time period #7 hw assignments 1919 to 1939 [module...

Time Period #7 HW Assignments 1919 to 1939 [Module C]

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Time Period #7 1919 to 1939 Notes [Module C]

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration [1915 to 1970] The decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities seeking political asylum in their own country—reshaped culture and politics, North and South, and set in motion the current racial challenges and disparities.

Task #1 American Pageant: Chapter #31 The Dynamic Decade to Cultural Liberation (pages 738-744)

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____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Omit Reading: Red dust and the brickyard shanties - African-American families head north and find work in the brickyards of Coeymans New York


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Rhapsodies in Black: The Cultural Awakening of the Harlem Renaissance A cultural awakening in Harlem captivated the imagination of writers, artists, intellectuals transcending regional and racial boundaries to produce an impressive range of literature, music, dance and theater. Task #3 American Pageant: Chapter #31 The Dynamic Decade to Cultural Liberation (pages 738-744)

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Task #4 Reading and Notes : I, Too”: Langston Hughes’s Afro-Whitmanian Affirmation by Steven Tracy Whatever we say, whatever we write, whatever we do, we never act alone. Just as John Donne meditated upon the notion that “no man is an island,” so, too, in the twentieth century did T. S. Eliot demonstrate how the individual talent grew out of a tradition that created, nurtured, and contextualized its ideas. In 1919, the same year in which Eliot published his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Langston Hughes published two poems in the January issue of his Cleveland high school’s literary journal. One of these poems was in the free verse style of Walt Whitman, whom Hughes revered throughout his life. In “I Hear America Singing” (1867), an early version of which was published in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass as number 20 of his “Chants Democratic,” Whitman—the bard, the seer, the hearer, the singer—celebrates the music that the young United States offered to an old world in need of the aesthetic, linguistic, and spiritual expansion and renewal that would come, in part, from American popular culture: I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear, Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong, The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam, The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work, The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deck- hand singing on the steamboat deck,


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The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as he stands, The woodcutter’s song, the ploughboy’s on his way in the morning, or at noon intermission or at sundown, The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of the girl sewing or washing, Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else, The day what belongs to the day – at night the party of young fellows, robust, friendly,Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs. From the rousing marching songs of the Civil War to the wistful postwar “sorrow songs,” as W. E. B. Du Bois would later call them, the American tradition of “strong melodious songs” reached great heights in the 1860s and ’70s. The music of Whitman’s day—spirituals, secular songs, work songs, game songs, and the emergent style of ragtime—came to be known the world over as “American music,” and would have a powerful cultural impact on subsequent generations in the United States and beyond. Out of Whitman’s generalized American nationalism grew Langston Hughes’s specifically Afro-nationalistic fervor. African Americans, who by the 1920s were dominating American music and dance through ragtime, which was slowly morphing and developing into jazz, began to have a significant presence in American literature as well. By June 1921, Hughes was writing that he spoke for and as “the Negro.” That year, in the journal Crisis, he demonstrated how African and African American aesthetics, the oral tradition, and the relation of the individual to the group drove his poetic ambition. In his poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” Hughes speaks of the Negro, third person singular, as the Negro, first person singular, but clearly refers to the first-person-plural millions of souls who were linked together, sometimes literally, certainly figuratively, in their arts: I’ve known rivers: I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers. I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young. I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep. I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it. I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset. I’ve known rivers: Ancient, dusky rivers. My soul has grown deep like the rivers. Writing as the Negro, Hughes develops a voice, an aesthetic, a soul that speaks in, of, and out of time for humanity. Adopting a somewhat more acidic tone, Hughes published the poem “I, Too” on March 1, 1925, in Survey Graphic. In this poem, Hughes clearly speaks for masses of marginalized African Americans. Yet it is a very personal poem as well. The “I” is not merely one person, but a collective vision (eye), two (too)—multiple generations of experience distilled into a multi-layered but personal melody: I, too, sing America. I am the darker brother. They send me to eat in the kitchen When company comes, But I laugh, And eat well,


