As the Great Depression ground on and unemployment escalated, Americans looked to churches, voluntary associations, and ultimately to the federal government
to get the nation on its feet. Government programs provided unprecedented material and psychological relief on a mass scale. Consumer culture became more homogeneous, while the arts proved to be vital resources for a population struggling to cope with the nation’s worst-ever depression.

AMERICA REMADE: THE GREAT DEPRESSION & THE NEW DEAL

Driving across the parched plains of the Texas panhandle one Sunday afternoon in 1935, the Phillips family was surprised to see a strange, billowing mass reaching thousands of feet into the blue sky and heading straight toward them. Within minutes, the air turned thick as the cloud of grit and sand pelted the family’s Ford Model A. Desperate to escape, the Phillipses abandoned their car and scrambled blindly toward an old hut, where they took shelter with ten others huddling in the dark. Four hours later, the frightened inhabitants emerged to a nearly unrecognizable, dust-encrusted landscape.

Similar episodes were repeated across the southern plains over the next several years. Extreme weather was nothing new to plains folk. For four years they had endured record drought and dozens of long, slow dust storms that ruined crops, buried homes, and coated everything inside and out with a dense film. But the swirling dark towers of sand were something new and lethal. They literally whipped the earth out from under one’s feet, destroying millions of acres of crops, suffocating thousands of livestock, and killing dozens of people.

Beyond the plains, the great majority of Americans also felt as though the ground was disappearing under their feet in the 1930s. After the Wall Street crash of 1929, the prosperity and optimism of 1920s urban America evaporated. Contrary to the popular view that the economy would bounce back, it did not. And as the economy unraveled, over one in five Americans lost their jobs; another three million lost their land. Most Americans learned to “live lean” in these years, improvising novel ways of surviving and coping with life’s stresses and uncertainties. A growing number also demanded federal government action. Committed to the idea that big business would revive employment of its own accord, President Herbert Hoover resisted such calls until well into 1931. When he finally took action, it was too little, too late, and the electorate voted him out of office in a landslide.

Hoover’s successor was elected on a vague platform that included a “new deal” for Americans and an acknowledgment that the unbridled forces of freemarket capitalism had brought the Great Depression— by then, the worst economic downturn in U.S. and global history. Franklin D. Roosevelt and his cabinet commenced a thorough retooling of the American economy. Lacking a grand plan, Roosevelt’s experimental New Deal nevertheless gradually changed government and society and produced a novel political ideology, New Deal liberalism. Government regulation of business stabilized the economy and stimulated consumption, while social security, farm subsidies, and housing assistance integrated one in three Americans into a vast new network of entitlements (federal services and payments). Although in theory all Americans benefited from the New Deal, in practice some benefited far more than others.
Besides reform, other forces remade American life in the 1930s. Consumer culture expanded its reach and influence, taking advantage of new national communication networks and Americans’ desire for at least temporary release from the stresses and strains of the Depression. A distinctive American diet emerged, as did a consumer rights movement that demanded better labeling and more control over product contents. Thanks largely to massive government funding, the arts flourished and became a vital source of morale building in these hardest of times.

HERBERT HOOVER AND HARD TIMES

Immediately following the Wall Street crash of 1929, President Herbert Hoover cut taxes on the theory that this measure would give consumers more disposable income and stimulate investment. The Republican president reassured the nation that the economy was “fundamentally sound” and had suffered only a temporary setback. Hard work, private and state relief organizations, and business leadership would reverse the slump. Having directed the nation’s two greatest humanitarian relief efforts—the Belgian food drive of 1915 and the Mississippi flood of 1927—to wide acclaim, Hoover enjoyed the support of most Americans. But over the next few years, as millions lost their jobs and homes or were thrown off their land, voters grew disillusioned with Hoover’s approach.

The Unraveling Economy

The stock market recovered temporarily but then continued its descent through 1931. Companies once thought to be invincible, such as U.S. Steel, lost 90 percent of their stock value and were forced to close many plants. By 1930, twenty-six thousand businesses had gone bust. As the surviving industries operated at less than a fifth of their previous capacity, newspapers grimly reported massive layoffs. Meanwhile, the American depression spread to the global financial system as troubled U.S. banks recalled loans from Germany and Austria. A chain reaction began when Germany defaulted on reparations to France and Britain, causing those nations to default on their U.S. loans. After American depositors, fearing that international defaults threatened their own savings, rushed to withdraw their funds, more U.S. banks failed. In an effort to discourage borrowing, the Federal Reserve tightened credit sharply, causing interest rates to spike and putting pressure on banks, especially rural and ethnic ones. Upwards of five thousand banks failed by 1932—and took the savings of nine million Americans with them.

By 1931, the depression had become a global crisis, but its effects were especially crippling in the United States. The U.S. economy was less regulated than Europe’s and therefore more prone to extreme booms and busts. Only Germany, with its crushing war debt and 30 percent unemployment rate, fared worse. U.S. workers and farmers were hit hard. Some industrial cities, such as Detroit and Flint, Michigan—both hubs of the auto industry—were devastated. In Chicago and Cleveland in 1932, unemployment rates jumped to 50 percent, while the Ohio cities of Akron and Toledo counted even higher rates of people out of work (see Table 24.1). Nationwide, one in four Americans were thrown out of work by 1932. Those who remained employed often worked shorter hours for lower wages, as full-time work became a rarity. Unlike many European nations, the United States lacked a safety net of federal unemployment insurance, health care, and social security that might have saved millions of people from abject poverty. With far less income—or none at all—trickling in, over half a million people lost their homes to foreclosure and millions more were evicted from rental properties.

The depression affected all workers, but it hurt some more than others. Working women were the first to lose their jobs in the popular belief that men needed the work more (for both psychological and economic reasons) and that jobs for women were a luxury that society could no longer afford. Local governments and employers’ associations campaigned against women’s employment, and all but 25 percent of school districts banned female teachers. As the depression wore on, however, more women were compelled to work, often because their husband’s incomes had been cut so severely. Now barred from many skilled and professional occupations, most could find only domestic or part-time jobs.

Employers also enforced existing racial hierarchies that excluded African Americans, Latinos, and Asians from certain skilled positions and professions. Companies routinely fired people of color first to free up jobs for whites. By 1932, African American men were twice as likely as white men to be unemployed. Black working women suffered triple the unemployment rate of white women, largely because employers replaced them with the flood of white women entering domestic and service occupations. As joblessness spread, once-vibrant African American neighborhoods such as Chicago’s South Side and New York’s Harlem suffered disproportionate levels of poverty and despair.

The crash of 1929 accelerated the ongoing mass migration of small farmers off the land. By then, prices for meat, dairy, and produce had already dropped to ruinous levels, and debt and foreclosure rates were rising. Falling prices and the rapid expansion of large-scale agribusiness in the 1920s further pressured small farmers and sharecroppers, forcing six million to quit the land by 1929. After the crash, millions more left—some sped by the prolonged drought that struck the plains in the early 1930s (see Leaving the Dust Bowl, below). Over the next three years, almost one-third of all farming families lost their land when they could not make mortgage payments. In the hardest-stung rural regions, parents had little choice but to cut children’s meals from three to two per day. Across the country, hospitals observed record numbers of illnesses and deaths from malnutrition.

