937 and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, made it through an increasingly conservative Congress and became law, other reforms faltered before daunting obstacles. In 1939, for example, the national health care bill championed by New York senator Robert Wagner failed to make it to Roosevelt’s desk, with FDR himself refraining from spending any political capital to support the measure.

While the possibilities for domestic reform began to narrow in the late 1930s, events on the world stage became dramatically more important. Since the early 1930s, fascist movements around the globe had been on the march. From 1936 to 1939, Spain was torn apart by civil war between fascists and Republicans. In Italy, Benito Mussolini (who had become prime minister in 1922) consolidated his power as Il Duce and launched an aggressive foreign policy, entering into a war with Ethiopia in 1935. Adolf Hitler became the German chancellor in 1933 and ruled as a totalitarian dictator. He began to rearm his nation in 1935 and in 1936 seized parts of the Rhineland and launched a four-year plan to prepare the German economy for war. In Asia, a militaristic Japan continued its policy of expansion, with an open war against China erupting in 1937.

FDR responded to these and other developments in October 1937 by warning Americans publicly of the dangers that “three bandit nations” – Italy, Germany, and Japan – posed to the rest of the world. FDR called for “peace-loving nations” to “make a concerted effort in opposition to those . . . creating a state of international anarchy and instability from which there is no escape through mere isolation or neutrality.” This “quarantine” speech – so called because FDR called for the international community to join together to quarantine the aggressive, belligerent parties in conflicts – marked the beginning of FDR’s reprioritization of foreign over domestic policy and the start of a more sustained attempt to remake American public opinion regarding the United States’ role in world affairs.

Roosevelt’s fresh focus on foreign affairs held important consequences for the domestic politics of reform. The political backlash that unfolded during FDR’s second term had constrained the boundaries of what was possible for the New Dealers to achieve at home. This new reality helped shape Roosevelt’s approach to foreign affairs in the late 1930s. If the United States was to be successful in containing fascism and militarism abroad, FDR had to find a way to deal with the growing strength of the coalition of conservative Republicans and conservative Democrats in Congress. Much of what Roosevelt attempted to accomplish between 1937 and the United States’s entry into World War II in December 1941 took the form of an elaborate and careful set of maneuvers: FDR had to work with a variety of partners in order to create the political openings that allowed him to shift American foreign policy. Roosevelt thus chose to avoid pressing for further domestic reforms as a sort of trade to secure for his foreign policy support from conservative southern Democratic politicians. By September 1939, when Germany invaded Poland and triggered the outbreak of World War II in Europe, one southern conservative recalled that FDR was “cultivating us in a very nice way.”

The approach and then outbreak of open war in Europe scrambled domestic American politics in several respects. At last, FDR was able to win enough support in Congress to revise the neutrality laws that had been passed between 1935 and 1937, which prohibited American loans and the sale of arms and ammunition to countries that were at war. Rather than openly press for a third term in office in 1940, FDR concentrated on preparing the United States for war while quietly opposing potential rivals for the Democratic nomination. Each dispatch of bad news from Europe underscored for most Americans that FDR was capably working to keep the nation safe, as well as making the implicit case that in such extraordinary times a third term as president – a dramatic departure from American political tradition – was essential.

Republicans, still groping for political traction following the drubbing of Hoover in 1932 and Landon in 1936, nominated a true dark horse as their candidate in 1940: Wendell Willkie, a man who had never held any kind of elected office. A corporate lawyer and businessman from Indiana, Willkie had supported Roosevelt in 1932 and in 1936. After 1937, however, Willkie opposed the New Deal, in no small part because the electrical utility company he ran, Commonwealth & Southern, had been put out of business by the TVA. A committed internationalist, Willkie’s appeal to the members of the Republican rank and file rested upon concerns that nominating a member of the party’s establishment, an isolationist senator like Robert Taft of Ohio or Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, would only guarantee the party yet another resounding defeat.

Willkie’s rhetoric and political positions clarified that he did not oppose the New Deal in its entirety. Rather, Willkie believed that some form of government intervention in the economy had a legitimate place in American politics and society. Despite his intense opposition to Willkie’s candidacy, Republican senator Charles McNary of Oregon accepted the vice-presidential slot on the Republican ticket. It is perhaps a measure of the unusual nature of Willkie’s candidacy – and of the 1940 presidential election – that Willkie had never met his running mate until they were both on the same presidential ticket. Willkie, despite his internationalist stance and belief in aiding the Allies against the Axis powers, was saddled with a Republican platform that proclaimed an explicit opposition to “involving this nation in a foreign war.”

FDR responded to these political developments by first hewing to his strategy of remaining “above politics.” Roosevelt reshuffled his cabinet, appointing two prominent Republicans to posts directly related to the nation’s military security. He named Henry Stimson secretary of war, and made Frank Knox, the Republican vice-presidential candidate in 1936 and the publisher of the anti-Roosevelt Chicago Daily News, secretary of the navy. At the Democratic Party’s convention, held at Chicago Stadium in July 1940, FDR leaned on the strong support of the city’s Democratic machine for some stagecraft. Roosevelt had Senator Alben Barkley inform the delegates that the president did not intend to run unless drafted by the convention. Barkley then announced that the assembly was free to vote for any candidate it desired. When Barkley at last mentioned Roosevelt by name, the Chicago Superintendent of Sewers, Thomas Garry, shouted into a microphone connected to the stadium speakers, “We want Roosevelt! The world wants Roosevelt!” This “voice from the sewers” was likely a bit of superfluous theater, but the party delegates responded with vigor, nominating FDR overwhelmingly on the first ballot. FDR accepted the nomination, speaking to the convention from Washington. He declared he had no ambition to hold a third term in office and would accept the nomination only because it was his duty to sacrifice for the nation. In such a time of international crisis, FDR indicated, the president did not “have the time or the inclination to engage in purely political debate.”

Roosevelt, of course, had done exactly just this in his quiet jockeying for the nomination. It took even more political wrangling for FDR to convince Democratic Party bosses to accept his preferred running mate, Henry Wallace, his liberal secretary of agriculture. Wallace, a popular idealist, would replace FDR’s running mate of 1932 and 1936, John Nance Garner. Garner, a conservative Democrat from Texas, had split from FDR and the New Deal in 1937, opposing federal intervention in the Flint sit-down strike, the Court-packing plan, and the growth of federal power more generally. To successfully place Wallace on the ticket, FDR had to threaten party bosses with his withdrawal as a presidential candidate, and he eventually dispatched Eleanor to Chicago to lobby on his behalf.

The 1940 presidential campaign proceeded to unfold in a most unorthodox fashion, with one candidate seeking an unprecedented third term in office and the other an unprecedented political wild card, and with both campaigning against the backdrop of the unfolding war in Europe. After the fall of France, all wondered if Britain would be able to survive an assault from Nazi Germany. Willkie’s charismatic and vigorous campaign emphasized his open support U.S. aid to Britain, his opposition to what he termed the inefficiencies of the New Deal, and to the dangers inherent in giving any president a third term in office. While organized labor, by and large, backed FDR, the charismatic head of the United Mine Workers, John L. Lewis, urged workers to throw their support to Willkie, stating that he thought “the election of President Roosevelt for a third term would be a national evil of the first magnitude. He no longer hears the cries of the people.”

Willkie’s vigorous campaign made a positive impression with Americans, and Roosevelt, in the closing stages of the race, was forced to abandon his nonpartisan posture and deliver a series of major campaign speeches. FDR told Americans who were worried by his institution of the military draft in September 1940 and by Willkie’s claims that FDR was planning to secretly send American troops to Europe, “Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars. They are going into training to form a force so strong that, by its very existence, it will keep the threat of war far away from our shores. The purpose of our defense is defense.” “That hypocritical son of a bitch,” Willkie exclaimed to his brother as they listened to the speech. “This is going to beat me.”

Willkie was right; it did. Willkie had at least performed better than Alf Landon had in 1936. In addition to repeating Landon’s victories in Maine and Vermont, in 1940 Willkie also won in Indiana, Michigan, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa, and Colorado. FDR won everywhere else. Roosevelt was reelected to a third term in office with 55 percent of the popular vote, taking the electoral college with 449 electoral votes to Willkie’s 82.

The New Deal and War

Roosevelt and the New Dealers faced great challenges following FDR’s reelection in 1940. Some liberals, concerned about the fate of reform, worried that FDR would abandon the agenda outlined by the New Deal during the 1930s. Other liberals hoped that the approach of war and Roosevelt’s third term might somehow permit the continuation and extension of the New Deal’s reform impulse. In his January 1941 State of the Union Address, FDR outlined what was at stake for the country, stating that “the immediate need is a swift and driving increase in our armament production. . . . The need of the moment is that our actions and our policy should be devoted primarily – almost exclusively – to meeting this foreign peril. For all our domestic problems are now a part of the great emergency.” That said, Roosevelt proceeded to link the nation’s goals abroad to the work begun by the New Deal at home. The United States, FDR declared, stood with free peoples around the globe: “Let us say to the democracies,” that “We Americans are vitally concerned in your defense of freedom. We are putting forth our energies, our resources and our organizing powers to give you the strength to regain and maintain a free world. We shall send you, in ever-increasing numbers, ships, planes, tanks, guns. This is our purpose and our pledge.” FDR connected this pledge with an analysis of what he called “the social and economic problems which are the root cause of the social revolution which is today a supreme factor in the world.” He upheld the traditional tenants of the nation in his defense of global intervention:

For there is nothing mysterious about the foundations of a healthy and strong democracy. The basic things expected by our people of their political and economic systems are simple. They are:

Equality of opportunity for youth and for others.

Jobs for those who can work.

Security for those who need it.

The ending of special privilege for the few.

The preservation of civil liberties for all.

The enjoyment of the fruits of scientific progress in a wider and constantly rising standard of living.

These are the simple, basic things that must never be lost sight of in the turmoil and unbelievable complexity of our modern world. The inner and abiding strength of our economic and political systems is dependent upon the degree to which they fulfill these expectations.

Indeed, all of humanity, Roosevelt argued, had the right to be free from social, religious, economic, and state oppression. These rights stemmed directly from the efforts undertaken by the New Deal to combat the Great Depression:

In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.

The first is freedom of speech and expression – everywhere in the world.

The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way – everywhere in the world.

The third is freedom from want – which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants – everywhere in the world.

The fourth is freedom from fear – which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor – anywhere in the world.

That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.

During the remainder of 1941, FDR and his administration set out to better secure the nation as the war in Europe spread. In March, Congress passed the Lend-Lease Bill (patriotically numbered House Resolution 1776), which permitted the United States to “sell, transfer title to, or otherwise dispose of” military supplies to other nations. Roosevelt, in December 1940, had built public support for the plan by describing it as fundamentally the same act as one person lending his garden hose to a fellow neighbor whose house was on fire. “What do I do in such a crisis?” FDR asked. “I don’t say . . . ‘Neighbor, my garden hose cost me $15; you have to pay me $15 for it’ . . . I don’t want $15. I want my garden hose back after the fire is over.” Over the life of the program, the United States would transfer about $50 billion in military equipment and goods to foreign nations, with the bulk ($30 billion) going to Britain, and the Soviet Union, China, and France benefitting as well. Well before the United States formally entered the war, then, the nation was becoming the “arsenal of democracy,” as FDR put it, to the Allied nations.

In addition to Lend-Lease, in August 1941 FDR met with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill off the coast of Newfoundland. After their meeting, the two leaders issued an eight-point statement, what journalists labeled the “Atlantic Charter.” In fewer than four hundred words, this document called for free trade, self-determination of peoples, and an international order that would allow “all men in all lands” to “live out their lives in freedom from fear and want,” echoing FDR’s “Four Freedoms” speech from the beginning of the year. The Atlantic Charter was less an attempt by FDR to “internationalize” the principles behind the New Deal than it was a vague declaration to give both Churchill and Roosevelt considerable latitude. For example, while FDR was committing the United States to the self-determination of peoples, the State Department was privately assuring the French government in exile that France would be permitted to retain their imperial hold on Southeast Asia after the war.

With the formal entry of the United States into World War II following the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the normal conventions and boundaries of American politics were further disrupted. “Some degree of censorship in wartime is essential,” Roosevelt declared, “and we are at war.” In 1940, FDR signed the Smith Act, which called for aliens visiting the United States on visas to register with the government. With war, wiretaps were increasingly used to monitor what the government deemed “subversive activities,” and alien visitors to the country were fingerprinted upon arrival. The expansion of an internally focused security state, one mobilized for war, would draw directly upon the bureaucratic capacities created by the New Deal.

During the 1930s, New Dealers had radically expanded the power of the federal government and had deployed it in new ways. These structural changes in the American state were not, however, matched by a corresponding revolution in the nation’s constitutional structure. As legal historians have noted, no constitutional amendments were passed to codify the New Deal’s reforms. Searching for a way to manage the rapidly growing federal government, New Dealers turned not to the task of amending the Constitution, but rather to arena of administration and management. Here, within seemingly endless stacks of organizational charts, budget tables, and memoranda, a fierce fight for the New Deal’s survival took place.

In 1939, the public construction functions of the federal government had been consolidated in a new organization, the Federal Works Agency (FWA). While New Dealers claimed this consolidation of agencies was “in the interests of economy and efficiency,” this justification demands to be placed in a broader context. Rather than quietly accept that a more conservative Congress meant the curtailment of public works projects, various New Dealers combined the emergency presented by the approach of war with their desire to use public works projects to reduce unemployment and develop the nation’s infrastructure.

These reformers justified public works projects as necessary wartime spending, providing a powerful rationale for spending money on programs that were becoming increasingly unpopular. In the name of wartime necessity, the public works programs produced substantial infrastructure throughout the nation, building hundreds of airports and housing for defense workers, and improving miles of roads, to name but a few of their endeavors. For the first time, public works programs even provided job training for the unemployed, a step that had long been opposed by organized labor. New Deal public works programs were altered from the make-work often associated with Harry Hopkins’s Works Progress Administration and were transerred instead to Harold Ickes’s Public Works Administration, which emphasized heavier construction and efficiency.