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And grow strong. Tomorrow, I’ll be at the table When company comes. Nobody’ll dare Say to me, “Eat in the kitchen,” Then. Besides, They’ll see how beautiful I am And be ashamed— I, too, am America. Hughes’s impulse is retrospective, looking back to Whitman’s “I Hear America Singing.” He is also drawing upon centuries of the African American experience to enhance his art. Hughes does not simply hear America singing, he sings America. Hughes slightly but monumentally alters the final line to read “am” rather than “sing.” Singing is being, and African American singing, in its style and subject matter, matters, as it was mattering increasingly in American commercial, popular, and artistic culture. But mostly it mattered in the hearts, souls, and minds of Americans who had heard Whitman singing, who had heard the “varied carols” of America, and had gradually embraced the honesty, truth, and art of all Americans. In stripped, compressed, and succinct lines, and weary but pointedly admonitory tones, Hughes’s average Black American man sings—not for his supper, but out of his humanity. Steven Tracy, Professor of Afro-American Studies at UMass Amherst, is the author of Langston Hughes and the Blues (1988) and served as general co-editor of The Collected Works of Langston Hughes (2001–2004). Omit: Podcast: Celebrating The Legacy Of Langston Hughes (36:11)

http://www.npr.org/2012/02/02/146297228/celebrating-the-legacy-of-langston-hughes


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Task #1 Reading and Notes: The Economics of the 1920s by Betsy Jane Clary, Professor of Economics

The Economics of the 1920s The 1920s represented the beginning of a new era in the way economists, public officials, and lay people think about economic life and in the approach to the economic process. The United States emerged from World War I as the strongest economic and military power in the world. The decade of the 1920s ended with the stock market crash of 1929 and the onset of the worst depression in the history of the country. The period between, the Roaring 20s, the Jazz Age, saw the formulation of a "new economics," a new approach to the economic process, largely under the leadership of Herbert Hoover.

The accepted role of government in the economy was changing, in part due to the

experience of economic mobilization during World War I. The U.S. economy had produced

at levels previously thought unattainable, in very large part because of the unprecedented

degree of government intervention. Professional economists for the first time played a

major role, along with government and business leaders, in affecting the economic policy

and the increased production, and the economics profession was challenged, especially by

Irvin Fisher, to participate in shaping the "new economics."

Managing the wartime economy also taught the value of collecting and utilizing

comprehensive economic data, and, under the leadership of Wesley C. Mitchell, the

collection and use of what has come to be called national income statistics in empirical

studies placed economics on a more scientific foundation. A unique American style of

economic theory and application was on the threshold of development. Further, the

American interpretation of the Treaty of Versailles and its denunciation by the British

economist Maynard Keynes led to an enhanced suspicion of Europe and European

policies. The United States was seen as having the opportunity, as well as the obligation,

to chart a new and uniquely American course in the pursuit of improving the human

condition.

The 1920s was also the period during which consumption and consumerism became the

accepted way of life in the American economy. Purchases of houses, automobiles, radios,

electrical equipment, and other durable goods led to never-before-seen increases in

productive capacity. There appeared to be few, if any, limits to what the nation could

produce, and the problem of production seemed to have been solved, at least in the

United States. Also during the 1920s the widespread use of consumer credit made its

appearance. The use of advertising and public relations became prominent during the 20s,

and selling strategies augmented the massive growth in personal consumption.

Among the most important and influential social theorists in the United States during the

early twentieth century was Thorstein Veblen. Not only did the work of Veblen influence

Hoover and the economists involved in developing economic policy, his influence can also


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be seen in the literature of the period. Veblen's analysis of waste in the industrial system,

his descriptions of the leisure class, with its conspicuous consumption and pecuniary

emulation, and his analysis of the dichotomy between the profit motive of business and

the productive motive of industry is evident in the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sinclair

Lewis, among others, as seen in The Great Gatsby and Babbitt.

The period of the 1920s was significant in shaping the institutional framework of

economic theory and policy for much of the remainder of the century, and it continues to

be relevant in the new century. Much of the world of the 1920s—government economic

policy-making, the role of the United States in the world economy, big corporations,

advertising, consumerism—continues to be very much with us in the first decade of the

twenty-first century.


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Task #2 Reading and Notes: The Winds of Political Change – 1928 …And Why You Almost Never Feel Them Coming

The Winds of Political Change - 1928 …And Why You Almost Never Feel Them Coming

By Kevin Baker

The Democratic candidate was crushed. An urban, ethnic liberal from the Northeast, he had been caught flatfooted by the waves of vitriolic attacks that smeared his background, his years of dedicated public service, the character of his beloved wife, as well as his religious beliefs and cultural values. He lost the heartland, and even the traditionally Democratic South had turned against him in unprecedented numbers, and it looked as though Republicans would continue to control not only the White House but also both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court for a long time to come.