Many middle-class Americans experienced a sudden fall in their fortunes. Doctors, attorneys, teachers, and other college-educated people all suffered salary cuts. Many also lost their life savings, disposable income, and credit. Even the wealthiest Americans were affected. Although most generally maintained their high standard of living, they lost between 50 percent and 90 percent of their investments—and some were ruined. As sales of homes, cars, and other big-ticket consumer goods plummeted, more plant closures and layoffs followed.

The Limits of Voluntarism

Much as he had done throughout his distinguished career in government, President Hoover hewed to a policy of voluntarism— the idea that the federal government, rather than legislating solutions, should work collaboratively with big business, the states, and voluntary relief organizations to resolve the crisis. Shortly after the crash, Hoover persuaded business leaders to pledge to maintain wage and employment levels. He also convened the Emergency Committee for Employment, which worked with charities to coordinate unemployment relief. As Hoover had hoped, city government, charities, and churches and synagogues rallied, setting up soup kitchens and providing shelter and other essentials, and eight states gave the unemployed direct financial assistance.

Despite business’s pledge, however, the layoffs and foreclosures continued, approaching record levels in 1931. Relief organizations were quickly overwhelmed. With the business sector unable to find its own way out of the downward spiral, President Hoover’s faith in voluntarism wavered. Calling upon state and local governments to invest in public projects such as road construction, the president conceded that government might need to take a more direct role in what he was the first to call the United States’ “Great Depression.”
The president’s first step was to help burdened farmers. In an effort to protect American growers from overseas competition, Hoover signed the Hawley-Smoot Tariff (1930), which imposed heavy taxes on food imports. He also reluctantly authorized the single largest peacetime increase in federal spending for largescale public projects ($700 million, or $9.8 billion in today’s dollars), in the hope that government could put millions of people back to work. The president moreover directed the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, a federal agency established in early 1932, to provide $300 million in stimulus loans to banks, insurers, and railroads and other corporations. In the same year, congressional Democrats prevailed on a hesitant Hoover to sign the Federal Home Loan Bank Act, by which thousands of homeowners refinanced their mortgages and avoided foreclosure, and the Emergency Relief Act, which authorized the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to extend loans to the struggling states.

Hoover’s initiatives, however, did not stem the powerful tide of the Depression. Although the scale of the federal programs was unprecedented, it was dwarfed by the enormous costs of the Depression. Workers, farmers, and the middle class continued to struggle, and the Hawley-Smoot Tariff triggered a disastrous trade war in which foreign governments boycotted American goods. U.S. exports consequently fell by over 50 percent in the following year, and the unemployment rate tripled, to almost 25 percent, by 1932.

Living Lean

Left largely to their own devices under Hoover’s voluntarist policies, Americans coped as best they could by learning to “live lean.” Millions hit road and rail in search of work, and thousands of homeless families set up shantytowns on the periphery of cities, typically alongside rail lines and near city dumps. They called these settlements Hoovervilles in ironic reference to a president who appeared unmoved by their plight.

Two million urban people traversed the country looking for work in 1930—among them, 250,000 teenage boys and “sisters of the road” (homeless women). As in previous recessions, several thousand urban families headed for the countryside, hoping to farm their own food. But starting a farm from scratch, with little experience and even less capital, proved a grueling and often impossible task. For the first time in the nation’s history, more people (especially Italians and Mexican immigrants) left the United States than entered it. Many departed of their own accord, in search of work, but for most Mexicans, emigration was forcible. As unemployment climbed and Americans grew hungry for any work they could find, a wave of anti-Mexican feeling among white workers, unions, and local government broke over Southern California and the Southwest. Courting voters ahead of the 1932 election, Hoover announced a repatriation policy to send Mexican nationals back to Mexico. By 1940, city, federal, and county governments had forcibly “repatriated” upwards of 450,000 mostly rural Mexicans—along with over 35,000 American citizens mistaken for Mexican nationals.

The most desperate people scrimped on meals, trawling through trash to find food if necessary, and cut all nonessential spending. Middle-class women, who in the 1920s had opted to dress their children in store-bought clothing rather than sewing from scratch, learned anew how to darn socks, knit, and sew clothes. Aunts, uncles, grandparents, and other relatives moved in with nuclear families, and children found themselves sharing their bedrooms—and even their beds— with cousins and siblings. As couples delayed marriage, children, and the expense of having a family, the national birthrate fell almost a quarter, to just over seven babies per hundred women (a historic low).

The emotional effects of the economic crisis were no less severe. By 1932, popular optimism that business was “sound and prosperous” (Hoover’s words) had given way to fear and despondency. Psychological distress took many forms. In a culture in which urban men’s identity rested on their role as family breadwinner, widespread job loss among men set off a full-scale crisis of masculinity. “The moral fiber of the American man,” lamented popular novelist Sherwood Anderson, “through being without a job, losing a sense of being some part of the moving world of activity, so essential to an American man’s sense of his manhood—the loss of this essential something in the jobless can never be measured in dollars.”

Many unemployed men, particularly in industries that prized physical strength, felt humiliated by their loss of status. Fathers who had once put ample food on the table and fed their family’s consumerist desires now considered themselves failures. Publications with titles such as “The Decline of the Male,” “The Lure of the Helpless Male,” and “Fallen Fathers” reinforced their sense of defeat. Demoralized and deeply ashamed, most men suffered in silence. Some left home, however, and others took their own lives, pushing the nation’s suicide rate to an all-time high.

Mobilizing for Change

Although most Americans concentrated on day-to-day survival, some also began to organize for change. In 1932, farmers banded together to prevent the banks and sheriffs from seizing their properties and evicting their families. Midwestern farmers set up the Farmers’ Holiday Association, which coordinated an effort to prevent foreclosure auctions and, in some states, dumped large quantities of milk and vegetables in protest of low prices. Kentucky coal miners struck over a 10 percent wage cut in 1931, and the following year, Ford Motor Company workers walked off the job. Both strikes were violently broken, but employers’ use of armed force against the workers enraged many people around the nation and fueled a revival of the labor movement.

In dozens of cities, unemployed people rioted over unaffordable rent and food. In some thirty-seven states, they joined associations known as unemployed councils. Although some were founded by the American Communist Party (which counted just twelve thousand members in 1930), the majority of the councils’ three hundred thousand members were neither communist nor politically motivated. Rather, in the early years of the Depression, most councils were committed primarily to what they called “self-help”—finding ways to feed, shelter, and otherwise protect their members.

Self-help flourished everywhere. In Seattle, unemployed councils fed the jobless by borrowing fishermen’s boats and securing local farmers’ permission for workers to pick over lower quality produce. In Pennsylvania, twenty thousand unemployed coal miners dug small mines on company land and sold the “bootlegged” coal. In Chicago, whenever a sheriff evicted a family and put their belongings out on the street, the local council immediately dispatched a band of neighbors to reopen the home, return the property, and occupy the city’s poor relief office until officials agreed to pay the family’s rent. Such actions were sometimes illegal, but Americans were generally sympathetic, and officials seldom prosecuted. Chicago’s city government eventually suspended the evictions.

Schemes such as these softened the blows of unemployment, but they did not address the root cause. Gradually, Americans began to demand more systematic relief, protesting the federal government’s relative lack of action. Hoover refused a plea for increased federal aid to the unemployed and to low-wage workers. Millions of jobless people inter-the end of 1931, the once-popular Hoover was well on his way to becoming the most reviled president in the nation’s history.