On the eve of World War II, the American military suffered from years of neglect. As a result, the American state that was constructed during wartime relied on the bureaucratic structures of the New Deal; public works programs provided state capacities essential to the preparedness effort. With wartime public works, the WPA increasingly discarded its primary method of construction – putting people to work in order to directly reduce unemployment – in favor of private contracting, highlighting timely production and willingness to simply get the job done.

New Dealers welcomed the support of the Army Chief of Staff, General George Marshall. Marshall, adept at making political and bureaucratic allies, took pains to provide the WPA with good press, as when he spoke in the “Symposium on National Defense” that was broadcast over NBC radio on October 29, 1940. Marshall, along with Acting Commissioner of the WPA Howard Hunter, Coordinator of National Defense Purchases Donald M. Nelson, economist Stuart Chase, and manufacturer Henry Dennison, discussed the role of the WPA in defending America. “In the great task of preparing for national defense,” Marshall proclaimed, “the Work Projects Administration . . . has proved itself to be an invaluable aid. Already in the field, it has been carrying out work for the Army and Navy for the last five years, and its services in this direction have been rapidly expanded.”

The WPA was busy building and repairing Army facilities such as rifle ranges, storage buildings, and barracks, as well as constructing and expanding airports. By July 1, 1940, Howard Hunter bragged, “the WPA has already done a half a billion dollars’ worth of work on primary national defense projects and an additional billion dollars’ worth on projects of secondary military importance.” Donald Nelson backed up Hunter’s boast, adding, “The work program has indeed been a good business proposition, paying dividends both in economic recovery and in social betterment.”

The WPA, Nelson claimed, could shift its workforce to defense tasks more quickly and efficiently than private firms and the labor market could re-allocate employees to such work. By 1940, about 20 percent of WPA projects were explicitly classified as “defense activities.” The War and Navy secretaries certified specific projects, including airports, access roads for military bases, national guard and ROTC facilities, and “strategic” highways in order to give them priority status, thus exempting them from WPA rules regarding wages, hours, and the use of relief labor. Roads and airports were two types of defense projects favored by the WPA because of their ability to put large numbers of unskilled workers to work quickly. WPA Chief Engineer Perry Fellows observed that the organization of the WPA, “which extends into almost every county in the nation, its flexibility, and its immediately available labor supply, adapt it particularly to do certain phases of this vital road building job.” Assistant Secretary of War Robert Patterson echoed Fellows’s point, noting that “Because the WPA is organized in almost every county in the nation, because of its experience and flexibility, it can execute almost every type of work in the preparedness program.” While defense road building accounted for about 36 percent of WPA employment on highway and other road projects, it was not always visible to the public as defense work, per se. Or, as Howard Hunter once put it, “we’ve been seeing WPA national defense work somewhat as one sees an iceberg. The part we have not seen is so much greater than the part we have seen.”

When Franklin Roosevelt at last called for the liquidation of the WPA in late 1942, he paid tribute to the agency’s ability to accomplish “almost immeasurable kinds and quantities of service.” The WPA was responsible for “reaching a creative hand into every county of the nation,” the President declared. Since 1935, the WPA had served as the central agency of the New Deal state, employing 8 million people, building public works projects across the nation, and providing work for a wide variety of unemployed Americans, including artists, writers, and musicians. What Roosevelt’s “honorable discharge” did not acknowledge was that the WPA rendered a particularly immeasurable kind of service after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

The wide-ranging role of New Deal public works programs during wartime was epitomized by the part the WPA played in carrying out the relocation and internment of Japanese Americans in the Western United States. During the Depression, New Dealers such as Harry Hopkins and Harold Ickes had built extensive bureaucracies for constructing public works and providing employment. During the war, this expertise and these bureaucracies were put to use in a way no one had foreseen back in the dark days of the early 1930s. Eager to justify the continued existence of a shrinking unemployment relief program in the face of growing private demand for workers, WPA administrators looked for ways to make other contributions to the domestic war effort.

Between March and November, 1942, the WPA, led by its assistant commissioner Rex L. Nicholson, organized and staffed the “assembly centers” and “relocation camps” built to house approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans. During these months, Nicholson and the WPA administered the “reception and induction” division of the newly created Wartime Civilian Control Administration (WCCA), spending more money on internment than any other civilian agency, and even slightly more than the Army itself. At the Army’s request, the WPA used its own procurement and disbursement systems to supply and maintain the internment camps. As War Relocation Authority officials noted, Nicholson had declared, in essence, “you formulate the policies and WPA will carry them out.”

In a nation where few people (outside of the Japanese Americans themselves) voiced opposition to internment as it was taking place, it should not be surprising to find that the people who ran the WPA were willing to participate in such an active fashion. They were variously motivated by a desire to shore up support for an agency confronted by growing political opposition, a xenophobic sense of patriotism, or a misguided sense that they could somehow “help” Japanese Americans. As relocation and internment got under way, Hopkins was aware of the WPA’s role in the process and apprised the president of its work. Although he had left his post as head of the WPA at the end of 1938 to become Commerce Secretary, Hopkins kept in contact with his many friends and associates in the agency, including its acting commissioner during the first months of 1942, Howard Hunter. The day after construction of the camp at Manzanar began, and about a week before the first Japanese-Americans arrived in the arid Owens Valley of California, Hopkins wrote to Roosevelt, praising Hunter’s work on internment. Hopkins assured the president that Hunter and the WPA were “handling all the building of those camps for the War Department for the Japanese evacuees on the West Coast” and “doing it with great promptness.” Hopkins suggested to Roosevelt that Hunter’s work merited a promotion, urging him to put Hunter in charge of the entire FWA. Although Army engineers and private contractors played the central role in the construction of the camps for the WCAA, Hopkins was correct in stating that the WPA played an important part in the internment and relocation effort.

Not only did the WPA play a large role in running the internment bureaucracy for the WCCA, it also was responsible for helping to supervise the preparation of fifteen assembly centers and staffing them. Japanese Americans were held in these assembly centers until the internment camps were ready to receive them. One of these WPA-run assembly centers, at Manzanar, was simply converted into one of ten internment camps, or “relocation centers,” as they were called. While the WCCA was superseded by the War Relocation Authority by the end of 1942, WPA staff remained in place to administer the camps.

As the internment process began, WPA officials in Southern California briefed Earl Minderman, director of the WPA’s division of information in Washington, D.C., on the specific accomplishments of the agency. “Ten days after the assignment was made,” reported the WPA’s Southern California state information officer to Minderman, “we opened the first [camp site] at Manzanar in Owens Valley under the management of Clayton L. Triggs, one of our regional men.” Henry Amory, the WPA administrator in charge of Southern California, became camp manager at the Santa Anita assembly center, a location the WPA referred to as “our baby.” “The rest of the staff,” the report continued, “both here and at Manzanar, have been drafted from WPA.” A third center at the Pomona Fairgrounds was projected to be ready within another ten days. It, too, was managed by a WPA official. Conditions at these assembly centers were terrible, as Stanford University history professor Yamato Ichihashi later testified. The Santa Anita center was “mentally and morally depressive.” “[T]housands are housed in stables which retain smells of animals. A stable which housed a horse now houses 5 to 6 humans. . . . There is no privacy of any kind. In short the general conditions are bad without any exaggeration; we are fast being converted into veritable Okies.” Conditions were so unsanitary that government bureaucrats were surprised there were not more outbreaks of illness. Despite the WPA’s attempts to claim they had created a livable environment, the testimony of Ichihashi, along with the eloquent recollections of many other “evacuees,” indicates how severely the WPA fell short of this goal.

Robert L. Brown, the reports officer and the assistant project director at Manzanar, recalled that Clayton Triggs, his boss, relied on what he had learned while working with the WPA. With the WPA, Triggs had run camps for workers doing road construction and learned first-hand what was involved in camp administration. After the war, Brown drew on his own experience working in the internment camps, taking a position with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration handling camps of refugees in Europe. “[A] lot of the people that came to Manzanar to start with,” Brown remembered of his fellow camp staffers, “were fellows that [Triggs] picked up from his WPA experience, and were people he knew.” Triggs, however, was able to come up with new variations on his WPA experience while running Manzanar. Triggs requested that Nicholson approve the installation of some of the most restrictive elements of the camp: barbed wire fencing, guard towers, and spotlights. Nicholson, at the request of Colonel Bendetsen, also ordered all camp administrators to post notices of Civilian Restrictive Order No. 1, erecting signs instructing evacuees that they were to remain inside the fences of the camp.

The WPA also lent its procurement and disbursement systems directly to the Army in order to supply the camps and conduct maintenance and repairs. The reliance of the Army on the WPA for such basic functions as these illustrates not only the breadth and capability of the WPA but also the reluctance of the military to undertake such tasks. Neglected during the isolationist climate of the interwar years, the Army declined to commit potentially large numbers of men and supplies to running such an open-ended program as internment. While the Army had worked with the Departments of Labor, the Interior, and Agriculture between 1933 and 1942 to administer the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), helping to run the CCC was different from administering internment. Most obviously, the unemployed had voluntarily enrolled in the CCC. Supervising Roosevelt’s “tree army” as it performed light forestry work was not the same task as keeping Japanese Americans confined behind barbed wire. Two or three Army officers supervised each CCC camp, consulting with the several of the camp enrollees on the running of the camps. The Army viewed this as a useful opportunity to provide on-the-ground command training for its officers. By 1942, however, the Army’s central priority was to win a global war, not to deploy its limited resources on an internment effort within the nation’s borders. Even if the Army had wanted to be more involved in internment, Attorney General Francis Biddle and Secretary of War Stimson told Roosevelt at the end of February 1942 that “the difficulties [of internment and relocation] were practical, i.e., the Army did not have enough men to evacuate or guard any very large number of Japanese at this time.” The strength of the New Deal state filled this void.

Lieutenant General DeWitt’s control over the internment bureaucracy stymied the efforts of WPA officials to make political capital out of their role in uprooting approximately 120,000 people and taking them away from their homes and businesses. One frustrated WPA administrator wrote, “the moving of these japs is one of the biggest tasks of its type ever attempted[;] we should get credit.” He complained, “A complete report on the extent of our participation . . . would enable us to write a good story for periodicals.” Even in recent newsreel footage, this official further grumbled, “the WPA is getting no credit for this work.”

The role of the WPA in Japanese American internment, viewed broadly, was a consequence of the reorganization and execution of New Deal public works programs under the twin goals of economy and efficiency. In the face of growing opposition from a conservative Congress, New Dealers had managed to maintain the increasingly controversial works programs during the late 1930s and early years of World War II, building housing, roads, and airports, and providing worker training. However, the WPA – the program that to many New Dealers epitomized the potential of the welfare state to level inequalities – ended up playing a key part in carrying out the largest forced relocation of people in United States history since Indian removal in the nineteenth century. This use of the capacities of the state to shape society casts serious doubts on the notion that World War II saw a weakened New Deal state that crumbled and gave way to a vigorous wartime regime. Rather, the wide-ranging role played by the public works programs in readying the United States for war indicates that this wartime state drew upon deep and vital roots in the state structures built by the New Deal. This reality illustrated the considerable strengths of New Deal liberalism while at the same time calling into question its social democratic potential.

During the war, federal spending priorities expanded in both scale and scope. If federal spending during the Great Depression focused on public works projects, during wartime it focused on defense and reached a staggering 40 percent of GDP. (In 1938, by contrast, federal spending was only 8 percent of GDP.) Public spending on such an enormous scale finally brought economic recovery within sight. Indeed, the economic boom brought on by mobilizing the American economy and putting it on a wartime footing served to deliver in full on the promise of the New Deal during the Depression: full employment (unemployment dropped to 3.1 percent in 1943, to 1.77 percent in 1944, and to 1.23 percent – a record low – in 1944), a higher standard of living for Americans, and a substantial increase in farm income. These were just three of the many achievements wrought by massive wartime spending. The income gap between the rich and poor, which had decreased during the Great Depression, narrowed even more dramatically during World War II: between 1941 and 1945, the poorest 40 percent of American families saw their incomes begin to turn upward. The passage of the Serviceman’s Readjustment Act – popularly known as the G. I. Bill – in 1944 guaranteed the nation’s veterans one year of unemployment payments following the end of their terms of service, along with access and funding for higher education, vocational training, and loans for buying homes and starting businesses.

While federal spending became a huge presence in the nation’s economy during wartime, relative to what it had been during the Great Depression, FDR’s approach to administration in both cases remained quite similar. To figure out how to best mobilize the nation for wartime production, Roosevelt and the New Dealers relied on a range of bureaucratic organizations, often with overlapping areas of responsibility, in an attempt to arrive at a pragmatic balance between centralized policy-making and decentralized decision-making. They used public authority to structure the private market. Pulling off this task was difficult, to put it mildly. As Henry Wallace joked, the task of a wartime administrator was like that of a juggler, where the challenge each man faced was “to keep all the balls in the air without losing his own.”

FDR set the tone for what would be required of the nation in May 1940, following the fall of France to Nazi Germany, when he declared that the United States would need to produce 50,000 military aircraft each year to adequately defend itself and supply allied nations. That was a tall order. Between 1919 and 1929, the nation had manufactured a total of just 13,500 such airplanes. Although critics scoffed at such an apparently unrealistic figure, Edward Stettinius later observed that, while such a huge number appeared “like an utterly impossible goal . . . it caught the imagination of Americans, who had always believed they could accomplish the impossible.” Indeed, in 1941 the nation produced 26,000 military aircraft; in 1942, 48,000; in 1943, 86,000; in 1944, 96,000; and in 1945, 50,000.