The Democratic candidate I’m referring to was Al Smith. He lost his run for the Presidency in 1928 by a much larger margin than the one that defeated John Kerry, yet within four years, millions of the same Southerners and Midwesterners who had voted against Smith were embracing the New Deal coalition that would dominate American politics for most of the ensuing half-century. The moral of the story is that after their big loss last November, Democrats might be better off sitting on their hands rather than wringing them. In America, shifts in power rarely occur without some significant outside event. Anticipating just what that event will be—war, recession, scandal—is impossible.

“This was the greatest vote, the greatest margin and the greatest percentage (61 percent) that any President had ever drawn from the American people; we shall live long before we see its like again,” the inventor of the modern campaign chronicle, Theodore H. White, wrote after Lyndon Johnson’s lopsided triumph over Barry Goldwater in 1964. In fact we would see its like again twice in the next 20 years, and from the Republican side, as Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan swamped their opponents in 1972 and 1984, respectively. Nor was White alone in his nearsightedness.

“The result was one of the great landslides of American political history, raising ominous question marks for the future of the Republican Party,” opined that wild-eyed young liberal Robert Novak after Goldwater’s defeat. This is why we historians love having the benefit of perfect hindsight. It saves us from having to propound the sort of hasty, hip-shooting predictions that can be roundly mocked afterward (usually by historians).

Some issues in our history have simmered for years, arising predictably in one campaign after another. Slavery (and later civil rights) was certainly one. The question of “hard” or “soft” money was another, playing a major role again and again in elections from the end of the Civil War into the 1930s. The same could be said, in recent decades, for the Cold War and crime.


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But just as often, presidential elections have been decided by issues and events that four years earlier no one dreamed would have been important. How many people, for instance, would have predicted in the wake of LBJ’s romp that Vietnam would dominate the 1968 campaign—and force him out of the race? Who could have guessed, before 1950, that the 1952 election would hinge on a war on the Korean peninsula? Or that the obscure governor of Georgia would rise to the Presidency in 1976 thanks to “a third-rate burglary”?

In our media age, of course, political handlers have learned how to help foment such abrupt changes in the national dialogue. Bush family retainers seem to possess a particular knack for this; perhaps it is not so surprising to see how much of the 2004 election revolved around gay marriage when one considers how mired the 1988 race was in Boston Harbor.

Al Smith fell victim to the Jazz Age version of a media blitz. Smith was something very new in our presidential politics, and something not really seen since—an unabashedly urban, working-class candidate. Only 12 when his father died, he had been forced to drop out of school, later joking that he had received his “FFM” degree at Manhattan’s Fulton Fish Market, sweeping up and hauling fish. Breaking into politics through Tammany Hall, he was indisputably of the machine, but he also came to transcend it, and even to sow the seeds of its demise, with a raft of vital social legislation he pushed through as leader of the New York State Assembly. Graduated to governor for an unheard of four terms, he ran a progressive administration widely admired for its honesty, efficiency, and innovation.

For all that, Al Smith was simply not what most Americans thought of as a President. Potbellied, large-nosed, sporting his trademark brown derby, his voice full of the intonations of his native Lower East Side, an avowed opponent of Prohibition and above all, a Catholic, Smith was as alien to many heartland voters then as latte drinkers supposedly are today. By the time he finally secured the Democratic nomination, he had little chance to win in any case, running as he was in a year of peace and general prosperity against an immensely popular, Republican candidate, Herbert Hoover.

Yet it was the way he lost that was to leave Smith permanently scarred. The attacks started even before the 1928 race was under way. The Ku Klux Klan, still powerful in much of the South and Midwest, issued 10 million pieces of “literature” that repeated all the ancient calumnies against the Catholic Church and accused Smith of fronting a plot by the Pope to take control of the United States.

Nor was the Klan alone in this absurd fearmongering. The Methodist bishop of Buffalo warned that “no governor can kiss the papal ring and get within gunshot of the White House.” The Reverend John Roach Straton, one of the earliest broadcast evangelists, used his popular radio show to claim that the election of Smith would encourage “card playing, cocktail drinking, divorce, dancing, Clarence Darrow, nude art, prize fighting, [and] greyhound racing.” No less than William Alien White, the legendary, independent-minded editor of the Emporia (Kansas) Gazette, took it


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upon himself to serve as a sort of one-man Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, repeatedly smearing Smith for having supposedly protected saloons, gambling, and prostitution: “The whole Puritan civilization which has built a sturdy, orderly nation is threatened by Smith.”