The largest and most effective protest came in June 1932 as twenty thousand unemployed World War I veterans and their families marched from all corners of the country to the nation’s capital. Once there, this Bonus Army demanded early payment of veterans’ bonuses that were due in 1945. Rebuffed by President Hoover, the veterans set up camp and refused to leave, hoisting banners with messages such as “We were heroes in 1917, but we’re bums now.” Most of the campers dispersed when the Senate voted down a House bill for the immediate payment of their bonuses, but two thousand dug in. Increasingly embarrassed, the president ultimately ordered the U.S. Army to disperse the remaining protestors. A fleet of six tanks and two regiments of the Third Cavalry razed the campsite, injuring over a hundred veterans (and killing one baby) in the process.

The Election of 1932

Following the routing of the Bonus Army, public opinion swung even more strongly against Hoover. Nonetheless, going into the election of 1932, Republicans retained the embattled Hoover as their candidate. Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR), a wealthy New York politician and distant cousin of former president Theodore Roosevelt, won the Democratic nomination. Permanently paralyzed from the waist down by polio, which he had contracted at the age of thirty-nine, Roosevelt brought to the Democratic ticket boundless optimism and the fighting spirit that had carried him through his health crisis. As governor of New York since 1928, FDR had actively promoted state relief programs. His track record led party members to agree that he, more than any other Democrat, had the right experience to guide the nation out of the Depression.

Drawing strength from the popular disaffection with Hoover, Roosevelt lambasted the president for his evident lack of leadership, proclaiming that his opponent’s insides were “made of jelly.” FDR promised a “new deal for the American people” based on fresh ideas and the willingness to experiment. Other than ending voluntarism, it was unclear—both to FDR and to voters—exactly what the New Deal would involve. But the Democrat’s resolve to end the Depression and to lead boldly struck a chord with voters, who carried him into the White House with a significant majority (see Map 24.1). By also electing a Democratic House and Senate, voters effectively empowered FDR to carry out his agenda.

FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT AND THE FIRST NEW DEAL

The U.S. economy was at its lowest ebb when FDR was inaugurated in March 1933. One in every three adults was unemployed, and almost half the nation was at or below the poverty line. A deep, collective anxiety gripped all but the wealthiest Americans. The new president was convinced that the free-market system could survive only if it were thoroughly reformed. He also believed that he needed to act swiftly and decisively—and, unlike his predecessor, he understood that success would depend partly on the government’s ability to communicate directly and persuasively with citizens. The First New Deal was as much a sustained campaign against popular fear and lack of confidence as it was a set of structural economic reforms. FDR set out to rebuild Americans’ confidence in government, the free-market system, and themselves. Within days of his inauguration, he took the first of several emergency actions and recruited a team of leading economists, sociologists, and planners to draft long-term reforms. Lacking a master plan, the First New Deal was a trial-by-error process of experimentation and innovation.

Emergency Reform

FDR wasted no time in launching what historians call the First New Deal (1933–1934). Within three days of entering office, he took the unprecedented step of closing the nation’s banks, effectively ending the run on banks, which had escalated between the election and Roosevelt’s inauguration. The president also sent Congress an emergency bill that protected the larger institutions from the cascading bankruptcies of smaller ones. The resulting Emergency Banking Act (1933) directed the Treasury to inspect all banks and to reopen only those that could afford to operate. Federal assistance was extended to many of the more stable banks, while dozens of weaker ones were subject to mandatory reorganization.
Twenty-four hours later, FDR successfully pressed Congress to cut government salaries and veterans’ pensions by almost 15 percent, a move that instantly trimmed $1 billion from the federal budget—and that boldly signaled to business that FDR was prepared to cut government spending. By the end of the week, FDR had backed a third major bill—a modification of the Volstead Act that would allow the production and sale of beer. Roosevelt thereby sought to free the federal government from the expense of enforcing an unpopular law and to empower the states to tax the popular beverage. He also supported the full repeal of the rest of Prohibition, which Congress carried out later in 1933.

Reconstructing the Economy

Having taken swift emergency action, the administration embarked on the hard work of framing legislation aimed at reorganizing and stabilizing every major sector of the economy. All New Dealers shared the goal of reviving the economy, but disagreement existed over how to do so. The New Dealers tended to fall within one of two camps. One group believed that private interests—farmers, business leaders, workers—should dominate the planning process. The other camp argued that the government should be the principal planning agent in the new economy. Both approaches influenced the extraordinarily comprehensive set of reforms that the Roosevelt administration shepherded through Congress in what has come to be called the first hundred days (March 9–June 17, 1933).

Tackling the decimated farming sector first, the Agricultural Adjustment Act (1933) buoyed the prices of basic agricultural products such as wheat and corn and thus provided some immediate relief for beleaguered farmers. Reforming the financial sector—whose reckless practices had helped run up stock and property values in the late 1920s—was next. Under the Truth in Securities Act (1933), all corporations issuing new shares had to provide the public with complete and accurate information about their securities, including financial accounts that theoretically enabled investors to assess a company’s viability. Congress also established the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), which insured deposits in banks so that customers would not rush to withdraw their funds in mass panic, plunging the banks into crisis. The following year, FDR also established the Security and Exchange Commission, which he charged with policing the stock market. The new Federal Housing Administration made fair, affordable mortgages available by insuring bank loans extended for the purpose of home purchase or construction.

Relieving unemployment was also a priority in FDR’s first hundred days. Rather than giving cash handouts to America’s fifteen million jobless, however, the administration endeavored to put men back to work in the belief that paid employment would restore self-respect and affirm their identity as productive breadwinners and citizens. Under the new Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), the government established a series of massive new public employment schemes, many aimed at improving roads, bridges, and other infrastructure. Over four million people worked on road, school, and park construction under the direction of FERA’s Civil Works Association between 1934 and 1936. By 1937, the Civilian Conservation Corps was providing work and training for six hundred thousand young men through energetic, highly disciplined work in the nation’s parks and wilderness areas. Other massive public works were undertaken in the First New Deal by the Tennessee Valley Authority, including the world’s largest hydroelectric project (see Networking Rural America, below).

The most significant and ambitious reform of the First New Deal was the National Industrial Recovery Act, a sweeping law that fundamentally altered U.S. industrial relations and dramatically extended public work schemes. This act was a compromise between the United States Chamber of Commerce—a powerful business lobby that wanted the right to stabilize prices across entire industries—and theDemocratic Party’s commitment to organized labor. The law authorized businesses to set prices for any given industry and guaranteed workers the right to join a union and to collectively bargain with their employers. It also authorized the creation of the National Recovery Administration (NRA), which worked with business to establish production codes that specified work hours, wage rates, and the quality and quantity of products for over seven hundred industries. As well, the NRA brought government, business, and labor together to negotiate and agree on fair wages and prices.

By the end of 1933, the government had invested $6 billion in over 13,000 federal projects and 2,500 local projects that together employed over five million Americans. The sweep of these agricultural, financial, unemployment, and environmental reforms—all undertaken in just over three months—radically altered both the function and the extent of federal government. Never before, in times of peace, had the government taken such an aggressive and visible role in American life. Even in the long-dormant arena of Indian affairs, the government took dramatic action to ease poverty and re-empower the nation’s most disenfranchised communities. Known as the Indian New Deal, the Indian Reorganization Act (1934) ended the half-century-old system of allotment (which broke up communal lands and allotted them to individual Indian owners; see Chapter 17). It also authorized tribes to write their own constitutions and returned the management of communal lands to tribal councils. Federal funds were made available to the tribes for purchasing land and educational development.