This production miracle was a product of the New Deal’s approach to problem solving, in this case using government authority to maximize the productive capacity of American labor and business. To produce military supplies and goods in sufficient volume, the federal government relied on the private marketplace, leaning particularly on the skills and capacities contained within large industrial corporations. Thirty percent of the $175 billion in defense-related contracts awarded between June 1940 and September 1944 went to just ten companies, including General Motors, Ford, United Aircraft, Bethlehem Steel, Chrysler, and General Electric. As a result, cities and regions like Detroit, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Bay Area became key sites in the arsenal of production, with the aircraft industry and shipbuilding the main areas of focus. The American West, in particular, benefitted from defense spending, with its growth skyrocketing during the war. By 1943, for example, the aircraft industry was responsible for 40 percent of the manufacturing jobs in Los Angeles, and the city trailed only Detroit in its productive output. The population of the entire state of California exploded during the war, growing by one-third, with people pouring into cities like San Francisco (which grew 29 percent) and San Diego (which grew by 46 percent).

Perhaps the most famous domestic undertaking during the war, the top-secret effort to build an atomic bomb, illustrates the widespread impact of large-scale federal investment and the ways the war effort capitalized on the foundations laid by the New Deal in the 1930s. The Manhattan Project relied directly upon the electricity generated by the TVA for its uranium enrichment process at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and it leveraged the New Deal’s investment in the nation’s infrastructure in many of its activities, both major and minor. For example, some of the scientists and their families at work in Los Alamos, New Mexico, were housed in buildings that had been originally constructed by the CCC at the nearby Bandelier National Monument. Henry Kaiser took his firm’s experience building dams for the PWA and put its logistical and engineering capacities to work assembling cargo ships for the war effort in record-setting fashion. The health care scheme that Kaiser created for his employees in the 1930s would be the forerunner of Kaiser-Permanente, today one of the largest health maintenance organizations (HMOs) in existence. Army engineer Brehon Somervell built on his experience running the WPA in New York City, where he supervised the building of such projects as LaGuardia Airport, when he was promoted to brigadier general and put in charge of the Quartermaster Corps. During the war, Somervell directed the construction of a variety of military installations, including the Pentagon.

The return of economic activity and the virtual elimination of unemployment during the war served to bring about two of the most important aims of the New Deal. As one reformer observed in 1943, in view of these wartime achievements, “The honest-minded liberal will admit that the common man is getting a better break than ever he did under the New Deal.” While business hiring and private investment returned with a vengeance, the wartime economy also held improved news for consumers and workers. The federal government’s Office of Price Administration marked the culmination of New Deal efforts to include consumers within the polity, serving to tamp down inflation and ration consumer goods. Organized labor benefitted during the war as well. Labor leaders took a “no strike” pledge in return for government and business agreeing to arbitration procedures that brought increased wages, benefits, and maintenance of membership clauses to labor agreements. Women poured into the work force, particularly in the aircraft industry. African-Americans embraced the “Double-V” campaign, arguing that victory abroad must go hand-in-hand with victory over racist oppression at home. Pressing for a fair share in the return of prosperity, A. Phillip Randolph and other leaders extracted FDR’s commitment to create a Fair Employment Practices Committee, in return calling off plans for a massive march on Washington to demand economic justice.

Aside from the desire to triumph militarily, it is difficult to say that there was a deeply shared “culture of unity” among the American people during World War II. The 1943 Detroit race riots, for example, indicate that the New Deal coalition of ethnic and minority voters rested on exceedingly fragile foundations.

Overall, while the tremendous improvement in the nation’s economy during the war was an asset for FDR. This was not necessarily the case for all Democrats. Republicans made further strides against the New Deal and the Democratic Party in the 1942 midterm elections, with the governorship of FDR’s home state, New York, going to the Republicans for the first time in 22 years with Thomas Dewey’s victory. George Norris, the longtime progressive Republican and staunch supporter of FDR and the New Deal, lost his Nebraska senate seat. In Congress, Democrats barely retained their hold on the House and suffered serious losses in the Senate.

Liberalism and FDR’s Fourth Term

As the 1944 presidential election approached, both Republicans and Democrats viewed the event with trepidation. Republicans, on the one hand, faced a task that had eluded them since 1928 – winning the presidency. Democrats, on the other, were still contemplating the reversals they had suffered in the 1942 midterms. For many in the Democratic Party, the defeats suffered by their gubernatorial and congressional candidates reinforced the value of having FDR running at the top of the ticket. For organized labor, the 1942 elections underscored the importance of effective political organization in order to defeat labor’s opponents and elect labor’s friends. The 1944 electoral cycle would thus witness organize labor’s creation of its own political organization, the “Political Action Committee,” headed by Amalgamated Clothing Workers Association leader Sidney Hillman.

By 1944, Roosevelt was sixty-two years old and in rapidly declining health. It was unclear if he would be able to complete a fourth term as president. FDR, according to a March 1944 physical examination, was afflicted with a combination of heart disease, high blood pressure, left ventricular cardiac failure, and bronchitis. No one, however, informed the president of his medical situation, and FDR never pressed for more information, choosing instead to rely on his personal doctor, who simply diagnosed FDR as suffering from a combination of flu, bronchitis, and exhaustion.

While Roosevelt’s personal health was not good, the vigor of the Allies was more encouraging. By summer 1944, most Allied policy makers had come to think that the Battle of Midway in 1942 had marked a turning point in the Pacific theater, and the D-Day invasion in June 1944 seemed to indicate that an Allied victory in Europe was more a matter of “when” than “if.” From a foreign policy perspective, then, many in Roosevelt’s administration were shifting their thinking from how to win the war to the question of how to best plan for the peace.

FDR’s state of the union address, given in January 1944, marked a rhetorical high point – and last gasp – for the fate of New Deal liberalism during the war. Roosevelt argued that collective security and individual freedom were not contradictions, but rather that each required the other. “It is our duty now to begin to lay the plans and determine the strategy for the winning of a lasting peace and the establishment of an American standard of living higher than ever before known,” FDR declared. Harkening back to his 1936 inaugural address, FDR urged, “We cannot be content, no matter how high that general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our people – whether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth – is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, and insecure.” To secure the United States, both at home and in the world, FDR reminded his audience that the rise of fascism in Germany during the Great Depression had brought about “a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. . . . People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.” Thus, Roosevelt proposed “a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all – regardless of station, race, or creed.” These economic rights included:

The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the Nation;

The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;

The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;

The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;

The right of every family to a decent home;

The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;

The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;

The right to a good education.

FDR concluded, “after this war is won we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of happiness and well-being,” noting that securing these rights for all American citizens would lay the foundations for securing “lasting peace in the world.”

This stirring rhetoric signaled a kind of last hurrah for the New Deal. As Roosevelt himself had pointed out in a 1943 press conference, the pressures of wartime had supplanted the pressures for further domestic reform. He observed that it was time for “Dr. Win-the-War” to replace “Dr. New Deal.” Or, as FDR had put it in 1942, remarking upon the need to avoid antitrust prosecutions of business because they might hinder the war effort, “The war effort must come first and everything else must wait.”

While FDR’s third term as president marked a dramatic departure from past practice, opposition to a potential fourth term in office was markedly less strident. In part this spoke to the nature of presidential politics during world war, and in part this was also an indication of how truly extraordinary Roosevelt’s candidacy for a third term had been. Once the American people had demonstrated their willingness to reelect him in 1940, the precedent for 1944 had been set. As one Democratic politico put it, “Well, there is a law against bigamy but no law against trigamy.” Roosevelt did have to make one significant concession to placate Democratic Party bosses: he had to drop his liberal vice president, Henry Wallace, from the ticket. With the endorsement of the Party establishment, FDR named a relatively undistinguished senator from Missouri, Harry Truman, as his running mate. Truman, perceived by many (not least, by party bosses) to be a product of the Missouri machine run by Tom Pendergast, had actually done a solid job in the Senate, particularly in chairing investigations into wartime procurement. Other Democratic Party constituencies consented to Truman’s appointment as FDR’s number two, most notably organized labor. This approval gave rise to one of the Republican talking points during the ensuing campaign, that Truman’s selection had been “cleared by Sidney,” referring to labor leader Sidney Hillman.

Republicans, for their part, were in 1944 still groping to define themselves as a coherent national party that might be able to present a compelling alternative to FDR and the Democrats. If in 1940 they had nominated an unknown who had never held public office in Wendell Willkie, in 1944 Republicans chose a popular and effective Republican governor, Thomas Dewey, who had in 1942 won the governorship in FDR’s home state of New York. California’s Earl Warren declined the vice-presidential role in Dewey’s campaign, with this position ultimately going to Governor John Bricker of Ohio.

The 1944 presidential campaign unfolded in the wake of the D-Day invasion and against the backdrop of the widely shared assumption that American victory was the likely outcome of the war. Roosevelt again refrained from open campaigning for reelection, attempting to remain “above politics.” Dewey, pledging Republican support for the war effort, charged that FDR and his administration were “tired, old men,” proposing that “competence in reconversion” to a peacetime economy after the war should replace the economic mismanagement of the New Dealers. The nation could not afford a repeat of the “Roosevelt depression which lasted for eight years, with more than 10,000,000 unemployed continuously from 1933 to 1940,” Dewey charged. Dewey conceived of his candidacy, as he put it, as “a campaign against an administration which was conceived in defeatism, which failed for eight straight years to restore our domestic economy, which has been the most wasteful, extravagant and incompetent in the history of the Nation and worst of all, one which has lost faith in itself and in the American people.”

With opinion polls showing Dewey with a slight lead in the closing stages of the campaign, FDR took to the hustings in order to mobilize supporters. Despite his failing health, Roosevelt was in good form, on one occasion riding through New York City in an open car amid a driving downpour and speaking vigorously. Roosevelt capitalized on the track record of the Democratic Party and the New Deal in combating the Great Depression, arguing, “I believe that we Americans will want the peace to be built by men who have shown foresight rather than hindsight.” Truman, for his part, played the role of aggressive running mate in his campaign appearances. Seizing on Dewey’s pessimistic 1940 response to Roosevelt’s call for the construction of 50,000 airplanes for the war – Dewey said that it would take four years to build that many – Truman responded. “Under a President like the Republican candidate,” Truman charged, “we would have set our sights too low, and you can imagine the effect on the war effort. No one can even estimate how many lives of our young men that would have meant. Do you want that kind of opposition in the prosecution of the war against Japan?”

Dewey fared better than Willkie, finishing with 99 electoral votes and twelve states. Roosevelt won the popular vote with 53 percent to Dewey’s 47 percent, taking 432 electoral votes. FDR particularly relied upon the support of the Democratic South, the nation’s big cities, industrial regions, and – markedly – the votes of the less well off. Indeed, the poorer the voter, the more likely he or she was to have voted for FDR. While Roosevelt and the Democrats fared well in the 1944 elections, thanks in no small part to the imperatives of national unity during wartime, this triumph was also very much a class-based victory.

Following the 1944 elections, FDR recognized the powerful role played by labor’s Political Action Committee in boosting the Democratic Party’s fortunes by replacing his conservative commerce secretary, Jesse Jones, with his former vice-president, Henry Wallace. Many observers at the time interpreted this change in personnel as a signal that FDR, once the war was over, would move to re-embrace the New Deal. While Roosevelt’s death from a cerebral hemorrhage, on April 12, 1945, foreclosed this possibility, much of the international settlement that followed the war reflected the legacies of the New Deal.

Brief statements of principal, such as the Atlantic Charter signed by FDR and Churchill in 1940, presented the potential for New Deal ideas about rights and economic security to influence other nations and other peoples. During the Great Depression, unregulated market capitalism had led to the collapse of the global economy. Within the United States, the New Deal made it clear to all that government would not watch such a situation unfold and do nothing. Instead, new institutions, a social safety net, and a commitment to saving capitalism created a new way of conceiving of the relationship between the government and the market. This way of thinking was exported to the international stage. In the wake of World War II, the United States and other nations created a range of institutions that were intended to make sure that economic collapse and world war would not happen again: the United Nations, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (commonly known as the World Bank), and the International Monetary Fund, for example, were influenced by what the New Deal had achieved domestically. During Truman’s presidency and the growing Cold War with the Soviet Union, international efforts such as the Marshall Plan and the reconstruction of Japan reflected not just the imperatives of anti-Communism, but also the legacies of the New Deal.

What the New Deal Wrought

During the depths of the Great Depression, the New Deal fashioned a series of revolutionary transformations. It created a new set of public policy tools for confronting the collapse of capitalism. In using these tools, reformers provided immediate relief while investing in long-term economic prosperity. The New Deal laid the foundations for a growing middle class to share in the benefits of home ownership and economic growth after World War II. Finally, the New Deal helped to transform the presidency and the role of the federal government in American society. All of these accomplishments hold significant implications for understanding the present-day United States. So too do the New Deal’s flaws. In many ways, both the New Deal’s accomplishments and shortcomings have shaped the trajectory of postwar history, including the nature of race relations, the ongoing debate over the proper role of government in regulating the market economy, and current questions about the long-term viability of entitlement programs such as social security.

The central idea underlying much of the New Deal’s public policy was that of state-sponsored economic development. In deploying this idea, New Dealers were, at once, empirical, flexible, inconsistent, and boldly experimental. They embraced precedent when it served their purposes and abandoned it when it did not. They brought new forms of social and economic expertise into the American state, as lawyers, economists, civil engineers, and social workers became part of the federal bureaucracy on a new scale. These professions would reshape American statecraft in the last half of the twentieth century.