Herbert Hoover chose mostly to keep himself above the fray, even in-toning sanctimoniously—and irrelevantly—about how his own Quaker faith had occasionally been ostracized. Meanwhile, Republican-party operatives quietly funded some of the worst attacks on Smith.

Smith met the campaign of slander head-on. He affirmed explicitly in The Atlantic Monthly, “I believe in the absolute separation of Church and State,” and, anticipating John F. Kennedy by 32 years, took his case right into the heart of hostile territory. Traveling to Oklahoma City, a town then all but dominated by the Klan, he gave a national radio address before an audience that included Straton and other anti-Catholic evangelicals. In a bold speech, brimming with barely contained fury, he reiterated his belief in the separation of church and state and condemned all attempts “to inject bigotry, hatred, intolerance and un-American sectarian division into a campaign.” He thundered, “Nothing could be so out of line with the spirit of America. Nothing could be so foreign to the teachings of Jefferson. Nothing could be so contradictory of our whole history.”

In a truly spectacular piece of political jujitsu, Republicans criticized Smith for thus bringing religion into the campaign. Smith’s train into Oklahoma had been greeted with a burning cross. Another one appeared near Billings, Montana. Cops assigned to protect him in Louisville insulted him to his face. Vicious whispering campaigns claimed that he was an alcoholic and mocked Katie, the matronly, shy wife he was devoted to, for her weight, how she dressed, the jewelry she wore.

For once Smith’s keen political ear had failed him. The animosity directed toward him went beyond fears of papalring kissing or greyhound racing, and it would not be soothed by declarations of his fealty to Jefferson or the Constitution. The 1920s in an America still shaken by a world war were characterized throughout by an emotional backlash against the previous decades of ethnic immigration and by a deep suspicion of the urban world so many of those immigrants had settled in.

Then, as now, all the “negative” campaigning that we supposedly despise produced a record turnout at the polls, and for Al Smith, the verdict was crushing. He received less than 42 percent of the popular vote and carried only eight states. For the first time since Reconstruction, much of the South went Republican. So did Smith’s beloved New York.

Smith never got over the venom that had been directed at him. He would be further embittered by the fact that in 1932, three years into the Great Depression, he lost the Democratic nomination to Franklin Roosevelt, a man viewed as his political protégé, and in a year when America really might have been desperate enough to vote for a Catholic New Yorker.


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Yet for historians, it has become clear that Al Smith was actually the wave of the future. His campaign scored solid victories in cities from New York to San Francisco, Boston to San Antonio, and made serious inroads in such traditionally Republican citadels such as Philadelphia and Detroit. Once the shock of the Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression brought Midwestern farmers and Protestant Southerners into the fold, the New Deal coalition was complete.

Those gripped by either despair or euphoria over the 2004 election might want to reflect on how quickly, and unforeseeably, political fortunes have changed in the past. As to just what the next catalytic shock will be, and how it will affect the 2008 election, I would be happy to make my own predictions. Just come see me 20 or 30 years from now.

http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/ah/2005/1/2005_1_17.shtml

http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/ah/2005/1/2005_1_17.shtml


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Task #1 Reading and Notes: The Stock Market Crash

The Stock Market Crash New York Times reporter Elliott V. Bell witnessed firsthand the panic and despair

that ensued after the stock market crashed on October 24, 1929.

The market opened steady with prices little changed from the previous day, though some rather large blocks, of 20,000 to 25,000 shares, came out at the start. It sagged easily for the first half hour, and then around eleven o’clock the deluge broke. It came with a speed and ferocity that left men From all over the country a torrent of selling orders poured onto the floor of the Stock Exchange and there were no buying orders to meet it. Quotations of representative active issues, like Steel, Telephone, and Anaconda, began to fall two, three, five, and even ten points between sales. Less active stocks became unmarketable. Within a few moments the ticker service was hopelessly swamped and from then on no one knew what was really happening. By 1:30 the ticker tape was nearly two hours late; by 2:30 it was 147 minutes late. The last quotation was not printed on the tape until 7:081⁄2 P.M., four hours, eight and one-half minutes after the close. In the meantime, Wall Street had lived through an incredible nightmare. In the strange way that news of a disaster spreads, the word of the market collapse flashed through the city. By noon great crowds had gathered at the corner of Broad and Wall streets where the Stock Exchange on one corner faces Morgan’s [the headquarters of J.P. Morgan] across the way. On the steps of the Sub-Treasury Building, opposite Morgan’s, a crowd of press photographers and newsreel men took up their stand. Traffic was pushed from the streets of the financial district by the crush. . . .The animal roar that rises from the floor of the Stock Exchange and which on active days is plainly audible in the Street outside, became louder, anguished, terrifying. The streets were crammed with a mixed crowd—agonized little speculators, walking aimlessly outdoors because they feared to face the ticker and the margin clerk; sold-out traders, morbidly impelled to visit the scene of their ruin; inquisitive individuals and tourists, seeking by gazing at the exteriors of the Exchange and the big banks to get a closer view of the national catastrophe; runners, frantically pushing their way through the throng of idle and curious in their effort to make deliveries of the unprecedented volume of securities which was being traded on the floor of the Exchange. The ticker, hopelessly swamped, fell hours behind the actual trading and became completely meaningless.