Communicating Reform

Even before entering office, the president-elect began talking to the public about the economic crisis. “The only thing to fear,” FDR counseled millions of radio listeners in his inaugural address, “is fear itself.” Just three days later came the first of over thirty fireside chats in which Roosevelt explained and sold his ideas for the New Deal. Adopting an informal and fatherly manner, as though gathering the family around the hearth, he aimed to instill confidence in a frightened citizenry, reassuring them that they had a steady, caring, and utterly committed president who took their suffering seriously. “I never saw him,” reflected one listener, “but I knew him. Can you have forgotten how, with his voice, he came into our house, the President of these United States, calling us friends. . . .”

Radio broadcasts were not the only way FDR’s government informed, persuaded, and reassured the American public about the First New Deal. Drawing on the latest advertising techniques, the government also used print, visual media (such as billboards), documentary movies, and even the relatively new strategy of product branding. General Hugh S. Johnson, director of the National Recovery Administration, ordered the design of a Blue Eagle icon and authorized all businesses that complied with NRA code standards to display the eagle. “When every American housewife understands that the Blue Eagle on everything that she permits into her home is a symbol of its restoration to security,” proclaimed Johnson, pointing to women’s important role as household shopper, “may God have mercy on the man or group of men who attempt to trifle with this bird.” Business rushed to display the banner, and by 1934 the eagle had become a ubiquitous symbol of economic recovery.

Popular Responses

By mid-1934, the First New Deal had achieved two of its three key objectives. The panic and fear that had gripped the nation under Hoover had been expelled. In their place arose a cautious optimism that the Depression might soon end and that FDR would be the one to end it. The reforms had also averted the complete collapse of the nation’s financial system and stimulated production. However, they had not ended the Depression or even significantly ameliorated some of its worst effects. In 1935, ten million Americans were still without work, and millions more could not make ends meet.

The sluggish economy invited a barrage of criticism. Breaking with FDR in 1933, charismatic senator Huey P. Long of Louisiana went on national radio to advocate a far more radical redistribution of wealth. His Share-Our-Wealth Plan called for high taxes for the wealthy, government-guaranteed subsidies of $5,000 for families, and an annual minimum wage of $2,500. Though highly controversial, Long’s plan proved popular enough that he considered running against FDR for the Democratic Party’s nomination for president in the next election. An assassin’s bullet, however, would deprive Long of that opportunity— and his life—in 1935.

Workers and labor unions also grew impatient. With the enactment of the National Industrial Recovery Act, union membership ballooned— especially in big industries, such as automobiles—from a few hundred thousand to 3.6 million by 1935 (about 14 percent of the industrial workforce) and to 10 million by 1941. Their confidence renewed, the unions insisted that government could do much more to help workers and the unemployed. Many protested that the National Recovery Administration was not procuring true cooperation between business and labor. In particular, many of the largest corporations shaped production codes to their own needs, at workers’ expense. Employers also continued to slash wages.

In 1934, over 1.5 million workers expressed their dissatisfaction by staging more than two thousand strikes. Most of the work stoppages were in protest of repeated wage cuts, and many were spontaneous. When employers recruited strikebreakers from among the unemployed, violence erupted. In one such episode, one thousand workers responded to the use of strikebreakers in the Electric Auto-Lite factory in Toledo, Ohio, by surrounding the plant. When another nine thousand supporters joined the picket line, the police and the National Guard attempted to disperse them, and a bloody battle ensued.

Of all the protests, the San Francisco waterfront strike became the most vivid—and most publicized—demonstration of workers’ surging strength. As in other industries, dockworkers’ union membership rates had soared to 95 percent following passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act. In the summer of 1934, a small but determined faction led by communist Harry Bridges walked out in protest of the “shape-up” system by which dockworkers mustered at 6 a.m. every day in the hope that the company foreman would employ them. When shippers attempted to replace the strikers, workers in dozens of other San Francisco industries stopped work, paralyzing the city. As gas stations ran dry and San Franciscans began hoarding food, National Recovery Administration director General Hugh S. Johnson publicly condemned the San Francisco general strike as a “civil war.” After a few days, the American Federation of Labor agreed, distancing themselves from the dockworkers and calling for an end to the strike. The dockworkers eventually won their original demand, but not before they fought deadly pitched battles with National Guard, police, and private security forces.

Other critics condemned New Deal initiatives as too timid—though not because they had failed to empower unions and workers. From Detroit, Catholic “Radio Priest” Charles Coughlin raged against the president for refusing to take direct control of the nation’s banks and to increase the money supply, a move that Coughlin thought would enable homeowners to pay their mortgages. Father Coughlin’s weekly sermons reached forty million listeners—an astounding 60 percent of the national radio audience. While FDR counseled against “fear itself,” Coughlin fear-mongered on a massive scale, warning that an international conspiracy of bankers, Jews, communists, and Wall Street brokers was running America. Millions joined his National Union for Social Justice, which demanded nationalization—that is, government takeover—of all banks, some industries, and the railroads.

Business Against Reform

Many business leaders were equally perturbed by the First New Deal, though on radically different grounds from both Coughlin and workers. Leading financiers and industrialists initially rejected FDR’s argument that capitalism’s future lay in its reform. Establishing the Liberty League in 1934, they condemned the New Deal as anti-capitalist and un-American and lobbied hard for its defeat. They were joined by the National Association of Manufacturers, which launched a full-scale media campaign against the reforms, claiming that they were “socialistic” and a radical departure from established principles. Pointing to the shutdown in San Francisco, the pro-business Los Angeles Times insisted that the protesters’ action had not been a general strike but “an insurrection—a Communist-inspired and led revolt against organized government.”

A majority of justices on the U.S. Supreme Court agreed. Dominated by an older generation that was committed to the principle of liberty of contract (which held that unions and collective bargaining impinged on the freedom to negotiate one’s own job contract), the Court struck down key reforms. The first case involved New York’s Schechter Poultry Company, which had been convicted in a state court of selling diseased chickens to consumers in violation of the National Recovery Administration’s poultry code. In 1935, Schechter appealed the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which reversed the conviction on the grounds that the executive branch of the federal government lacked the constitutional authority to regulate commerce in New York or any other state. The government was forced to disband the codes system, and the use of the Blue Eagle was prohibited. Shortly afterward, the Court rejected the Agriculture Adjustment Act, a coal conservation measure, and New York State’s minimum wage law. In light of these restrictive judicial rulings, the future of the New Deal appeared bleak.

THE SECOND NEW DEAL

By 1935, the First New Deal was under attack from business, a conservative Supreme Court, masses of disaffected workers, and an increasingly frustrated middle class. Faced with a choice between reversing or extending reform, FDR chose the latter. He abandoned his conciliatory approach to big business and began publicly deriding the “money classes,” boasting that “we have earned the hatred of entrenched greed.” Such rhetoric drew implicitly on the United States’ populist tradition of suspicion toward large corporations and banks (see Chapters 19 and 20). It also implicitly acknowledged that millions of voters were persuaded by Father Coughlin and more moderate critics that the banks were an obstacle to prosperity. With an election year looming, decrying big business promised to earn back the support of millions of disillusioned voters. The president was also genuinely convinced that greater economic stimulation and the redistribution of a larger portion of the nation’s wealth to the American people were vital to rebuilding the economy.