Approximately two-thirds of the New Deal’s spending went toward building public works projects. The government invested these funds in all but three of the nation’s 3,071 counties. The scale and scope of this economic stimulus set the foundations a national market in the postwar years. The New Deal’s spending spurred dramatic advances in economic productivity, improving the nation’s transportation networks (building thousands of miles of roads and hundreds of airports), expanding domestic military bases and facilities, and drawing up the blueprints for a national highway system. This public investment also foreshadowed the rise of the Sun Belt. It was no accident that the developing West and, to a lesser extent, the underdeveloped South, welcomed the arrival of federal dollars in their regions. While investing for the future, the New Deal’s public works programs created millions of jobs – both direct employment at the construction site and indirect employment, thanks to the multiplier effect of public spending. In public works spending, the New Deal gave American politicians – both Democrats and Republicans – a policy tool that would be used to influence overseas development, from the onset of the Cold War, through the Vietnam War, and continuing to today. As one political scientist put it, “The TVA has proved to be the New Deal’s most exportable product.”

The New Deal saved capitalism. In addition to investing in the nation’s infrastructure in order to put people back to work, the New Deal stabilized the financial system by separating commercial and investment banking via the Glass-Steagall Act, creating the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) to protect the savings of ordinary Americans, and creating the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to bring order and transparency to the nation’s capital markets. Organized labor gained the right to bargain collectively through the Wagner Act, and, although limited initially, measures like the Social Security Act and the Fair Labor Standards Act were important steps taken by New Dealers to mitigate the impact of the Great Depression on working people. New Dealers attempted to address the plight of farmers, seeking to stabilize the market for cash crops through the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) and relieve suffering in rural America. Taken together, these various elements of the New Deal’s policy toolkit signaled a willingness to react to economic emergency, to experiment constantly, and to adjust to changing circumstances.

In so doing, the New Deal did more than succeed simply by not repeating the mistakes of Herbert Hoover’s administration. It succeeded in the long run as well by helping to build a strong middle-class society in the postwar United States, incorporating new ethnic groups as well as many elements of the nation’s working class. Organized labor, which was 7.5 percent of the workforce in 1930, grew to 18.3 percent by 1940 and hit 27.1 percent by 1945. Catholics and Jews began to become part of the main stream of the nation’s political, social, and cultural life. To be sure, segregationist and racist Southern whites (and racist Northern whites, for that matter) were key parts of the New Deal coalition, and FDR was loath to anger their powerful representatives in Congress. Nevertheless, the New Deal certainly provided more assistance than had Hoover to African-Americans suffering from the Great Depression. Many New Dealers attempted to address the state of black America during the 1930s, with Eleanor Roosevelt emerging as a prominent and eloquent advocate for racial justice. Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes desegregated the Interior Department and implemented employment quotas for African-Americans on public works projects. When the Daughters of the American Revolution denied the black contralto Marian Anderson the use of their concert hall, Ickes offered her the Lincoln Memorial as an alternative performing venue, as it was under the jurisdiction of the Interior Department. Anderson’s concert, on Easter Sunday, 1939, attracted national attention as millions of people listened over the radio. An early symbol of the fight for civil rights, Anderson would perform again at the Lincoln Memorial for the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

The New Deal began the work of expanding the nation’s middle class by making home ownership more affordable through the Home Owners Loan Corporation and Federal Housing Administration-backed mortgages. Millions of Americans who might only have been able to rent their dwellings were instead able to purchase property and begin to secure better prospects for themselves and their children. Americans, whether they identified themselves as workers, as consumers, or as taxpaying homeowners, benefited from what economist John Kenneth Galbraith called the “countervailing power” wielded by the New Deal. With concrete backing from the federal government, ordinary citizens received the support of the state in order to balance the power held by business in the economy.

While the New Deal successfully alleviated the impact of the Great Depression and helped build an enlarged middle-class after World War II, it also began the construction of what historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. labeled the “Imperial Presidency.” With the dramatic expansion of the federal government begun under the New Deal, Roosevelt and his advisors faced the challenge of managing this enlarged bureaucracy. With the creation of the Executive Office of the President in 1939, the federal government started to restructure and reorganize the enormous new number of agencies created to counter capitalism’s collapse. With this organizational template in place, new bodies and agencies would be placed under the supervision of the president and his cabinet officers during the remainder of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including the Council of Economic Advisors, the National Security Council, the Central Intelligence Agency, and most recently, the Department of Homeland Security.

As president, FDR had much more in common with his successors than with his predecessors in office. His many press conferences and sophisticated use of modern media (radio, in FDR’s case) to communicate directly with the public elicited outpourings of letters and support from Americans. When speaking on the radio, as Frances Perkins remembered, the President’s “head would nod and his hands would move in simple, natural, comfortable gestures. His face would smile and light up as though he were actually sitting on the front porch or in the parlor” with his listeners. Before Roosevelt, most people encountered the federal government only when they went into a post office. With FDR, Americans came to experience the federal government in many more aspects of their daily lives, particularly with the growth of the welfare state.

The welfare state built by the New Deal represented the federal government’s assumption of the power to intervene in the economy. Measures such as social security, unemployment insurance, and public works employment functioned to ameliorate the harsh effects of the Depression, helping to smooth out the business cycle. The 1946 Fair Employment Act, with its creation of the Council of Economic Advisors, enshrined into law the principle that the federal government could and should act vigorously to prevent future depressions. While the New Deal’s programs were intended to address the economic crisis of the 1930s, the intellectual scaffolding for these efforts was not widely recognized – or even developed – until after World War II, with the widespread adoption of Keynesian theory in managing modern economies. While the New Deal failed to end mass unemployment during the Great Depression, post–World War II economists across the political spectrum finally recognized that the stimulus provided by wartime mobilization and massive amounts of federal spending served to legitimize the effectiveness of government intervention in the economy.

As politicians, journalists, scholars, and concerned citizens attempt to make sense of the financial collapse of 2008 and the ensuing Great Recession experienced by nations around the globe, it seems that many have forgotten the achievements wrought by the New Deal to counter the Great Depression. Economic collapses are not “black swans,” birds so rare that they might as well not exist. Rather, as the Great Depression that began in 1929 and the Great Recession that began in 2008 demonstrate, economic collapses should be considered “white swans” – birds we have seen before. The performance of the federal government during the Great Depression and World War II, along with the development of the discipline of macroeconomics since the 1940s, has provided nations and their leaders today with an explicit, workable approach for responding to economic crises.

But the hard-won insights of political and economic history have been lost upon those who choose to ignore the past in order to advance their own ideological agendas. In recent years, a number of politicians have argued that federal spending actually has no impact whatsoever on the economy. The former governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, claims that public investment in infrastructure during an economic downturn “defies economy practices and principles that tell ya ‘you gotta quit digging that hole when you are in that financial hole.’” Former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele charges, “Not in the history of mankind has the government ever created a job. Small-business owners do, small enterprises do, not the government. When the government contract runs out, that job goes away.” “Americans might well rue the day when they trusted the federal government to spend the nation into prosperity,” asserts Jacob Hornberger, the president of the Future of Freedom Foundation. “It just isn’t going to happen.”

But it did happen during the Great Depression. With the exception of the 1937–1938 recession – when FDR followed conservative orthodoxy and cut public spending – every year of the New Deal witnessed increases in the nation’s GDP averaging between 8 (1933–1937) and 10 (1938–1939) percent per year, coupled with decreasing unemployment. As economist Christina Romer has judged, “These rates of growth are spectacular, even for an economy pulling out of a severe depression.” When FDR took office, unemployment as a percentage of the civilian labor force stood at 20.9 percent (as a percentage of the civilian private nonfarm labor force, unemployment had hit 30.02 percent). By 1937, four years of New Deal policies had cut unemployment in the civilian labor force in half, down to 9.18 percent. Unemployment among the civilian private nonfarm labor force had been cut by the New Deal by almost two-thirds, down to 13.25 percent. The economic stimulus provided by the renewed public spending associated with wartime mobilization drove unemployment down further, to historic lows. By 1944, eleven years after FDR’s first inauguration, unemployment in the civilian labor force was 1.23 percent, and only slightly higher – 1.69 percent – as a percentage of the civilian private nonfarm labor force. The per capita GDP of the United States grew at an average rate of 3 percent every year between 1940 and 1973. Thanks to the policies inaugurated by the New Deal, the United States began to recover from the disastrous economic mismanagement of Herbert Hoover and started an unprecedented run of economic growth. With the dramatic public investment associated with the New Deal and World War II, a generation of Americans witnessed the power of federal spending to bring about economic growth and virtually eliminate mass unemployment. With the regulations put in place by the New Deal, this same generation recognized the necessity of government to a functioning and thriving economy.

It is customary for historians, particularly those who wish to improve in some way the world their children will inherit, to optimistically hold forth about the ability of the past to inform and improve decision-making in the present. More recent events, however, serve mainly to confirm the tough-minded conclusion of a Russian medievalist: “History teaches nothing, but only punishes for not learning its lessons.” The wide gap between the robust historical legacies of the New Deal and the comparatively impoverished debates of our present moment stands to remind us that how we use our history matters a great deal. The unfolding story of the twenty-first century’s Great Recession underscores that for a “usable past” to exist, people must first choose to understand it.

Essay on Sources

As I wrote this book, I found myself reading (and rereading) a dauntingly vast historical literature that, along with my own archival research, informs my interpretation of the New Deal and Great Depression. I became increasingly (and, at times, painfully) aware of the enormous debt I owe to several generations of scholars. In this brief essay I hope to clarify the nature of this debt and provide readers who are interested in learning more with an overview of some of the important works in the field.

There is no shortage of excellent accounts of the New Deal and the Great Depression. The essential starting point remains William E. Leuchtenburg’s classic Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932–1940 (1963), which has shaped our understanding of the New Deal era since it first appeared in print. Leuchtenburg’s survey can be supplemented with a number of additional accounts, both older and more recent, including particularly Basil Rauch, The History of the New Deal, 1933–1938 (1944), Denis W. Brogan, The Era of Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Chronicle of the New Deal and Global War (1952), Arthur Schlesinger Jr., The Age of Roosevelt (3 vols., 1957–1960), Anthony J. Badger, The New Deal: The Depression Years, 1933–1940 (1989), Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle (eds.), The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order (1989), Roger Biles, A New Deal for the American People (1991), Jordan A. Schwarz, The New Dealers: Power Politics in the Age of Roosevelt (1994), David M. Kennedy, Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War (1999), George T. McJimsey, The Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (2000), Paul K. Conkin, The New Deal, 3rd ed. (2002), Alan Lawson, A Commonwealth of Hope: The New Deal Response to Crisis (2006), and Eric Rauchway’s elegant The Great Depression and the New Deal: A Very Short Introduction (2008).

Biographies of many of the New Deal’s principal actors can also be useful entry points for readers looking to deepen their knowledge of the 1930s and 1940s.

While the genre has its limitations – as Philip Guedalla once observed, “Biography is a very definite region bounded on the North by history, on the South by fiction, on the East by obituary, and on the West by tedium” – I have nevertheless found the following works useful: For FDR, see Frank Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt (4 vols., 1952–1973) and Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Rendezvous with Destiny (1990), James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox (1956) and Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom (1970), Patrick J. Maney, The Roosevelt Presence: The Life and Legacy of FDR (1998), Roy Jenkins, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (2003), and Alan Brinkley, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (2009). For Eleanor Roosevelt, see Blanche Wiesen Cook, Eleanor Roosevelt: A Life (2 vols., 1992–1999) as well as the sharp and perceptive study written by Allida M. Black, Casting Her Own Shadow: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Shaping of Postwar Liberalism (1997). Other useful biographies of major New Deal players include George T. McJimsey, Harry Hopkins: Ally of the Poor and Defender of Democracy (1987), T. H. Watkins, Righteous Pilgrim: The Life and Times of Harold L. Ickes (1990), William Lasser, Benjamin V. Cohen: Architect of the New Deal (2002), Daniel Scroop, Mr. Democrat: Jim Farley, the New Deal, and the Making of Modern American Politics (2006), and Kirstin Downey, The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life of Frances Perkins, FDR’s Secretary of Labor and his Moral Conscience (2009).

Readers interested in the primary sources should head straight to the published papers and memoirs of the New Dealers. These include Samuel Rosenman (ed.), The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt (13 vols., 1938–1950), James A. Farley, Behind the Ballots (1938), Raymond Moley, After Seven Years (1939) and The First New Deal (1957), Frances Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew (1946), Robert Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins (1948), Eleanor Roosevelt, This I Remember (1949), Harold L. Ickes, The Secret Diary of Harold Ickes (3 vols., 1953–1954), Rexford Tugwell, The Democratic Roosevelt (1957), and John Morton Blum, From the Morgenthau Diaries (3 vols., 1959–1967). Readers may consult FDR’s presidential papers online at www.presidency.ucsb.edu/.

In Chapter 1, I draw on the unemployment data compiled by the U.S. Bureau of the Census. See Susan B. Carter, et al. (eds.), Historical Statistics of the United States, Earliest Times to the Present, Millennial Edition (2006), series Ba475. For more on how unemployment was measured, see David R. Weir, “A Century of U.S. Unemployment, 1890–1990: Revised Estimates and Evidence for Stabilization,” Research in Economic History 14 (1992): 301–346. My discussion of the history of American reform before the New Deal relies upon Robert H. Weibe’s classic, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (1967), as well as Udo Sautter, Three Cheers for the Unemployed: Government and Unemployment before the New Deal (1991), Daniel T. Rogers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (1998), Elizabeth Sanders, Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State, 1988–1917 (1999), Andrew W. Cohen, The Racketeer’s Progress: Chicago and the Struggle for the Modern American Economy, 1900–1940 (2004), and Eric Rauchway, Blessed Among Nations: How the World Made America (2007).