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Far into the night, and often all night long, the lights blazed in the windows of the tall office buildings where margin clerks and bookkeepers struggled with the desperate task of trying to clear one day’s business before the next began. They fainted at their desks; the weary runners fell exhausted on the marble floors of banks and slept. But within a few months they were to have ample time to rest up. By then thousands of them had been fired. Agonizing scenes were enacted in the customers’ rooms of the various brokers. There traders who a few short days before had luxuriated in delusions of wealth saw all their hopes smashed in a collapse so devastating, so far beyond their wildest fears, as to seem unreal. Seeking to save a little from the wreckage, they would order their stocks sold “at the market,” in many cases to discover that they had not merely lost everything but were, in addition, in debt to the broker. And then, ironic twist, as like as not the next few hours’ wild churning of the market would lift prices to levels where they might have sold out and had a substantial cash balance left over. Every move was wrong, in those days. The market seemed like an insensate thing that was wreaking a wild and pitiless revenge upon those who had thought to master it. from H. W. Baldwin and Shepard Stone, eds., We Saw It Happen (New York: 1938


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Task #2 Reading and Notes: Hoover’s Response to the economic downturn

I would like to state to you the effect that... [an interference] of government in business would have upon our system of self-government and our economic system. That effect would reach to the daily life of every man and woman. It would impair the very basis of liberty and freedom.... The greatness of America has grown out of a political and social system and a method of [a lack of governmental] control of economic forces distinctly its own our American system which has carried this great experiment in human welfare farther than ever before in history.... And I again repeat that the departure from our American system... will jeopardize the very liberty and freedom of our people, and will destroy equality of opportunity not only to ourselves, but to our children.

March, 1929

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.

October, 1930 On the 3d of October last year, I called to Washington the leading bankers of the country and secured from them an agreement to combine the resources of the banks to stem the tide. They pledged themselves to $500 million for this purpose. On October 6, I called in the leaders of both political parties. I placed before them the situation at home and abroad. I asked for unity of national action. That unity was gladly given. We published a united determination to the country to meet the situation. Our people drew a breath of relief. The ship swung to a more even keel.

October, 1932


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Task #3 Podcast: Soldier Against Soldier: The Story of the Bonus Army (14:19)

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CLASS #90 HOMEWORK - March 29, 2017

Task #1 Podcast: Author Reconstructs FDR's 'Defining Moment' (11:27)

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https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=images&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwjrlLTvvffSAhXJ7YMKHXdQDIUQjRwIBw&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FDefining-Moment-FDRs-Hundred-Triumph%2Fdp%2F0743246012&bvm=bv.150729734,d.amc&psig=AFQjCNHgZNxQSosdVxrvVi504ouJZIJ9pw&ust=1490731526911096


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Task #2 Reading and Notes: The Hundred Days and Beyond: What did the New Deal Accomplish?

The Hundred Days and Beyond:

What did the New Deal Accomplish? “There wasn’t anybody in that entire Brains Trust apparently that had given any thought – they had absolutely no plans – or any real study to the problem created by this banking situation.” -Walter Wyatt, the Federal Reserve official, who was amazed at how unprepared the incoming Roosevelt administration was for the situation they faced on inauguration day, 4 March, 1933.

The Hundred Days The Hundred Days were an accident. Roosevelt took advantage of the need to reopen the banks to ask Congress to stay in session to pass recovery and reform legislation. Much of that legislation was improvised. The haste dictated by the economic crisis profoundly shaped the New Deal response in the Hundred Days.