Extending Reform

In a nod to the labor unions’ growing power, the first major reform of the Second New Deal was the Wagner Act (1935), which provided that all nonagricultural workers could join unions and prohibited employers from firing or otherwise coercing workers who chose to do so. The law also established a nonpartisan board that would supervise union elections and enforce collective bargaining rather than merely allow it—union goals since the Gilded Age. The Social Security Act (1935) provided that employers and employees would pay a tax into a general fund that would pay retired workers a pension. The same law also established the first direct federal assistance to the unemployed, imposing a tax on employers that funded compensation for anyone recently thrown out of work.

FDR also fortified existing employment programs, including the Works Progress Administration (WPA), which now became the principal federal relief agency. Over the next eight years, 8.5 million Americans would work for the WPA. The federal government would invest $10.5 billion in WPA projects, which included construction, art, and architecture (and even a program to build swimming pools; see Spaces and Places: Swope Park Swimming Pool, Kansas City, Missouri). On the income side, the Revenue Act of 1935 raised taxes on estates, personal income, and corporations. Although the law brought in only $250 million in tax revenues each year, it symbolized the government’s tougher stance toward large corporations and the superwealthy— and reassured middle and working-class voters of FDR’s commitment to a more equitable distribution of wealth. Finally, racial injustice drew the attention of some members of the Roosevelt administration. Mary McLeod Bethune, a college president and a member of Roosevelt’s “Black Cabinet” (a group that advised the president on African American affairs), pressed FDR to recognize the Depression’s disproportionate toll on African Americans. Bethune also worked with the new National Youth Administration to ensure that more than two hundred thousand African American youth received the same training opportunities available to young white people.

The Election of 1936

Powered by diverse popular support for his initiatives, FDR competed in the election of 1936 with a much broader, and even more solid, base of support than in 1932. The majority of voters appeared convinced by his argument that “to preserve [capitalism] we had to reform.” White workers, unions, African Americans in the North (those in the South had limited voting rights), ethnic and religious minorities, middle-class professionals, pensioners, and even progressive Republicans reelected FDR in the biggest landslide victory in the nation’s history (see Map 24.2). Father Coughlin’s National Union for Social Justice, which had fielded a number of candidates for Congress, fared poorly, as did the Liberty League, a protest organization formed by conservative Democrats with links to the business world. Both groups collapsed after FDR’s reelection.

The president interpreted his landslide victory as a mandate to extend the Second New Deal (see Table 24.2). To that end, he consolidated his authority as president, insulating many federal agencies from congressional oversight and creating six new assistant positions in the cabinet, each directly answerable to the White House. Roosevelt’s only remaining opponent was the Supreme Court. Because the justices were lifelong appointees, the Court’s opposition posed a real and ongoing threat. Taking the offense, FDR asked Congress for legislation that would radically alter the structure of the Court by ultimately expanding the number of justices from nine to fifteen. This court-packing scheme would allow him to nominate enough sympathetic justices to outweigh the conservatives. In the end, however, Congress rejected the scheme. Still, FDR’s well-publicized threat appeared to serve his purpose, as the justices subsequently affirmed the constitutionality of New Deal legislation.

A New Deal for the Arts

The Great Depression brought a surge of activity in the arts, largely because President Roosevelt believed that professional artists, like other workers, needed employment and that the creative arts were crucial to raising the nation’s morale. At no other time has government funded the arts as generously as it did between 1935 and 1943, allocating around $100 million, equivalent to $1.7 billion today. And neither before nor since have artists so emphatically shaped local and national culture.

Most government funding for the arts was channeled via the WPA, which created four federal “projects” (agencies) representing the visual arts, theater, music, and writing. The forty thousand artists employed by the WPA fanned out into every state, often working in remote areas that had never before seen art exhibitions or professional performances—or been the subject of films, books, and other artwork. The Federal Music Project alone put to work over fifteen thousand unemployed musicians to perform for public and radio audiences. By 1940, the project had also provided music lessons for eighteen million eager American students.

Painters and sculptors of the Federal Art Project transformed tens of thousands of public spaces—including parks, schools, and post offices—with vibrant murals, sculptures, and paintings. Much of this work portrayed scenes from early America, which many artists depicted nostalgically as a happy and prosperous place unlike their own world. There followed an outpouring of books, magazines, and movies on the American past, and the theme also influenced home design and decoration. Some artists, however, chose contemporary, and often quite controversial, subject matter, such as labor strikes. The Federal Theatre Project sponsored even bolder work, starting with Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here (1935), a satire about a populist presidential candidate who promises to return the United States to prosperity but instead puts the nation on the path to fascism.  Edgier still was The Living Newspaper series, in which playwrights took a controversial issue from newspaper headlines and worked with unemployed journalists to develop a script on that theme. Injunction Granted (1936), for example, lampooned business tycoons such as H. J. Heinz and encouraged workers to join a radical union. Warned by WPA administrators that such explicitly political material might lead to a loss of federal funding, directors toned down subsequent plays. Nonetheless, they continued to champion the concerns of ordinary workers and consumers and to provide much needed employment to actors and other theater workers.

Many of the journalists, novelists, and other writers employed by the Federal Writers Project went to work on a series of WPA guidebooks to every state in the nation. These lengthy volumes offered the most exhaustive historical and cultural guide to America ever produced. Each contained essays on the state’s history and culture, major cities, and tourist attractions, and many also collected oral histories from remote or little-understood communities of sharecroppers, former slaves, and migrant workers. Some state governments, particularly in the South, objected to the writers’ liberalism and decided to publish no more than a few hundred copies of their work. But the guides’ focus on the lives of ordinary people influenced American literature for years to come—and launched the careers of Richard Wright, Studs Terkel, and dozens of other influential writers of the post-Depression era.

ADAPTING CONSUMER CULTURE

Consumer culture suffered a heavy economic blow in the Depression’s early stages. But as advertisers responded to hard times with new messages aimed at thrifty homemakers, American consumption patterns grew far more homogenized than before. At the same time, the large-scale purveyors of commercial entertainment found a larger audience among the unemployed and those simply looking for a cheap escape from their woes. By the late 1930s, tens of millions ate the new “American diet,” watched the same upbeat Hollywood films, whistled the same catchy advertising jingles, and buried themselves in the same best-selling novels. Optimistic and nostalgic themes prevailed, and consumers took comfort in participating in a truly national culture. But consumer tastes also fragmented in new ways, as the Depression and New Deal stimulated the formation of novel identities—and potential markets—such as that of the “teenager.” Not everyone was content with the expansion of advertising and consumer industries. A new consumer rights movement insisted that ordinary people should have more say over the quality and content of products and the truthfulness of advertising—and by the mid-1930s, concerned citizens called on Congress to enact a New Deal for consumers.

Entertaining the Nation

Forced unemployment and underemployment gave millions of Americans up to fifty extra hours of spare time each week. The New Deal also expanded many workers’ spare time by cutting the waged workweek to just forty hours (a historic low) and capping it with the two-day rest known as “the week-end.” (Until the 1930s, only organized workers in building and construction, the clothing and needle trades, and printing and publishing had won that concession from employers.) Americans explored new ways of meaningfully filling their increased free time. Knitting, reading, and other solitary pastimes became popular. Millions joined hobby, bowling, or athletic clubs. A miniature golf craze—spurred by competitions featuring large cash prizes—swept the nation. And a softball tournament at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1933 turned baseball’s younger sibling into a popular pastime.

Although the Depression initially had an adverse effect on Hollywood and other culture industries, companies saw tremendous long-term potential in the sudden expansion of spare time and people’s creative efforts to fill it. Consumers wanted to escape the harsh realities of contemporary life—and upbeat and pleasurable movies, books, and other media were ideally suited to that purpose. Firms adopting this strategy grew dramatically, producing dozens of “hits” (a new term in the 1930s), whereas realistic and critical treatments of Depression-era themes mostly failed.