For the origins of Progressive Era welfare schemes, see Mark H. Leff’s important article, “Consensus for Reform: The Mothers’ Pension Movement in the Progressive Era,” Social Service Review 47 (1973): 397–417, as well as Theda Skocpol’s study Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (1995). For the relationship between reform and women, start with the essays collected in Linda K. Kerber, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Kathryn Kish Sklar (eds.), U.S. History as Women’s History: New Feminist Essays (1995). On the mobilization for World War I, see Robert D. Cuff’s essential The War Industries Board: Business-Government Relations during World War I (1973), David M. Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society, twenty-fifth anniversary edition (2004), Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (1987), and Joseph A. McCartin, Labor’s Great War: The Struggle for Industrial Democracy and the Origins of Modern American Labor Relations (1997). For John Maynard Keynes’s analysis of the political economy forged at Versailles, see his The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1920), as well as Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes: Hopes Betrayed, 1883–1920, vol. 1, John Maynard Keynes (1983), and Skidelsky, Keynes: The Return of the Master (2010).

My discussion of the place of the 1920s in modern history is informed by Lynn Dumenil, The Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s (1995), Warren I. Susman, “Culture and Civilization: The Nineteen-Twenties,” in Susman (ed.), Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (1984), 105–121, David M. Kennedy, “Revisiting Frederick Lewis Allen’s Only Yesterday,” Reviews in American History 14 (June 1986): 309–318, Lawrence W. Levine, “Progress and Nostalgia: The Self Image of the Nineteen Twenties,” in Levine (ed.), The Unpredictable Past: Explorations in American Cultural History (1993), 189–205, and my essay, “The Strange History of the Decade: Modernity, Nostalgia, and the Perils of Periodization,” Journal of Social History 32 (Winter 1998): 263–285.

The scholarly debate over what triggered the Great Depression has been described as the holy grail of macroeconomics, for – much like the grail – complete understanding of the Great Depression’s causes recedes the closer one gets to it. Nevertheless, I have found the following works useful: John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash, 1929 (1954), Milton Friedman and Anna Jacobson Schwartz, A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960 (1963), Charles P. Kindleberger, The World in Depression, 1929–1939, fortieth anniversary ed. (2013), and Kindleberger and Robert Z. Aliber, Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises, fifth ed. (2005), Michael A. Bernstein, The Great Depression: Delayed Recovery and Economic Change in America, 1929–1939 (1989), Christina D. Romer, “The Great Crash and the Onset of the Great Depression,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 105 (1990): 597–624, and “What Ended the Great Depression?” Journal of Economic History 52 (1992): 757–784, Barry Eichengreen, Golden Fetters: The Gold Standard and the Great Depression, 1919–1939 (1992), Michael D. Bordo, Claudia Goldin, and Eugene N. White, eds., The Defining Moment: The Great Depression and the American Economy (1998), Ben S. Bernanke, Essays on the Great Depression (2000), Peter Temin, “The Great Depression,” in Stanley L. Engerman and Robert E. Gallman (eds.), The Cambridge Economic History of the United States, vol. 3, The Twentieth Century (2001), 301–328, Liaquat Ahamed, Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World (2009), Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff, This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly (2009), Nouriel Roubini and Stephen Mihm, Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance (2010), Alexander J. Field, A Great Leap Forward: 1930s Depression and U.S. Economic Growth (2011), and Douglas A. Irwin, Peddling Protectionism: Smoot-Hawley and the Great Depression (2011).

For the connection between capitalism and “creative destruction,” see Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, third ed. with an introduction by Thomas K. McCraw (2008), and Thomas K. McCraw, Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (2007). For historical measures of inequality in American society, see the work of Emmanuel Saez, especially his co-authored essay with Thomas Piketty, “Income and Wage Inequality in the United States, 1913–2002,” in A. B. Atkinson and Thomas Piketty (eds.), Top Incomes Over the Twentieth Century: A Contrast Between Continental European and English-Speaking Countries (2007), 141–225. On the crisis politics that shaped Herbert Hoover’s administration, see William E. Leuchtenburg, Herbert Hoover (2009) and Joan Hoff Wilson, Hebert Hoover: Forgotten Progressive (1975). My account of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt at the end of Chapter 1 draws on the historical and biographical studies mentioned above.

Chapter 2’s comparative discussion of the Great Depression draws on John A. Garraty, “The New Deal, National Socialism, and the Great Depression,” American Historical Review 78 (October 1973): 907–944, James Q. Whitman, “Of Corporatism, Fascism, and the First New Deal,” The American Journal of Comparative Law 39 (1991): 747–778, Alonzo Hamby, For the Survival of Democracy: Franklin Roosevelt and the World Crisis of the 1930s (2004), Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt’s America, Mussolini’s Italy, and Hitler’s Germany, 1933–1939 (2007), Kiran Klaus Patel, Soldiers of Labor: Labor Service in Nazi Germany and New Deal America, 1933–1945 (2010), Philip Nord, France’s New Deal: From the Thirties to the Postwar Era (2010), and Jeffrey Fear, “German Capitalism,” in Thomas K. McCraw (ed.), Creating Modern Capitalism: How Entrepreneurs, Companies, and Countries Triumphed in Three Industrial Revolutions (1995), 135–182.

For the New Deal as an expansion of state capacity, see Theda Skocpol and Kenneth Finegold, State and Party in America’s New Deal (1995). On the “interregnum of despair,” see Jordan A. Schwarz, The Interregnum of Despair: Hoover, Congress, and the Depression (1970). For the origins of FDR’s first administration, see, in addition to the general works discussed above, Otis L. Graham Jr., An Encore for Reform: The Old Progressives and the New Deal (1967), Elliot A. Rosen, Hoover, Roosevelt, and the Brains Trust: From Depression to New Deal (1977), Rosen, Roosevelt, the Great Depression, and the Economics of Recovery (2007), Betty Houchin Winfield, FDR and the News Media (1990), and Anthony J. Badger, FDR: The First Hundred Days (2009).

The various public polices and programs undertaken during the first years of the New Deal are treated in Daniel R. Fusfeld, The Economic Thought of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Origins of the New Deal (1956), Lloyd C. Gardner, Economic Aspects of New Deal Diplomacy (1964), Ellis Hawley, The New Deal and the Problem of Monopoly: A Study in Economic Ambivalence (1966, reissued in 1995), John A. Salmond, The Civilian Conservation Corps, 1933–1942: A New Deal Case Study (1967), Michael E. Parrish, Securities Regulation and the New Deal (1970), Joel Seligman, The Transformation of Wall Street: A History of the Securities and Exchange Commission and Modern Corporate Finance (1982), Thomas K. McCraw, Prophets of Regulation: Charles Francis Adams, Louis D. Brandeis, James M. Landis, Alfred E. Kahn (1984), Bonnie Fox Schwartz, The Civil Works Administration: The Business of Emergency Relief (1984), James Stuart Olson, Saving Capitalism: The Reconstruction Finance Corporation and the New Deal (1988), Colin Gordon, New Deals: Business, Labor, and Politics in America, 1920–1935 (1994), Patrick D. Reagan, Designing a New America: The Origins of New Deal Planning, 1890–1943 (1999), Landon R. Y. Storrs, Civilizing Capitalism: The National Consumers’ League, Women’s Activism, and Labor Standards in the New Deal Era (2000), Julian E. Zelizer, “The Forgotten Legacy of the New Deal: Fiscal Conservatism and the Roosevelt Administration, 1933–1938,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 30 (June 2000): 331–358, David A. Moss, When All Else Fails: Government as the Ultimate Risk Manager (2004), Meg Jacobs, Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (2005), Jason Scott Smith, Building New Deal Liberalism: The Political Economy of Public Works, 1933–1956 (2006), Robert D. Leigninger, Long-Range Public Investment: The Forgotten Legacy of the New Deal (2007), Sarah T. Phillips, This Land, This Nation: Conservation, Rural America, and the New Deal (2007), Neil M. Maher, Nature’s New Deal: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Roots of the American Environmental Movement (2008), Thomas A. Stapleford, The Cost of Living in America: A Political History of Economics Statistics, 1880–2000 (2009), Michael A. Perino, The Hellhound of Wall Street: How Ferdinand Pecora’s Investigation of the Great Crash Forever Changed American Finance (2010), and Michele Landis Dauber, The Sympathetic State: Disaster Relief and the Origins of the American Welfare State (2013). For the most important interpretation of the New Deal published since Leuchtenburg’s FDR and the New Deal, see Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (1995), and Michael K. Brown, Kenneth Finegold, David Plotke, and Alan Brinkley, “Forum: Alan Brinkley’s The End of Reform,” Studies in American Political Development 10 (1996): 405–425.

For relations between FDR and Congress, see Patrick J. Maney, “The Forgotten New Deal Congress, 1933–1945,” in Julian E. Zelizer, ed., The American Congress: The Building of Democracy (2004), 446–473. For conservatives during the 1930s, see Frederick Rudolph, “The American Liberty League, 1934–1940,” American Historical Review 56 (October 1950): 19–33, George Wolfskill, The Revolt of the Conservatives: A History of the American Liberty League, 1934–1940 (1962), Leo P. Ribuffo, The Old Christian Right: The Protestant Far Right from the Great Depression to the Cold War (1983), Gregory L. Schneider, The Conservative Century: From Reaction to Revolution (2009), Jennifer Burns, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (2009), and Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (2009).

On agriculture, see Theodore Saloutos and John Hicks, Agricultural Discontent in the Middle West, 1900–1939 (1951), Gilbert Fite, George N. Peek and the Fight for Farm Parity (1954), Paul K. Conkin, Tomorrow a New World: The New Deal Community Program (1959), Richard S. Kirkendall, Social Scientists and Farm Politics in the Age of Roosevelt (1966), Paul E. Mertz, New Deal Policy and Southern Rural Poverty (1978), Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (1979), Theodore Saloutos, The American Farmer and the New Deal (1982), David E. Hamilton, From New Day to New Deal: American Farm Policy from Hoover to Roosevelt, 1928–1933 (1991), Phillips, This Land, This Nation (2007), and Maher, Nature’s New Deal (2008).

For the labor activism of 1934, see Irving Bernstein, Turbulent Years: A History of the American Worker, 1933–1941 (1969), Bruce Nelson, Workers on the Waterfront: Seamen, Longshoremen, and Unionism in the 1930s (1988), Elizabeth Faue, Community of Suffering and Struggle: Women, Men, and the Labor Movement in Minneapolis, 1915–1945 (1991), Staughton Lynd (ed.), “We Are All Leaders”: The Alternative Unionism of the Early 1930s (1996), Janet Irons, Testing the New Deal: The General Textile Strike of 1934 in the American South (2000), Cecelia Bucki, Bridgeport’s Socialist New Deal, 1915–36 (2001), and an insightful and provocative essay by Melvyn Dubofsky, “Not So ‘Turbulent Years’: Another Look at the American 1930s,” in his Hard Work: The Making of Labor History (2000), 130–150.

Chapter 3’s discussion of the creation of the New Deal coalition draws on John M. Allswang, The New Deal and American Politics: A Study in Political Change (1978). Two useful biographical studies of FDR’s aide Harry Hopkins are McJimsey, Harry Hopkins: Ally of the Poor and Defender of Democracy (1987) and June Hopkins, Harry Hopkins: Sudden Hero, Brash Reformer (1999). For the approach taken by the Republican Party during the 1930s, see Clyde P. Weed, The Nemesis of Reform: The Republican Party during the New Deal (1994) as well as James T. Patterson’s classic study, Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal: The Growth of the Conservative Coalition in Congress, 1933–1939 (1967). See also the work on the American Liberty League, discussed above. For the charismatic appeal of FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt to the American public, see the discussion in Lawrence W. Levine and Cornelia R. Levine, The People and the President: America’s Conversation with FDR (2002).

My treatment of the roles played by Emile Hurja and James Farley in coordinating patronage for the Democratic Party relies on Melvin G. Holli, The Wizard of Washington: Emil Hurja, Franklin Roosevelt, and the Birth of Public Opinion Polling (2002) and Scroop, Mr. Democrat (2006), as well as on my own study, Building New Deal Liberalism (2006). For the roles played by women in building the Democratic Party, see Susan Ware, Beyond Suffrage: Women in the New Deal (1981) and Ware, Partner and I: Molly Dewson, Feminism, and New Deal Politics (1989), as well as Betty Sparks Huehls, Sue Shelton White: Lady Warrior (2002) and Martha H. Swain, Ellen S. Woodward: New Deal Advocate for Women (2005). African Americans formed a key element of the New Deal coalition. My interpretation of their role owes much to Nancy J. Weiss, Farewell to the Party of Lincoln: Black Politics in the Age of FDR (1983) and Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (2013), but see also the arguments advanced by Harvard Sitkoff, A New Deal for Blacks: The Emergence of Civil Rights as a National Issue: The Depression Decade, thirtieth anniversary ed. (2008) and Patricia Sullivan, Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era (2006). An important study of the relationship of the Communist Party to civil rights activists is Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression (1990).

My discussion of discontent with the New Deal on both the Left and the Right draws on a number of works, including T. Harry Williams, Huey Long (1969), Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression (1982), Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor, and How I Got Licked, with an introduction by James N. Gregory (1994 [1935]), Greg Mitchell, The Campaign of the Century (1992), June Benowitz, Days of Discontent: American Women and Right-Wing Politics, 1933–1945 (2002), and Edwin Amenta, When Movements Matter: The Townsend Plan and the Rise of Social Security (2006). For the Works Progress Administration, see my discussion in Smith, Building New Deal Liberalism (2006), as well as Donald S. Howard, The WPA and Federal Relief Policy (1943), Federal Works Agency, Final Report on the WPA Program, 1935–43 (1947), and Searle F. Charles, Minister of Relief: Harry Hopkins and the Depression (1963).

For more on the New Deal’s art and cultural projects, see Jane De Hart Mathews, The Federal Theater, 1935–1939: Plays, Relief, and Politics (1967), William F. McDonald, Federal Relief Administration and the Arts (1969), Jerry Mangione, The Dream and the Deal: The Federal Writers’ Project, 1935–1943 (1972), Karal Ann Marling, Wall to Wall America: A Cultural History of Post Office Murals in the Great Depression (1982), Barbara Melosh, Engendering Culture: Manhood and Womanhood in New Deal Public Art and Theater (1991), Bruce Bustard, A New Deal for the Arts (1997), and Linda Gordon, Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits (2010).