Despite the four months between election and inauguration, Roosevelt had few worked-out legislative or recovery plans. He certainly had no plans to deal with the rapidly escalating banking crisis. When he took office and shut the banks, he had to turn to held-over officials in the Treasury and Federal Reserve to dust off legislative proposals that they had devised in the Hoover years. The key was not more credit (the banks had had plenty of that) but recapitalization through the Reconstruction Finance Corporation buying preferred stock in the banks. It was still a tremendous gamble when the President went on the air on Sunday March 12 to explain the crisis and make a “man to man appeal” for confidence when the banks reopened the next day. The gamble paid off when people deposited more than they took out. There was no Plan B if that appeal failed.

The response to FDR’s inaugural and from congressional leaders to his banking proposals encouraged him to ask Congress to stay in session. Eventually Congress passed an unprecedented sixteen pieces of major legislation. In the Hundred Days, the New Deal established a farm program that told farmers what they could and could not plant (the Agricultural Adjustment Administration), created an industrial recovery programme that set minimum prices and wages (the National Recovery Administration), launched the biggest public works program in the nation’s history (Public Works Administration), set up national relief program (Federal Emergency Relief Administration), refinanced farm and home mortgages, regulated the stock market and banking, guaranteed bank deposits, and established the Tennessee Valley Authority.

There was no great federal blueprint that FDR wanted to impose on the country. He really only had definite plans for farm policy, the Tennessee Valley and the Civilian Conservation Corps. Only when existing appropriations for relief were exhausted did

YOUR NOTES:


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he devise a temporary relief administration. Forty days into the Hundred Days there was no indication that there was to be an industrial recovery program – congressional action forced Roosevelt’s hand over that and over public works spending.

There was much talk of the emergency as the equivalent of war and a justification for emergency presidential powers as in a time of war. Wartime agencies from 1917-18 served as model for agencies like the NRA. Many officials who had served in government then returned to Washington in 1933. But, in fact the emergency in 1933 led to constraints rather than opportunities for federal power. The government had to act quickly but there simply was not any established “state capacity” for the government to do so. The federal government, observed one historian, “had almost no institutional structure to which Europeans would accord the term ‘the State’.” It had neither the information nor the personnel to implement the policies launched in 1933.

As a result, bankers themselves had to decide which banks were sound enough to reopen, farmers had to operate the crop control programme, businessmen dominated the formulation and the implementation of the NRA industrial codes, existing state agencies had to administer the relief programme, and the army had to organize the Civilian Conservation Corps.

Similarly, Roosevelt and others had a fatal attraction for one-off quick-fix solutions that would kick-start the economy into recovery without the permanent expansion of the bureaucracy and constant state intervention. Congressional “share the work” schemes, farm proposals for cost of production legislation, retrenchment, public works spending, and above all demands for currency inflation were all in this “start-up” mode. Roosevelt never lost the hope that tinkering with the currency –including the gold-buying experiment – would raise price levels, particularly of farm products and in itself bring recovery.

This concern for the domestic price-level fitted in with his main advisers’ conviction that the depression was national in origin and would be solved by nationalist measures. These concerns finally knocked out of the reckoning an internationalist option at the London conference at the start of July. For men like FDR’s budget director, Lewis Douglas, balancing the budget was one part of an international rescue package that involved exchange rate stabilization and the removal of trade barriers. Roosevelt believed that currency stabilization would tie his hands as he sought domestic recovery, so he scuppered the London conference.

Why did FDR get support for the banking bail-out and for the dramatic legislation of the Hundred Days? It was not just his communication skills both personally to congressional leaders and journalists and nationally to the radio audience. He was popular, he had been elected by a large majority, and he had survived an assassination attempt. Above all, it was the scale of the depression that made congressional leaders of both parties respond to their constituents’ demands to support FDR. Unemployment was at least twenty-five percent, agriculture was


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devastated, and homeowners and farmers lost their homes and land in the thousands every month. None of the stabilizers that protect Americans nowadays were in place – almost no unemployment relief since private, local and state unemployment welfare funds were exhausted; no guarantee of bank deposits; no unemployment or old age insurance. FDR’s opportunity lay in the magnitude of the economic downturn which led political leaders to ignore (temporarily) cherished ideological convictions against government intervention.