Record sales—which had lagged behind sheet music sales in the 1920s—boomed, thanks partly to the industry’s decision to halve the price of discs and to introduce cheap record players. Eager to integrate consumers into a single national market, Columbia and Decca led the way by softening the sound of jazz and blues and homogenizing the equally diverse traditions of country music. The introduction of jukeboxes to restaurants, soda fountains, and other venues after 1933 further sped the emergence of a national record market. By the end of 1935, millions of Americans eagerly tuned in to the National Broadcast Corporation (NBC) Your Lucky Strike Hit Parade radio show, which counted down the ten best-selling hits of the week. (The show was named after the sponsor’s cigarette brand; also see Hot Commodities: Cigarettes.) The same year, a derivative of jazz—an energetic, rhythmic form of dance music known as swing—swept the nation, accounting for almost one-third of all record sales for the remainder of the decade.

As in the music industry, Depression-era publishers were most successful with titles that distracted readers from the harsh realities of life. For instance, detective novels, which accounted for more than half of all book sales, involved readers in intricate mysteries, often transporting them to exotic or luxurious locales. The authors of the second most popular literary genre, historical fiction, took readers back to a happier time in the nation’s past, much as most painters, architects, and interior design experts were doing. Book clubs, such as the Literary Guild and Book-of-the-Month Club, selected a fresh title each month for tens of thousands of avid subscribers, often turning little-known books into instant best sellers. New genres such as pulp magazines and comic books became wildly popular, and Superman became a mass phenomenon in 1938, fighting for social causes of the sort that the New Deal promoted—and tirelessly rescuing young women from certain doom.

Of all the mass media, cinema most tightly integrated consumers into a single national audience, although radio came in a close second. Movie attendance had initially fallen off after the Wall Street crash, to about $75 million in box office sales per week, and this decline forced almost a third of all cinemas to close. By 1934, attendance was springing back, and within a few years Americans were watching more “talking pictures” than ever before. The cinema chains of the 1920s grew bigger, absorbing many of the smaller operations that had been forced to close. As cinema empires mushroomed, moviegoers in New York and Chicago increasingly watched the same movies, newsreels, shorts, and advertisements as audiences in Houston and Seattle—and their children attended the same Saturday matinees.

With just a few exceptions, most Hollywood movies avoided direct mention of the Depression. Convinced that Americans wanted to escape grim reality for a few hours each week, the studios cranked out dozens of light, entertaining movies. President Roosevelt commended Hollywood for making it possible for every American to “pay 15 cents, go to a movie . . . and forget his troubles.” Among the diverting genres, musicals proved particularly popular, following Warner Brothers’ release in 1933 of 42nd Street, which told the story of a plucky young chorus girl struggling to become a Broadway star. The movie’s toe-tapping melodies, cheering message, and elegant “streamlined” set made it the first of many musicals to enthrall audiences— and to break box office records.

Other genres indirectly engaged audiences’ Depression-era fears and desires and sought to reassure viewers. New “screwball comedies” typically poked fun at a rich eccentric who became romantically attached to a working or middle-class protagonist. Offering the latter a chance at upward mobility and sudden success, such stories resonated powerfully at a time of widespread joblessness and anxieties about gender roles. Horror films portrayed—and slayed—a raft of terrifying monsters, including Dracula and Frankenstein. And by 1933, gangster movies were glamorizing Federal Bureau of Investigation agents who killed gangsters and brought law and order to the city.

Inventing the Teenager

High unemployment and New Deal policies also effected lasting change in youths’ lives— and in adults’ attitudes toward young people. Most conspicuously, attending high school (which only half of all youth had done before 1930) became the norm. The towering unemployment rates of the era disproportionately affected young Americans, who accounted for almost a quarter of the fifteen million thrown out of work. As in subsequent recessions, enrolling in school made it possible to delay entry into a difficult job market, and by 1940, almost three-quarters of all high-school-age youth stayed in school. College attendance grew by half, although, by today’s standards, the rate remained low, with just three in every twenty college-age Americans enrolled.

Throughout the cities, high school students gathered in basements, abandoned buildings, and the backrooms of stores to form their own “congresses” and “cellar” or athletic clubs. By the late 1930s, almost a third of all American adolescents belonged to a club. The clubs provided members with dance nights, freedom from adult supervision, status, the recognition of their peers, and sometimes even the possibility of employment.

Like the city neighborhoods in which they arose, clubs were often organized along racial and ethnic lines. Significantly, they fostered a new social identity—that of the teenager, who was neither a child nor an adult but an adolescent who spent most of his or her time in the company of peers. A distinct teen culture emerged with its own unique slang, including going steady to refer to a teenage couple’s agreement to date only each other, and parking, which meant cuddling and kissing in an automobile, usually after dark.

Before long, federal youth agencies and sociologists grew concerned that teenage clubs were encouraging truancy and petty crime (some did, but many did not) and that teens’ newfound independence made them vulnerable to subversion. Many parents moreover worried that teens’ peers had more influence over their children than did traditional authority figures. WPA youth agencies tried working with teens to redirect them “back into the fold of the school,” offering after-school vocational and recreational programs. But as one agency worker despaired, these efforts generally failed because youth preferred “paying 25 cents admission every Friday night to a [club] dance . . . to the accompaniment of a Victrola [record player]” over free, supervised events at the local school gymnasium. Teenagers—and adults’ perceptions that they were a vulnerable and potentially disruptive force in society—were here to stay.

Ever watchful for social trends that might entail new commercial possibilities, the powerful forces of advertising targeted teenagers for the first time. Record companies and jazz musicians promoted music specifically aimed at them, sparking the swing dance craze and a run on the short white “bobby socks” that teenage girls wore while jitterbugging. Even products that seemingly had nothing to do with teens, such as baker’s yeast and peanuts, now promised to clear teens’ acne or energize them and make them the most popular boys or girls in school. Magazines such as American Girl and Boy’s Life encouraged teens to acquire the skills and personality traits that would make them responsible adults and consumers. The content of these publications reinforced conventional gender roles, informing girls that marriage and children were the highest achievement in life and downplaying the possibility of a career or anything else that might put them in competition with boys and men.

Refining the American Diet

Like other industrialists, food manufacturers for several decades had hired armies of advertisers and branding experts to pitch their products. But it was only during the Depression— and with help from radio advertising—that the food industry was able to turn regional markets into a single national market. A distinctive American diet, consisting of the same range of everyday foodstuffs and recipes, displaced most immigrant-ethnic cuisines (with the exception of simple Italian foods, such as spaghetti and meatballs). Regional cuisines— among them Louisiana’s Cajun, midwestern German and Scandinavian, and southwestern Mexican—were sidelined to county fairs and local festivals.

Americans began eating many of the brands and foodstuffs we recognize today. Instead of a cooked breakfast or unprocessed dry cereal, for instance, consumers filled their bowls with Wheaties, Cheerioats (later renamed Cheerios), or Grape-Nuts, all of which they first heard about on the radio or saw in national magazines. Highly processed white bread replaced brown and whole grain loaves, and margarine—a butter substitute that the dairy industry had attempted to block since the nineteenth century—won a small but growing segment of the market.