For further reading on social security, see Roy Lubove, The Struggle for Social Security, 1900–1935 (1968), Alice Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th-century America (2001), Kessler-Harris, “Designing Women and Old Fools: The Construction of the Social Security Amendments of 1939,” in Linda K. Kerber, et al. (eds.), U.S. History as Women’s History: New Feminist Essays (1995), 87–106, Edward D. Berkowitz, Mr. Social Security: The Life of Wilbur J. Cohen (1995), and Linda Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare, 1890–1935 (1998). For taxation, see especially Mark H. Leff, The Limits of Symbolic Reform: The New Deal and Taxation, 1933–1939 (1984), as well as David T. Beito, Taxpayers in Revolt: Tax Resistance during the Great Depression (1989), and W. Elliot Brownlee, Federal Taxation in America: A Short History (1996). My treatment of the 1936 presidential election relies upon the general works cited at the beginning of this essay, as well as on Donald R. McCoy, Landon of Kansas (1979).

In Chapter 4, I rely on a large body of literature that has studied the complicated cultural and social changes that took place during the Great Depression. For letters from the unemployed to FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt, see Robert S. McElvaine (ed.), Down and Out in the Great Depression: Letters from the Forgotten Man (1983), Robert Cohen (ed.), Dear Mrs. Roosevelt: Letters from Children of the Great Depression (2002), and Levine and Levine, The People and the President (2002). The classic collection of everyday accounts of the 1930s remains Studs Terkel, Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression (1970). For mass unemployment, see Sautter, Three Cheers for the Unemployed (1991) and Bernstein, Turbulent Years (1969) can be usefully supplemented with Richard J. Jensen, “The Causes and Cures of Unemployment in the Great Depression,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 19 (Spring 1989): 553–583.

For more on organized labor, in addition to Bernstein, see Milton Derber and Edwin Young (eds.), Labor and the New Deal (1957), Philip Taft, The AF of L: From the Death of Gompers to the Merger (1959), Christopher L. Tomlins, The State and the Unions: Labor Relations, Law, and the Organized Labor Movement in America, 1880–1960 (1985), Nelson Lichtenstein, Labor’s War at Home: The CIO in World War II (1987), Stanley Vittoz, New Deal Labor Policy and the American Industrial Economy (1987), Steven Fraser, Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor (1991), Nelson Lichtenstein, Walter Reuther: The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit (1995), and Robert Zieger, The CIO: 1935–1955 (1995).

On women in the work force, see Claudia Goldin, Understanding the Gender Gap: An Economic History of American Women (1990), as well as Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (1982), Nancy Rose, Workfare or Fair Work: Women, Welfare, and Government Work Programs (1995), Suzanne Mettler, Dividing Citizens: Gender and Federalism in New Deal Public Policy (1998), and Eileen Boris, “Labor’s Welfare State: Defining Workers, Constructing Citizens,” in Michael Grossberg and Christopher Tomlins (eds.), The Cambridge History of American Law, vol. 3 (2008), 319–358.

I have relied on several works for my discussion of Native Americans, including Donald L. Parman, The Navajos and the New Deal (1976), Kenneth R. Philp, John Collier’s Crusade for Indian Reform, 1920–1954 (1977), Graham D. Taylor, The New Deal and American Indian Tribalism: The Administration of the Indian Reorganization Act, 1934–45 (1980), and Lawrence C. Kelly, The Assault on Assimilation: John Collier and the Origins of Indian Policy Reform (1983).

For Mexican Americans during the Great Depression, see Vicki Ruiz, Cannery Workers, Cannery Lives: Mexican Women, Unionization, and the California Food Processing Industry, 1930–1950 (1987), Devra Weber, Dark Sweat, White Gold: California Farm Workers, Cotton, and the New Deal (1994), Zaragosa Vargas, Labor Rights are Civil Rights: Mexican-American Workers in Twentieth-Century America (2005), and Deborah Cohen, Braceros: Migrant Citizens and Transnational Subjects in the Postwar United States and Mexico (2011).

For African Americans, see, in addition to the works by Weiss, Sullivan, Sitkoff, and Kelley, above, James E. Goodman, Stories of Scottsboro (1994). For an account of the 1943 race riot in Detroit, see Thomas J. Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (1996). For more on the Flint sit-down strike, see Sidney Fine, Sit-Down: The General Motors Strike of 1936–1937 (1969), and David R. Farber, Sloan Rules: Alfred P. Sloan and the Triumph of General Motors (2002).

For cultural developments during the Great Depression, see William Stott, Documentary Expression and Thirties America (1973), and Richard H. Pells, Radical Visions and American Dreams: Culture and Social Thought in the Depression Years (1973). Pells’s book is dedicated to historian Warren Susman. Susman’s essays on 1930s cultural history, collected in Culture as History (1984), repay close reading. Other important treatments of cultural aspects of the period include Daniel Aaron, Writers on the Left: Episodes in American Literary Communism (1961), Arthur A. Ekirch Jr., Ideologies and Utopias: The Impact of the New Deal on American Thought (1969), Lawrence W. Levine’s essays on the 1930s in Levine, The Unpredictable Past (1993), Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture (1998), Lary May, The Big Tomorrow: Hollywood and the Politics of the American Way (2000), and Gordon, Dorothea Lange (2010). On the “whiteness” of 1930s culture, see James Gregory, American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California (1989), and Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in American History (2001). For the argument that workers were able to forge a “culture of unity” in the 1930s, see Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939, second ed. (2008). For works that call into question the extent of this “unity,” see Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis (1996), Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940–1960 (1983), and Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (2003). For a powerful account that addresses broader developments in American culture and society during World War II, see John W. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (1986).

Chapter 5 turns to examining the political backlash against the New Deal that developed and grew during FDR’s second term in office. The classic study of the growth of conservative opposition during the Great Depression is James T. Patterson, Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal (1967). The Court-packing debacle is authoritatively treated by a number of scholars. See especially Laura Kalman, “AHR Forum: The Constitution, the Supreme Court, and the New Deal,” American Historical Review 110 (October 2005): 1052–1081, as well as the contributions from Alan Brinkley, William E. Leuchtenburg, and G. Edward White in the same issue. Book-length treatments include William E. Leuchtenburg, The Supreme Court Reborn: The Constitutional Revolution in the Age of Roosevelt (1995), Barry Cushman, Rethinking the New Deal Court: The Structure of a Constitutional Revolution (1998), G. Edward White, The Constitution and the New Deal (2000), and Jeff Shesol, Supreme Power: Franklin Roosevelt vs. the Supreme Court (2010). For more on the “Roosevelt Recession,” see the relevant sections in Herbert Stein, The Fiscal Revolution in America (1969) as well as the accounts in Brinkley, End of Reform (1995) and Lawson, Commonwealth of Hope (2006). For Keynes’s attempt to intervene, see Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes: The Economist as Savior, 1920–1937, vol. 2, John Maynard Keynes (1992). For more on organized labor during the late 1930s, see Nelson Lichtenstein, The State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (2002).

To understand fully the changing shape of reform during the late New Deal, Alan Brinkley’s End of Reform, while essential, must be supplemented, as it does not treat the significant reforms in housing and labor policy that took place in the late 1930s. For housing, see Timothy L. McDonnell, The Wagner Housing Act: A Case Study of the Legislative Process (1957), Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (1985), and Gail Radford, Modern Housing for America: Policy Struggles in the New Deal Era (1996). For labor policy and the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act, see Storrs, Civilizing Capitalism (2000). Susan Dunn, Roosevelt’s Purge: How FDR Fought to Change the Democratic Party (2010), contains an authoritative discussion of the 1938 party “purge” attempted by FDR and his advisors. For discussion of the purge in Kentucky, see Smith, Building New Deal Liberalism (2006).

I draw on many of the works mentioned above for Chapter 6’s treatment of the legacies of the New Deal. For more on the links between the New Deal and World War II, see Richard Polenberg, War and Society: The United States, 1941–1945 (1972), David Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (2001), and James T. Sparrow, Warfare State: World War II Americans and the Age of Big Government (2011). For trenchant critiques of the recent attempt by Amity Shlaes to rehabilitate the presidency of Herbert Hoover, see Jonathan Chait, “Wasting Away in Hooverville,” The New Republic, vol. 240, issue 4 (March 18, 2009), 38–42, and Eric Rauchway, “New Deal Denialism,” Dissent 57 (Winter 2010): 68–72. For discussion of the performance of the U.S. economy during the Great Depression and World War II, see Thomas K. McCraw, “The New Deal and the Mixed Economy,” in Harvard Sitkoff, ed., Fifty Years Later: The New Deal Evaluated (1985). For the growing role of foreign affairs in American politics, see Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932–1945 (1979), as well as the relevant chapters of George C. Herring, From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations since 1776 (2008).

The coming of World War II scrambled domestic politics in the United States and created an opening that led to FDR’s candidacy for a third (and then fourth) term as president. A number of previously cited works cover the 1940 campaign. For more on Wendell Willkie and his unlikely candidacy for the presidency, see Donald Bruce Johnson, Wendell Willkie and the Republican Party (1960). Warren F. Kimball, The Juggler: Franklin Roosevelt as Wartime Statesman (1994) is a valuable account; Brogan, The Era of Franklin D. Roosevelt (1952), also attends to the political maneuvering of FDR and his opponents. See also John W. Jeffries, “The ‘New’ New Deal: FDR and American Liberalism, 1937–1945,” Political Science Quarterly 105 (Autumn 1990): 397–418. For more on lend lease, see Warren F. Kimball, The Most Unsordid Act: Lend-Lease, 1939–1941 (1969). For the argument that the Atlantic Charter constituted a “New Deal for the World,” see Kimball’s essay, “The Atlantic Charter: ‘With All Deliberate Speed,’” in Douglas Brinkley and David R. Facey-Crowther (eds.), The Atlantic Charter (1994), 83–114. Elizabeth Borgwardt has built on Kimball’s insight. See her ambitious A New Deal for the World: America’s Vision for Human Rights (2005). For an important corrective that locates the origins of the modern “human rights movement” not in the 1940s but in the 1970s, see Samuel Moyn’s brilliant The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (2010).

On the reorganization of the federal government, see Barry Dean Karl, Executive Reorganization and Reform in the New Deal: The Genesis of Administrative Management, 1900–1939 (1963) and Richard Polenberg, Reorganizing Roosevelt’s Government, 1936–1939 (1966). For the impact that executive reorganization had on the New Deal’s public works programs, see Smith, Building New Deal Liberalism (2006). For more on the work done by the WPA in coordinating the internment of Japanese-Americans on the West Coast, see Jason Scott Smith, “New Deal Public Works at War: The WPA and Japanese-American Internment,” Pacific Historical Review 72 (February 2003): 63–92.

Recent work on the G.I. Bill includes Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality (2005), Suzanne Mettler, Soldiers to Citizens: The G.I. Bill and the Making of the Greatest Generation (2005), Glenn C. Altschuler and Stuart M. Blumin, The GI Bill: A New Deal for Veterans (2009), and Kathleen Frydl, The GI Bill (2009). My discussion of wartime mobilization is informed by Thomas K. McCraw, American Business, 1920 to 2000: How it Worked, 2nd ed. (2009); see also John Morton Blum’s classic, V was for Victory: Politics and American Culture during World War II (1976). For my treatment of mobilization’s impact on the American West, I am grateful to my late colleague Ferenc Szasz for alerting me to Earl Pomeroy’s encyclopedic The American Far West in the Twentieth Century, edited by Richard W. Etulain (2008). The classic statement of the impact of federal spending on the West was made by Gerald D. Nash. See chapter 4 of his American West in the Twentieth Century: A Short History of an Urban Oasis (1973), The American West Transformed: The Impact of the Second World War (1985), and World War II and the West: Reshaping the Economy (1990). For an important critique of Nash, see Paul Rohde, “The Nash Thesis Revisited: An Economic Historian’s View,” Pacific Historical Review 63 (August 1994): 363–392.

On the development of the atomic bomb, see Ferenc Morton Szasz, The Day the Sun Rose Twice: The Story of the Trinity Site Nuclear Explosion, July 16, 1945 (1984) and Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986). For Henry Kaiser’s contracting work for the federal government during the New Deal and World War II, see Stephen B. Adams, Mr. Kaiser Goes to Washington: The Rise of a Government Entrepreneur (1997).

The extraordinary 1944 presidential election merits more scholarly attention. I have found particularly useful the relevant chapters of Richard Norton Smith, Thomas E. Dewey and His Times (1982), as well as Michael A. Davis, “Politics as Usual: Franklin Roosevelt, Thomas Dewey, and the Wartime Presidential campaign of 1944,” Ph.D. diss., University of Arkansas, 2005, and Michael Anderson, “The Presidential Election of 1944,” Ph.D. diss., University of Cincinnati, 1990. For the influence of the New Deal on the postwar settlement, see Robert A. Divine, Second Chance: The Triumph of Internationalism in America During World War II (1971), Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World (2005), Amy L. S. Staples, The Birth of Development: How the World Bank, Food and Agriculture Organization, and World Health Organization Changed the World, 1945–1965 (2006), Michele Alacevich, The Political Economy of the World Bank: The Early Years (2009), and Jason Scott Smith, “The Liberal Invention of the Multinational Corporation: David E. Lilienthal and Postwar Capitalism,” in Kim Phillips-Fein and Julian E. Zelizer (eds.), What’s Good for Business: Business and Politics Since World War II (2012).