The Difficulties of Micro-Economic Intervention The National Recovery Administration did not bring recovery. In part, its failure reflected the contradictions of the New Dealers’ analysis of economic failure. In some industries they wanted to check excessive competition which relentlessly fuelled the deflationary spiral: cutting wages and prices in a vain effort to undercut competitors. But their analysis of other industrial sectors was that large firms practiced the economics of scarcity, keeping prices artificially high. The codes of fair practice, drafted largely by trade associations which held a monopoly of information about their industries, did little to protect consumers, increase wages, or increase purchasing power. To small businessmen the codes seemed to protect their larger rivals. For industries in which a few firms already controlled most of the market, there was little incentive to concede to labor, consumers or potential new entrants. There were more than 500 codes which merely increased resentment of bureaucracy and efforts at code enforcement. Concentration, as originally envisaged on codes in a few central industries would have been better. But fundamentally, there was little in the NRA that would create new jobs. It probably checked the deflationary spiral but, if the hope was that public works spending would engineer expansion, then PWA spending could not work quickly enough. Probably the biggest mistake was not to include government loans to business in the NRA which might have financed expansion. When the industrial recovery legislation was knocked down in 1935 it had few friends: the only attempts to sustain it were in coal mining.

The Agricultural Adjustment Administration was more politically and institutionally successful. Production control and price-support loans on stored commodities remained part of US farm programmes until 1996. Agriculture was the one area where there was ‘state capacity’ in 1933. The government had county by county production records; agricultural economists had devised a production control plan that was voluntary but provided incentives to offset the ‘free rider’ principle; and the Extension Service provided a network of agents in each rural county could sign up millions of individual farmers to participate. The farm program operated remarkably smoothly and quickly. Critics have claimed that drought, rather than government programmes, cut production, and that the AAA exacerbated rural poverty. Whatever its faults, the income it provided to farmers enabled them to survive on the land in the 1930s until non-farm opportunities arose after 1940. It eliminated many of the risks in farming and provided new sources of credit.

However, organized farm groups achieved political power in 1933 because their cooperation was essential to a voluntary farm program. This strengthening of farm


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interest groups meant that those groups would stand in the way in the future of plans to reorder American agriculture on a more efficient basis and in the way of solving the problems of rural poverty. New Dealers came to recognize that expanding urban consumer purchasing power, rather than supporting farm prices, was the solution to the farm problem. But by then farm pressure groups were too entrenched. Government support for agriculture became more and more generous (and less justifiable) as the number of people in farming declined.

The Longer-Term New Deal - The longer-term New Deal reforms produced social cohesion in the United States and a faith in the federal government that would last until the 1960s. Financial regulation of both banks and stock market in 1933 and 1934 heralded a lengthy period of financial stability, contained stock market speculation, and largely ended the spectres of bank failure.

From 1933 to 1938 the New Deal instituted reforms that would re-finance the mortgages of homeowners and farmers. They enabled debt-ridden property owners to take out longer-term mortgages and paved the way for a significant expansion of homeownership in the US, although the construction industry did not really start to revive until the late 1930s. The new mortgage arrangements helped the United States eventually to have the highest percentage of homeownership in the world. Farm foreclosures virtually stopped after 1933.

The failure to secure dramatic economic recovery meant that the government had to stay in the business of relief. The Federal Emergency Relief Administration funded state relief programs until 1935. In poor states the federal government put up almost 90% of relief money. Harry Hopkins always wanted to replace the dole with jobs. The Civil Works Administration put people to work temporarily in the winter of 1933-34. In 1935 the Works Progress Administration provided jobs for the unemployed – at its peak forty percent of the nation’s jobless. Many WPA jobs were unskilled construction jobs, particularly on roads. They struggled to attain the legitimacy and wage rates of jobs in the private sector. But the WPA provided jobs for artists, middle-class professionals, teachers and students. The range of construction projects from housing projects to high schools to a football stadium at the University of Arkansas created a permanent New Deal landscape at the local level. The WPA showed that government job programmes can be creative and efficient. For all the limitations and conservative stereotyping, WPA jobs were the first indication for many Americans that the federal government took its responsibility for their welfare in an economic downturn seriously.

The Wagner Act of 1935 was perhaps the most remarkable piece of legislation of the whole New Deal. It is difficult to imagine another year in which such a pro-union piece of legislation could have been passed. Anti-union tactics had been largely unrestrained in the United States. The courts, local, and state governments had usually sided with employers. This alignment reflected the fact that in most communities in the United States, the middle class identified with the employer rather than with local strikers. American workers had been encouraged in union organization in the early New Deal, and had launched in 1934 an unprecedented, albeit mostly unsuccessful, wave of strikes. The Wagner Act, by outlawing a host of


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employer anti-union activities and providing for government-supervised worker elections for union recognition, provided vital protection for union organizers as they organized mass production workers for the first time in 1936 and 1937. Unions provided the radical cutting edge of New Deal politics in the late 1930s. The decade was perhaps the only decade in the twentieth century in which middle-class Americans identified with industrial workers as fellow consumers. From the 1940s onwards middle-class Americans tended to view organized labour as hostile to their interests.