Although the new national diet consisted of many of the same meats, grains, vegetables, and fruits as before, manufacturers now commonly blended the food with new chemical preservatives, colorings, coagulants, and other agents. New laboratory-produced preservatives made possible the production of “pre-prepared” foods containing highly perishable ingredients such as raw egg and dairy products. Coagulants and other agents stopped manufactured foodstuffs from separating or acquiring an unappetizing texture or appearance, and chemical coloring enhanced the look of freshness and goodness. Instead of spending time making mayonnaise from scratch or having to throw stale crackers into the trash, a 1930s housewife could reach for the Miracle Whip or open a package of Ritz crackers that would stay fresh for weeks.

Some nutritionists questioned the health value of preprepared foods, and consumer rights advocates warned of possible adverse health effects. Food processors, however, correctly calculated that middle-class housewives, who typically lost their domestic servants when the Depression hit and now had to do the cooking themselves, wanted to spend less time in the kitchen. Cheap pre-prepared foods would allow them to do so.

Advertising Wars

Manufacturers’ success during this period of economic hardship largely came courtesy of advertisers, who adapted their techniques to the times. Conscious of the public’s rejection of the fantasy-driven messages of the 1920s, they now emphasized the product—its quality, affordability, and immediate gratifications to be had by buying it. As in the culture industries, the vast majority avoided direct mention of the Depression (which, they feared, might lead consumers to close their wallets) but implicitly acknowledged the crisis by hinting or even declaring that “prosperity is just around the corner.” Most printed advertisements provided hard information about products and prices, replacing the lavish, colorful illustrations of the previous decade with bold, black and white print and photographs, which were also less expensive to produce. Coupons also became a common way of attracting customers.

Meanwhile, for the first time, American homes filled with the sound of lively advertising jingles from the commercial sponsors of popular radio shows. Through their sponsorship of new, nationally syndicated programs such as The Jack Benny Show, advertisers turned obscure brands such as Pepsodent, Jell-O, Lucky Strike, and Pabst Blue Ribbon into household names—sometimes overnight.

Even as consumers were being bombarded with national advertising, they were also becoming more aware of its powers of manipulation. The consumer movement of the Progressive Era, which had collapsed after World War I, had already begun to revive in the late 1920s with the publication of Stuart Chase and Frederick J. Schlink’s best-seller Your Money’s Worth (1927). Most advertising, argued Chase and Schlink, deliberately deceived consumers and lacked social value. But it was only with the Depression and consumers’ shock at the financial collapse that consumer awareness became a mass phenomenon. By the early 1930s, dozens of books, magazines, and pamphlets were declaring deceptive advertising a major social problem.

The publication of Schlink and Alfred Kallet’s 100,000,000 Guinea Pigs: Dangers in Everyday Foods, Drugs, and Cosmetics (1933) also brought the quality of consumer goods under scrutiny. Of special concern were products that contained life-threatening chemicals and other agents. Hundreds of thousands of concerned citizens flocked to new organizations such as Consumer Research Incorporated, which assessed the composition and quality of home appliances, foods, and other goods and exposed fraudulent advertising. Other, more radical consumer rights groups such as the Consumers Union argued that business was pounding the nation with so many commercial messages that civic and religious values were collapsing.

Both wings of the consumer rights movement lobbied Congress and state legislatures for “truth-in-advertising” laws and stricter quality controls on foods, pharmaceuticals, and other goods. Seeking to put objective information in consumers’ hands, they also called upon the federal government to rate all goods for their safety and quality. Advertisers and manufacturers meanwhile launched a counteroffensive, insisting that advertising was a form of free speech and thus protected from government censorship under the Constitution. They offered instead to regulate themselves as an industry (like Hollywood) and to establish their own truth-in-advertising codes. Though sympathetic to consumers, President Roosevelt did not weigh in on the problem. Poorly funded and vastly outmaneuvered, consumer rights advocates settled for the watered-down Food, Drug, and Cosmetics Act of 1938, which required drug makers to prove the safety of their products before selling them to the public.

RURAL WORLDS TRANSFORMED

Although cities were the hub of American life, politics, and consumer culture in the 1930s, the nation was far from fully urbanized. Almost two in five people lived in rural areas, and in 1935 a record thirty-three million people made their homes on farms. Still, farming had been under siege since the agricultural recession of the early 1920s, and hundreds of thousands of farmers had left the land in the 1920s. The Great Depression, which caused thousands of rural banks to fail, accelerated the rural exodus. To make matters worse, a severe drought struck in 1931, causing crop failures in every state but Maine and Vermont and turning the southern plains into a giant dust bowl. President Roosevelt extended expert assistance, research, and funding to farming. But millions of farmers were displaced. Hundreds of thousands from the dust-stricken plains subsequently headed to California and the Pacific Northwest in search of bountiful orchards, green valleys, and a fresh start.

Demise of Sharecropping and Tenant Farming

The Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 was the first of many federal efforts to relieve farmers and reconstruct the farming sector. It sought to raise prices and farmers’ incomes by paying farmers to plant one-third fewer acres and raise one-third fewer animals. All farmers qualified for this program, which was funded by a consumer tax on processed food. Farmers killed six million pigs and destroyed tens of millions of acres of grain and cotton crops in the first year to meet the law’s requirements. Opponents of government intervention in agriculture meanwhile raged at the “slaughter of the little pigs.” The scheme appeared to work, however, forcing up prices and saving many farmers—at least for another year or two.

Unfortunately, the Agricultural Adjustment Act had unintended consequences. Paying farmers to destroy crops left many growers—particularly tenant farmers and sharecroppers— without a lasting source of income or the means to pay their landlords. Landlords often took the subsidies for themselves and used the money to replace sharecroppers and tenant farmers with the latest mechanical plows, harvesters, and tractors. Within a few years, hundreds of thousands were thrown off the land, and sharecropping and tenant farming became all but extinct. Although the government attempted to resettle the displaced farmers, fewer than five thousand consented; others preferred to migrate under their own steam.

After the Supreme Court, in 1936, ruled the Agricultural Adjustment Act’s food tax unconstitutional, the new Farm Security Administration (FSA) helped tenant farmers purchase their own farms. But the program was underfunded and did little to stem farmers’ migration. All told, more than 3.5 million Americans left their farms by 1940, returning almost ten million acres of farmland to nature. Most moved locally, but over a million headed to the agricultural “Golden State” of California, where they boosted that state’s population by more than 20 percent in just a few years.

Leaving the Dust Bowl

The exodus of farmers was particularly pronounced on the plains of Kansas, eastern Colorado, and the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma (see Map 24.3). Farming had always been tough in the region, with its extreme weather, wind-whipped prairie fires, and periodic droughts. By the 1930s, years of intensive wheat cultivation had stripped the terrain of grasses and other vegetation that stabilized the soil. Drought struck in 1931, causing massive dust storms known as “dusters.” Three years later, the worst storms in memory buried whole farms in thick black sand, stripping the earth of three hundred million tons of soil and carrying some of it—along with the taste and smell of the plains—all the way to New York City. Less dramatic but no less destructive were sand blows, which formed high drifts and coated everything and everybody with thick dust. Dusters and black blizzards continued to wreak havoc across the Dust Bowl through 1939.

Initially most farmers had responded stoically on the belief that the rains would return the following year. Many had approached the situation with dark humor. “Great bargains in real estate,” one shop window sign read, in reference to fifty-foot soil drifts; “bring your own container.” Local chambers of commerce insisted that the region was just fine and angrily criticized the few newspapers that declared the storms a catastrophe. But the drought continued—and when the first black blizzards struck, many farmers’ faith in the future crumbled. Calling upon President Roosevelt to act, they insisted that the drought, not social factors such as grass clearance and soil exhaustion, was the root cause of their troubles. Water was needed, they declared, and the federal government ought to dam and divert rivers to give it to them.