My concluding discussion of the New Deal’s legacies and significance relies on many of the works previously discussed in this essay. For the transformation of the presidency under FDR, see Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The Imperial Presidency (new ed., 2004) and the essays in William E. Leuchtenburg, In the Shadow of FDR: From Harry Truman to Barack Obama, fourth ed. (2009). For changes in union membership over time, see Gerald Mayer, “Union Membership Trends in the United States,” Federal Publications, Paper 174 (2004), available online at digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/key_workplace/174. Readers should also make note of two important and perceptive works of history: Bruce Schulman, From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economic Development, and the Transformation of the South, 1933–1980 (1991) and Jordan A. Schwarz, The New Dealers (1994). There is no shortage of work discussing the connections of Barack Obama’s presidency to FDR’s experience during the Great Depression and World War II. Three accounts by historians, with a particular focus on Obama, are Thomas J. Sugrue, Not Even Past: Barack Obama and the Significance of Race (2010), Morton Keller, The Unbearable Heaviness of Governing: The Obama Administration in Historical Perspective (2010), and James Kloppenberg, Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition (2010). For a perspective from sociologists and political scientists, see Theda Skocpol and Lawrence R. Jacobs (eds.), Reaching for a New Deal: Ambitious Governance, Economic Meltdown, and Polarized Politics in Obama’s First Two Years (2011); for a journalistic account see Michael Grunwald, The New New Deal: The Hidden Story of Change in the Obama Era (2012).

Index

AAA. See Agricultural Adjustment Agency

AALL. See American Association for Labor Legislation

Addams, Jane 4, 7

AFL. See American Federation of Labor

African-Americans

anti-lynching legislation 109

civil rights for, during 1930s 109

Democratic Party support for 75

employment of, through WPA 86

gains from New Deal 108, 178

during Great Depression 75–76, 107–109

in labor unions 109

NAACP and 5

in New Deal administration 75

during 1930s 107–109

Republican Party support 74

under Social Security Act 91

unemployment of, during Great Depression 107–109

Agee, James 118–119

Agricultural Adjustment Act 59, 127

Agricultural Adjustment Agency (AAA) 46–47, 58–59

agricultural policies.

See also farming industry

under Agricultural Adjustment Act 57–58

under New Deal 57–60

agricultural/industrial prices, during Great Depression 21

American Association for Labor Legislation (AALL) 5, 48–49

American Federation of Labor (AFL) 4, 101–102

American Liberty League 64, 80

America’s Sixty Families (Lundberg) 134

Amory, Henry 164

Anderson, Marian 178

Anderson, Sherwood 118

anti-lynching legislation 109

Armstrong, Barbara 90

Baker, Jacob 85

Banking Act of 1933. See Glass-Steagall Act

banking systems, in U.S.

under Emergency Banking Relief Act 41

Federal Reserve System and 4

reform of 43

Barkley, Alben 143, 145–146, 154–155.

see also 1938 midterm elections

Barton, Bruce 13

Baruch, Bernard 7

Bauer, Catharine 139

Belgium, New Deal programs in 32

Bellow, Saul 86

Benton, Thomas Hart 115

Berle, Adolf 33

Bethune, Mary Mcleod 75, 150

Biddle, Francis 166

Bilbo, Theodore 75–76

Black Tuesday 14–16

Blum, Léon 31–32

Brandeis, Louis 44

Bricker, John 173

Brookings, Robert 7

Brown, Douglas 90

Brown, Robert L. 164–165

Brownlow, Louis 71

Cahill, Holger 87

capitalism 17–18

see also welfare capitalism

collapse of, during Great Depression 30–32

the Great Depression and 17–18

under New Deal 31, 177–178

during Progressive Era 5–6

Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (Schumpeter) 17–18

Capra, Frank 114–115

Carmichael, Stokely 109

Carnegie, Andrew 3

Catchings, Waddill 134–135

Catt, Carrie Chapman 7

CCC. See Civilian Conservation Corps

CES. See Committee on Economic Security

Chandler, Al “Happy,” 143–144

see also 1938 midterm elections

Chase, Stuart 161

Chavez, Dennis 145

Churchill, Winston 158–159

CIO. See Committee on Industrial Organization

civil rights, for African-Americans 109

Civil Works Administration (CWA) 48, 82

Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) 50, 82, 165

Clapper, Raymond 89

Clements, Robert 78

Cohen, Benjamin 140

Collier, John 106

Committee on Economic Security (CES) 89–90

Committee on Industrial Organization (CIO) 136

Constitution, U.S.

See under specific amendments

Coolidge, Calvin 12

Copland, Aaron 115

Copperheads 142

Corcoran, Thomas 143

cultural production, during the Great Depression

audience response to 119–123

in film 114–115, 119–120

during the Great Depression 113–119

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and 118–119

in literature 114, 115, 120

in music 115

in painting 115

racialized boundaries for 115

in radio 120

social radicalism in 121–123

Cuomo, Mario 34

Currie, Lauchlin 134

Cutting, Bronson 81

CWA. See Civil Works Administration

Dawes Act 106–107

defense spending, during World War II 168–169

Delano, Frederick 51

Democratic Party

African-American political support for 75

Copperheads in 142

internal conflict within 142–148

New Deal and 39–40

during 1934 midterm elections 66

Women’s Division of 73–74

Dennison, Henry 161

Dewey, Thomas 170, 173

see also 1944 presidential election

Dewson, Molly 150

Dies, Martin 87, 140

Dilling, Elizabeth 81–82

Dos Passos, John 117–118

Douglas, Lewis 50

Douglass, Frederick 74

du Maurier, Daphne 120

Dubinsky, David 102, 141

Dublin, Mary 141

DuBois, W. E. B. 5

Eccles, Marriner 133, 134–135

The Economic Consequences of the Peace (Keynes) 8–9

economic recession, under Roosevelt, F. D. 132–137

Economy Act 42–43

Eighteenth Amendment, U.S. Constitution 12

Ellison, Ralph 86

Ely, Richard T. 5

Emergency Banking Relief Act 41

Emergency Relief and Construction Act (ERCA) 49

Emergency Relief Appropriation (ERA) Act 84, 85–86

employment

of African-Americans 86

under Fair Labor Standards Act 141

reform of labor relations 140

of white males, during Great Depression 105–106

of women 86, 104–105

through WPA 53, 83

Employment Stabilization Act 51

ERA Act. See Emergency Relief Appropriation Act

ERCA. See Emergency Relief and Construction Act

Evans, Walker 118–119

Fair Employment Act 180

Fair Labor Standards Act 141, 152

Farley, James 39, 61, 62, 69, 96, 130

farming industry

AAA and 46–47, 58–59

under Agricultural Adjustment Act 57–58

during the Great Depression 22

New Deal policies for 57–60

real estate land transfers, during the Great Depression 21

under Social Security Act 91

Faulkner, William 54

Federal Economy Act 104–105

Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) 48, 82, 83

Federal Home Loan Bank Act 137

Federal Housing Administration (FHA) 138

Federal Insurance Contribution Act (FICA) 90

Federal Reserve System 4, 41

Federal Trade Commission (FTC) 43–44

Federal Works Agency (FWA) 159–160

Fellows, Perry 161

FERA. See Federal Emergency Relief Administration

FHA. See Federal Housing Administration

FICA. See Federal Insurance Contribution Act

Filene, Edward 40

film, during the Great Depression 114–115, 119–120

fireside chats, of Roosevelt, F. D. 42

Fisher, Irving 16

Fitzgerald, F. Scott 13

Flanagan, Hallie 87

Fleming, Philip 70

Fletcher, Henry 65

forgotten man, as theme for Franklin, F. D. 113–114

Foster, William 134–135

France, New Deal programs in 31–32

Frank, Jerome 134

Frankfurter, Felix 43–44, 70–71

FTC. See Federal Trade Commission

FWA. See Federal Works Agency

Galbraith, John Kenneth 16, 51, 178–179

Garner, John Nance 35, 155

Garry, Thomas 155

Gayer, Arthur 51

Geddes, Eric 8

The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (Keynes) 134

George, David LLoyd 32

Germany, after Great War 9

see also Hitler, Adolf; Nazi Party

Germany, during the Great Depression 31

G.I. Bill. See Serviceman’s Readjustment Act

Giannini, A. P. 40

Gill, Corrington 85

Glass, Carter 43, 81

Glass-Steagall Act 43

globalization, of U.S. industry 3

after Great War 8

labor strikes as result of 3–4

under Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act 56

Gompers, Samuel 5, 101–102

see also American Federation of Labor

Gone with the Wind (Mitchell) 120

Good-Bye, Mr. Chips (Hilton) 120

The Grapes of Wrath (Steinbeck) 59, 110, 114, 116, 117

Great Britain 31–32

the Great Depression.

See also cultural production, during the Great Depression; Hoover, Herbert; Roosevelt, Franklin D.

African-Americans during 75–76, 107–109

Black Tuesday and 14–16

capitalism during 17–18

collapse of capitalism during 30–32

corporations during 39–40

crisis politics during, from 1929–1933 23–29

cultural production during 113–119

early days of 14–18

economic causes of 14–16

economic confidence during 18–19

farming industry during 22

Federal Reserve and 16

female employment during 104–105

Germany during 31

global effects of 18–23

Great Britain, during 17, 31–32

human costs of 19–22

interregnum of despair during 33–37

Italy during 31

labor strikes during 59–60, 110–112

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and 118–119

Mexican-Americans during 107

Native Americans during 106–107

New Deal and 2

real estate land transfers during, for farms 21

social impact of 18

social upheaval as result of 109–112

unemployment rates during 1–2, 104–109

U.S. economic recovery during 16–18, 44–48

white male employment during 105–106

wholesale agricultural/industrial prices during 21

Great War (World War I)

expansion of government during 7

Germany after, hyperinflation as result of 9

global economic crises as result of 17

globalization of world economy after 8

progressive movements during 7–8

Treaty of Versailles after 8–9

U.S. involvement in 7–8

WIB 7

Green, William 102

Grey, Zane 13

Grofé, Ferde 115

Guffey, Joseph 65

Gulick, Luther 90

Hamer, Fannie Lou 109

Harding, Warren 12

Harrington, Francis C. 85

Hatch, Carl 145

Hatch Act 145–146

Hemingway, Ernest 13

Henderson, Leon 134

Henry Street Settlement 5

Hillman, Sidney 102, 141, 171, 173

Hilton, James 120

Hitler, Adolf 9, 31, 136, 152

HOLC. See Home Owners Loan Corporation

Holmes, Oliver Wendell 26

Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) 137–138

Hoover, Herbert

criticism of New Deal 65

economic concessions by 25–26

economic policy of 24

election of 24

Federal Home Loan Bank Act under 137

interregnum of despair and, during last days of presidency 33–37

leadership qualities of, during Great Depression 22–23

RFC under 41, 49

Roosevelt, F., political endorsement of 23

unemployment under 24–25

voter dissatisfaction with 30

Hoover Dam 49

Hoovervilles 25

Hopkins, Harry 48, 50, 55, 65, 138, 144

as anti-business 2

CWA and 48, 82

FERA and 83

opposition to Treasury Department 133–134

Hornberger, Jacob 181

Housing Act of 1937 152

Howe, Louis 28, 39, 67

Hughes, Charles Evans 126

Hull, Cordell 56

Hull House 4

Hunter, Howard 160, 161, 162, 163

Hurja, Emil 68–71

see also Public Works Administration

Hutcheson, Bill 103

I, Candidate for Governor, and How I Got Licked (Sinclair) 78

Ichihashi, Yamato 164

Ickes, Harold 38, 50, 82, 160, 178

see also Public Works Administration; Works Progress Administration

Imperial Presidency, of Roosevelt, F. D. 179

income taxation

as class tax 92

under New Deal 92–94

under Revenue Act of 1935 92, 93–94

Sixteenth Amendment and 4

Indian Reorganization Act 106

interregnum of despair, during the Great Depression 33–37

It Can’t Happen Here (Lewis) 114

Italy, during the Great Depression 31

Jackson, Robert 134

Japanese-Americans, internment of during World War II 162–167

Johnson, Genora 111

Johnson, Hiram 64, 81

Johnson, Hugh 50

Jones, Jesse 175

Jones, Richard Lloyd 94

The Jungle (Sinclair) 77

Kaiser, Henry 169

Kennedy, David 13–14

Kerr, Florence 85

Keynes, John Maynard 56, 134

New Deal influenced by 96–97

as supporter of Roosevelt, F. D. 135

Treaty of Versailles and, on long-term effects of 31

Knox, Frank 154

La Follette, Robert, Jr. 38, 64, 81, 146

labor strikes

globalization of U.S. industry and 3–4

during the Great Depression 59–60, 110–112

Memorial Day Massacre and 112

during 1920s 12

labor unions 101–104

AALL 5, 48–49

AFL 4, 101–102

African-Americans in 109

CIO 136

under Fair Labor Standards Act 141

during Progressive Era 5

and Roosevelt, F. D. 39

UAW 136

women in 103–104

Landis, James M. 43–44

Land-Lease Bill 158

Landon, Alfred “Alf,” 156

Latimer, Murray 90

Le Sueur, Meridel 117

League of Nations 9

Leff, Mark 92

Leffingwell, Russell 40

Lehman, Herbert 130

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Agee and Evans) 118–119

Lewis, David 38

Lewis, John 102, 155–156

Lewis, Sinclair 114

Lippmann, Walter 10–11

literature, during the Great Depression 114, 115, 120

Long, Huey 77, 79

Lorentz, Pare 121

Lubin, Isador 134

Lundberg, Ferdinand 134

MacDonald, James Ramsay 31

Mallery, Otto T. 51

The Man Nobody Knows (Barton) 13

Manhattan Project 169

March of Dimes 28

Marshall, George 160

McCormick, Robert 80

McIntyre, Marvin 73

McNary, Charles 154

Means, Gardiner 33

Memorial Day Massacre 112

Mencken, H. L. 13

Mercer, Lucy 27

Merriam, Charles 51

Mexican-Americans, during the Great Depression 107

Minderman, Earl 164

Mitchell, Margaret 120

Mitchell, Wesley Clair 51

The Modern Corporation and Private Property (Berle and Means) 33

Moley, Raymond 33

Morgan, J. C. 107

Morgenthau, Henry 133

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington 114–115

Murphy, Frank 111

music, during the Great Depression 115

Mussolini, Benito 31, 136, 152

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) 5

National Association of Manufacturers 80

National Consumers’ League 141

National Housing Act 137, 138

National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) 45

National Industrial Recovery Board 47

National Labor Relations Act 72–73, 138–139

National Negro Committee 5

National Recovery Administration (NRA) 45–48

Native Americans, during the Great Depression 106–107

Nazi Party 31

Nelson, Donald 160–161

New Deal.