The final cement in a positive relationship between ordinary Americans and their government was the 1935 Social Security Act. Like the Wagner Act, the Social Security Act did not herald a ‘second New Deal’; rather it was the culmination of expert reform development and congressional study over a two-year period. The United States had been an “outlier,” a “welfare laggard” in the western industrialized world before 1935. For all the limitations of the Social Security Act – regressive taxes, variations in state provision, lack of coverage of some of the neediest Americans, and the lack of health care – it nevertheless represented a quantum leap in social provision. The contributory taxes also ensured that its legacy was permanent. As Roosevelt rightly observed, no future Congress was going to take away benefits that their constituents believed they had paid for.

It was these measures above all that created a half-way political revolution in the United States and bound lower-income voters to the Democratic Party until at least the 1980s and made it the national majority party until the 1990s. But it was only a half-way revolution. FDR never created the unequivocally progressive party that he hoped for. In particular, the southern Democrats, who had so enthusiastically supported the emergency New Deal, survived Roosevelt’s attempt to reconstruct the party in the South. They were skeptical about the non-emergency, urban, labor-oriented direction of the New Deal which also threatened traditional patterns of racial and economic dependency in the South. They would combine after 1938 with conservative Republicans in a bi-partisan coalition that would block efforts to extend the New Deal for the next quarter of a century. This constituted a powerful anti-statist coalition that stymied FDR’s 1937-38 hopes of a Third New Deal which would have guaranteed social minima to all Americans through social housing, extended coverage of Social Security, health insurance, a full-scale rural poverty programme, and a commitment to full employment. That agenda remains unfulfilled.

Infrastructure The public works programmes (both the large-scale projects of the PWA and the smaller labor-intensive programs of the WPA) have tended to be treated as short-tem palliatives aimed at temporary job creation. But the most recent study of New Deal public works spending concluded that it was “an extraordinarily successful method of state-sponsored economic development.”

The New Deal rebuilt the infrastructure of the United States when revenue-starved state governments could not do so. It rebuilt the road system (though FDR’s dream of an interstate highway system would not be realized until 1956). It rescued American schools and universities. Long before federal aid to education, the New


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Deal built schools, paid teachers salaries, invested in capital projects in the universities, and paid students to stay on at school and college. Multi-purpose dams created cheap electrical power and managed water resource development.

Nowhere was this impact greater than in the Sunbelt. A new generation of younger southern politicians like Albert Gore and Lyndon Johnson could see what the Tennessee Valley Authority had done for a river valley – it could be model for modernizing the poorest region in the country. Like their western counterparts, they could see that abundant electrical power and readily available water could provide the key for industrial development and the diversification of agriculture. The federal government funded capital infrastructure projects in Sunbelt cities that had been funded a generation before in older northern cities by private capital. What southern and western politicians also believed was that their regional entrepreneurs need access to capital, access that an eastern-dominated financial system denied them. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation, under Texas banker Jesse Jones, provided that capital. It is difficult to conceive of the remarkable growth of the South and the West in World War II and after without that New Deal-funded infrastructure investment.

Conclusion The New Deal was a “laboratory for economic learning” in the 1930s. Given the state of government economic knowledge in the 1930s it is not surprising that government employees struggled to engineer recovery through micro-economic intervention. Economic historians and right-wing commentators blame the New Deal for prolonging the Depression by deterring private investment through excessive regulation and raising prices at the expense of jobs. While it is true that Roosevelt had not secured recovery by the time of the dramatic recession in 1937-38, it is also true that the spending afterwards did create new jobs. Government employment in the 1930s also compensated significantly for the failure to create new jobs in the private sector. Above all, it is difficult to see that a free market solution could have been imposed without massive social and anti-democratic unrest. For all the bitterness of opposition to Roosevelt and heightened class tensions in the US in the 1930s, the New Deal developed, especially through its welfare and jobs programs, enough social cohesion to allow its democratic institutions to survive a catastrophic economic downturn intact and to fight a world war successfully. Anthony Badger is Paul Mellon Professor of American History at Cambridge University and Master of Clare College. He is the author of a number of books, most recently FDR: The First Hundred Days (Hill and Wang, 2008).


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time period #7 hw assignments 1919 to 1939 [module...

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