See also banking systems, in U.S.; National Recovery Administration; Public Works Administration; Social Security Act; specific acts

AAA 46–47, 58–59

African-American gains from 108, 178

African-Americans in administration 75

agricultural policies 57–60

American character of 65–66

as anti-business 2

in Belgium 32

capitalism under 31, 177–178

coalition 63, 66–76

conservative opponents of 79–82

economic recession as result of 132–137

expansion of middle-class under 178–179

as fascist 96

in France 31–32

gains for women under 73–74

in Great Britain 32

the Great Depression and 2

Hatch Act and 145–146

Hoover criticism of 65

income taxation under 92–94

internal conflict within Democratic Party from 142–148

international interest in 32

international legacy of 151–156

during interregnum of despair 33–34

Keynes as influence on 96–97

Landon opposition to 95, 96

later years of 137–141

leftist opponents of 77–79

long-term legacy of 176–182

after 1934 midterm elections 67–68

NIRA 45

political backlash against 125–126

presentation to American public 41–42

pressure from Democratic Party 39–40

Progressive Era and, as historical context for 6

public opposition to 76–82

reform of stock markets under 43–44

reformers’ response to 40

Republican opposition to 80–81

Republican Party response to 64

as state building 31–32

welfare state under 180

during World War II 156–170

The New Republic 29

Nicholson, Rex L. 162–163

1920s 10–14

Black Tuesday 14–16

Coolidge during 12

economic boom during 12–13

as Jazz Age 13–14

labor strikes during 12

Lippmann on 10–11

literature during 13

Republican policies during 12

1930s.

See also the Great Depression; labor unions; New Deal; Roosevelt, Eleanor; Roosevelt, Franklin D.

African-Americans during 107–109

cultural production during 113–119

labor strikes during 110–112

mass unemployment as shared cultural experience 100–101, 104–109

security issues during 101

social upheaval during 109–112

unemployment during 104–109

1934 midterm elections 63–66

Democratic wins during 66

New Deal programs bolstered by 67–68

Republican Party during 64

1936 presidential election 94–98

campaign of Landon during 94–97

campaign of Roosevelt, F. D. 63, 97–98

inaugural address of Roosevelt, F. D. 124–125

1938 midterm elections 143–148

1940 presidential election 153–154

1944 presidential election 170–176

Nineteenth Amendment, U.S. Constitution 12

NIRA. See National Industrial Recovery Act

Nock, Albert Jay 81

Norris, George 38, 50, 64, 81, 146, 170

Norton, Mary 140

NRA. See National Recovery Administration

OARP. See Old Age Revolving Pensions, Inc.

O’Connor, Basil 33–34

O’Day, Caroline 74

Old Age Revolving Pensions, Inc. (OARP) 78

O’Neill, Thomas “Tip,” 88–89

organized labor. See labor unions

Osgood, Irene 5

Other People’s Money (Brandeis) 44

Our Enemy, The State (Nock) 81

Owen, Ruth Bryan 73

painting, during the Great Depression 115

Palin, Sarah 181

Parks, Rosa 109

Patterson, Robert 161–162

Peabody, Endicott (Reverend) 26–27

Peek, George 58

Pendergast, Tom 173

pension systems 4

see also Social Security Act

Pepper, Claude 140

Perkins, Frances 38, 73, 91, 111, 138, 140

Perkins, Milo 80

presidents, U.S.

See under specific presidents

Progressive Era 5–6

labor unions during 5

NAACP and 5

New Deal and, historical context for 6

poor implementation of measures during 6

response to capitalism 5–6

size of government during 6

urban welfare during 4–5

women’s suffrage movement and 7

Prohibition. See Eighteenth Amendment, U.S. Constitution

Public Works Administration (PWA) 160

community applications for 54–55

CWA 48

employment provided by 53

evolution of 49–50

large-scale construction projects under 51–53

political capital of 53–54

in southern states 54

WPA 48

Puzzled America (Anderson, S.) 118

PWA. See Public Works Administration

radio, during the Great Depression 42, 120

Rand, Ayn 81

Randolph, A. Phillip 150, 170

Ransom, John Crowe 115

Raskob, John J. 80

Rayburn, Sam 38, 44

real estate foreclosures, from 1929–1945 20

Rebecca (du Maurier) 120

recession. See economic recession

Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act 56

Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) 41, 49

The Red Network (Dilling) 82

Reno, Milo 59

Republican Party

African American support for 74

1934 midterm election losses 64

opposition to New Deal 80–81

Revenue Act of 1935 92, 93–94

RFC. See Reconstruction Finance Corporation

Riefenstahl, Leni 121

The Road to Plenty (Foster and Waddill) 134–135

Roberts, Owen 127

Rockefeller, John 3, 6, 93

Rogers, Will 37–38

Romer, Christina 181

Roosevelt, Eleanor

as anti-business 2

early life 27

as First Lady 39

letters from public to 99–100

marriage to Roosevelt, F. D. 27

public connection to 66–67

response to 1932 inaugural address 37

Roosevelt, Franklin D. 26–29

See also Democratic Party; National Recovery Administration; New Deal; 1934 midterm elections; 1936 presidential election; World War II

affair with Mercer 27

anti-lynching legislation under 109

appointment of Jews under 72–73

assassination attempt against 35

Churchill and 158–159

contraction of polio 28

economic nationalism policy 55–61

economic recovery under 44–48

education of 26–27

election of 29, 30–31

Farley support for 130

fireside chats 42

first one hundred days of presidency 37–44

foreign policy 56, 152–153

forgotten man as theme for 113–114

Imperial Presidency of 179

Keynes and 135

La Follette support for 129–130

labor unions and 39

letters from public to 99–100

marriage to Roosevelt, E. 27

1932 inaugural address 35–36

during 1934 midterm elections 63–66

during 1938 midterm elections 143–148

1940 election campaign 153–154

1941 state of union address 156–158

1944 presidential election 170–176

1944 state of union address 171–173

political brain trust for 33–34

political endorsement of Hoover 23

political history of 27–29

presidential aspirations of 27–29

pressure from Democratic Party 39–40

public connection to 66–67

public opposition to 76–82

race relations 74–75

recession under 132–137

reform of Supreme Court under 126–131

relationship with business community 2, 39–40

response to Democratic Party conflict 142–148

state building under 31–32

U.S. neutrality under, as foreign policy 153

in Wilson administration 27

Roosevelt, James 26

Roosevelt, Sara 26

Roosevelt, Teddy 27

Rosenman, Samuel 33

Russian Revolution 12

Ruth, Babe 13

Saturday Evening Post 70–71

Schacht, Hjalmar 31

Schechter Poultry Corporation v. United States 48, 126–127

Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr. 179

Schumpeter, Joseph 17–18

Scott, Frank 7

Scottsboro Boys 109

SEC. See Securities Exchange Commission

Second Louisiana Purchase 70

Securities Act of 1933 43–44

Securities Act of 1934 44

Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) 44

Serviceman’s Readjustment Act 167

settlement house movement 4–5

see under specific settlement houses

Seventeenth Amendment, U.S. Constitution 4

Share Our Wealth Society 79, 92–93

see also Long, Huey

Sherman Antitrust Act 3, 4, 6

Shouse, Jouett 80

Sinclair, Upton 77–78

Sixteenth Amendment, U.S. Constitution 4

Sloan, Alfred 112, 136

Smith, Al 28, 96

Smith Act 159

Smoot-Hawley Tariff 16

social radicalism, in cultural production 121–123

Social Security Act 88–92

CES and 89–90

development of 89–90

excluded groups under 91

FICA and 90

Sokoloff, Nikolai 86

Somervell, Brehon 169

Stalin, Joseph 143

Standard Oil 3, 6

state building, New Deal as 31–32

Steagall, Henry 43

Steele, Michael 181

Steinbeck, John 59, 110, 114, 116, 117

Stimson, Henry 154

stock market crash. See Black Tuesday

stock markets

New Deal reform of 43–44

under Securities Act of 1933 43–44

Stokes, Thomas 144

Stone, Harlan 127

Sullivan, Mark 95

Supreme Court, U.S.

reform of, under Roosevelt, F. D. 126–131

Schechter Poultry Corporation v. United States 48, 126–127

United States v. Butler 127

West Coast v. Parrish 130–131

Susman, Warren 10

Taft, Robert 154

tax and spend liberalism 144

taxation systems. See income taxation

Temporary Emergency Relief Organization (TERA) 28

Temporary National Economic Commission 136

Tennessee Valley Authority 50

TERA. See Temporary Emergency Relief Organization

Thompson, Virgil 117

Tilly, Charles 7

Townsend, Francis 77, 78, 92, 96

Treaty of Versailles 31

Triggs, Clayton 164–165

Triumph of the Will 121

Truman, Harry 173

see also 1944 presidential election

Truth in Securities Act. See Securities Act of 1933

Tugwell, Rexford 33, 46, 61, 69, 138

as anti-business 2

on FDR race policies 74

UAW union. See United Auto Workers union

unemployment.

See also labor strikes; labor unions

of African-Americans, during Great Depression 107–109

during the Great Depression 1–2, 104–109

after Great War 11

under Hoover 24–25

from 1929-1945 19

during 1930s, as shared cultural experience 100–101, 104–109

TERA and 28

unions. See labor unions

United Auto Workers (UAW) union 136

United States (U.S.).

See also banking systems, in U.S.; globalization, of U.S. industry; the Great Depression; 1934 midterm elections; specific presidents

culture of unity in, during World War II 170

economic recovery for, during Great Depression 16–18, 44–48

involvement in World War I 7–8

lack of economic confidence in 30

real estate foreclosures in, from 1929–1945 20

Smoot-Hawley Tariff in 16

unemployment rates in, from 1929–1945 19

United States v. Butler 127

United Textile Workers strike 60–61

urban welfare 4–5

see also African-Americans

U.S. Steel 3

Van Devanter, Willis 131

van Kleeck, Mary 7

Van Zeeland, Paul 32

Vandenberg, Arthur 154

Vann, Robert 74, 75

voting rights. See Nineteenth Amendment, U.S. Constitution

Wagner, Robert 38, 73, 138–139, 152

see also National Labor Relations Act

Wald, Lillian 4, 5

Walker, Frank 84

Walker, Jimmy 62

Wallace, Henry 58, 155, 168, 173, 175

Walling, William English 5

Walsh, Thomas 72

War Industries Board (WIB) 7

Warren, Earl 173

Warren, Robert Penn 115

Wartime Civilian Control Administration (WCCA) 162–163

internment of Japanese-Americans and 162–167

Watson, Thomas 40

WCCA. See Wartime Civilian Control Administration

Weaver, Robert 75

welfare capitalism 5–6

under New Deal 180

Wells, Ida B. 5

West Coast v. Parrish 130–131

Wheeler, Burton 130

White, Dudley A. 146–147

White, Sue Shelton 73

White, Walter 109, 150

Whitman, Walt 117

WIB. See War Industries Board

Wilkie, Wendell 153–154, 173

see also 1944 presidential election

Williams, Aubrey 85, 147

Wilson, Edmund 116

Wilson, Woodrow 7, 11, 27

Witte, Edwin 90

Wolman, Leo 51

women

employment of 86, 104–105

in labor unions 103–104

under New Deal 73–74

under Social Security Act 91

Women’s Division of Democratic Party 73–74

women’s suffrage movement 7, 12

see also Nineteenth Amendment, U.S. Constitution

Woodrum, Clifton 87

Woodward, Ellen Sullivan 73, 85

Works Progress Administration (WPA) 48, 82–88

administration of 84–86

employment as goal of 83

employment of African-Americans through 86

employment of women through 86

engineering projects 87–88

ERA Act and 84, 85–86

establishment of 83–84

internment of Japanese-Americans under 162–167

liquidation of 162–167

public activities projects 86–87

requirements under 85

WPA Art Project 87

Writers’ Project 86

World War I. See Great War

World War II

bureaucratic organization during 167–169

culture of unity during, in U.S. 170

defense spending during 168–169

expansion of federal power after 159

federal spending during 167

international institutions created after 175–176

internment of Japanese-Americans during 162–167

Manhattan Project 169

New Deal during 156–170

Smith Act during 159

WPA. See Works Progress Administration

WPA Art Project 87

WPA Theater Project 87

Wright, Richard 86

Writers’ Project 86

Zangara, Guiseppe 35

Zeitgeist 10

Titles in the Series

Edward D. Berkowitz, Mass Appeal: The Formative Age of the Movies, Radio, and TV

Sean P. Cunningham, American Politics in the Postwar Sunbelt: The Contested Ascendancy

Ian Dowbiggin, The Quest for Mental Health: A Tale of Science, Medicine, Scandal, Sorrow, and Mass Society

John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Early Cold War Spies: The Espionage Trials That Shaped American Politics

James H. Hutson, Church and State in America: The First Two Centuries

Maury Klein, The Genesis of Industrial America, 1870–1920

John Lauritz Larson, The Market Revolution in America: Liberty, Ambition, and the Eclipse of the Common Good

Wilson D. Miscamble, The Most Controversial Decision: Truman, the Atomic Bombs, and the Defeat of Japan

Charles H. Parker, Global Interactions in the Early Modern Age, 1400–1800

Stanley G. Payne, The Spanish Civil War

Jason Scott Smith, A Concise History of the New Deal