As plains dust fell like snow on the National Mall, the Roosevelt administration resolved to act. Over the following several years, the government spent more money on the Dust Bowl than on any other region in the nation. Despite farmers’ insistence that water was the issue, the FSA soon realized that the problem was far graver and more complicated and that ecological, economic, and cultural factors—including the popular attitude that land was primarily there to be exploited—would have to change. In 1935, federal dollars poured into disease prevention, literacy, soil conservation, and a host of other programs.

The aid enabled many farmers to stay on the land—and they rewarded FDR by voting for him in the election of 1936. But the poorest sharecroppers continued to leave. Thousands of “Okies”—poor white rural folk from Oklahoma and other plains states—joined the swelling migration to California. Processions of their dust-encrusted cars rumbled over the state line. However, many of the newcomers found California inhospitable. Police, coping with their own poor and destitute, sometimes turned back the migrants. Everywhere, the downtrodden Okies faced something they had never experienced before—explicit discrimination. Signs such as “Negroes and Okies Upstairs” directed the newcomers to segregated seating or excluded them altogether.

Barred from many towns, thousands squatted in camps they called “Little Oklahomas.” About 175,000 found seasonal waged work on “factory farms,” where they replaced Mexican workers who were being repatriated. The rest moved northward from camp to camp and seasonal job to seasonal job in search of a way to survive.

Envisioning the Depression

Not all Californians treated the impoverished migrants hostilely. A small group of photographers, writers, and social critics who had been documenting the Depression’s impact on Californians soon became interested in the Dust Bowl migrants’ experiences and origins. Several, including journalist John Steinbeck and photographer Dorothea Lange, made the reverse trek to the plains. They discovered that the same forces of large-scale agribusiness that were at work in California had contributed significantly to the ecological and social ravages of the Dust Bowl.

Subsequently, the FSA sponsored Lange and other professional photographers and filmmakers to document the everyday life of sharecroppers, coal miners, food processors, migrant laborers, and displaced families across the United States (see Singular Lives: Florence Owens Thompson, “Migrant Mother”). The FSA published many of more than a million images in newspapers and magazines. Impressed by the stills—and the public’s fascination with them—independent publishers founded new photo-magazines such as Life, sending dozens of photographers out to do similar shoots. Among the most famous works of Depression era photojournalism was Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), a joint effort by writer James Agee and photographer Walker Evans that meticulously detailed the plight of the Dust Bowl’s besieged farmers. This extensive body of photographic work informed city dwellers about the diverse and difficult experiences that many of their fellow Americans were enduring. (It also sparked a boom in the sale of portable cameras— particularly Kodak’s new, easy-to-use Brownie.) More than the printed word or drawings, photographs of malnourished, dispirited, and prematurely aged men and women struck a deep emotional chord and built sympathy for farmers’ plights—and wide support for the rural New Deal. FSA photographers also laid the path for John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath, probably the most important literary work of the Great Depression. Among the few best-selling novels to earn the widespread praise of literary critics (and a Nobel Prize), Steinbeck’s story traced the Joad family’s harrowing experience of the Dust Bowl. Director John Ford’s film adaptation of the novel—for which he drew on the stark and haunting FSA photographs— sealed the Okies’ place in history as the face of the Great Depression.

Networking Rural America

At the beginning of the 1930s, only 10 percent of American farms had electricity. The vast majority of farmers relied on coal, wood, and candles for light and heat. Farmers’ dependency on these premodern sources of power both compromised their standard of living and symbolized the gap between urban and supposedly “backward” rural life. One of the largest projects of the New Deal, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA, founded 1933) networked millions of impoverished southerners into a regional electricity grid for the first time—effectively extending the New Deal to some of the nation’s most isolated and destitute communities.

The TVA grew out of a long-standing controversy in American politics over the use and protection of the nation’s water supply. Reformers had long urged the government to harness the energy of the country’s rivers for hydroelectricity In May 1933, the Roosevelt administration decided to take over work under way on a dam at Muscle Shoals on the Tennessee River. Over the next few years, the TVA improved water transportation, built five dams, and upgraded twenty others. These projects all but eliminated flooding and brought electric power to poor communities in eight southern states.

By 1937, the TVA was one of the United States’ largest and cheapest suppliers of power. By setting electricity prices low, the TVA also helped bring prices down in the rest of the nation. The government worked with power companies and community groups to wire other rural areas, and by 1940 over a third of all farms had electricity (see Map 24.4). Electrification changed the practical side of farm life by enabling the use of labor-saving tools and appliances, and it integrated farming families into national consumer culture via the radio. Working with local communities, the TVA introduced fertilizer, built flood control gates, reforested the land, and conserved the soil. Many farmers subsequently felt less isolated, less ignored by the government, and more included in modern life.

A New Deal for the Environment

As well as expanding the federal role in agriculture, the New Deal transformed wastelands and other unfarmed parts of the American landscape and changed popular attitudes toward forests, wetlands, and native species. Federal agencies conserved millions of acres of soil and planted hundreds of millions of trees, including 220 million along the ninety-ninth meridian running from Texas to Canada. In addition, young men in the Civilian Conservation Corps planted some two billion trees on private and public wastelands that within a few years had reforested more than half of all the land that has ever been reforested in the United States. Other government projects restocked rivers and lakes with a billion fish, built thirty thousand wildlife shelters, restored historic sites, and laid roads to national parks. Hundreds of trails, including the Appalachian and Pacific Crest Trails, introduced millions of Americans to recreational hiking and camping.

Conservation groups, such as the Sierra Club, that had traditionally worked with business to develop environmentally friendly ways of developing resources now reoriented themselves around state and federal governments. As government and conservationists worked together to make forests, rivers, and mountains both more accessible and more protected, conservation became both a public goal and a widely shared value.

LIBERALISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS

The New Deal took shape via experimentation and innovation rather than according to a master plan. But by the late 1930s, the experiment had generated a new concept of government, society, and culture. This New Deal liberalism sought to use federal government to mitigate the worst excesses of the free-market system, and it enduringly transformed the nation. Widely popular, New Deal liberalism nevertheless struck some Americans as still too limited in scope. A loose coalition of leftists offered an alternative vision of the United States as a diverse country in which all people were free and equal and where government guaranteed everyone a free education, health care, and the basic necessities of life. For others—particularly Republicans, the southern wing of the Democratic Party, and sections of the labor movement—the New Deal was a dangerous power-grab by government. As the nation entered a new recession in 1937, Roosevelt lost both political support for some programs and his will to forge others.

New Deal Liberalism

Before the New Deal, in matters of economic policy, the federal government had generally consulted with and responded to only business leaders and their lobbyists. After 1932, however, the federal government became a broker state as officials now consulted not only with big business but also with labor unions, farmers, small business owners, and other constituencies and tried to “broker” compromises acceptable to all. By the late 1930s, New Deal liberals were arguing that the government’s duties also included regulating business and investing in economic development.

Drawing on the work of influential British economist John Maynard Keynes, these liberals insisted that the main cause of recession was poor consumer demand rather than declining production, as economists had believed. The practical upshot of Keynesianism, as the theory became known, was that government should actively stimulate consumer demand by lowering interest rates (making money cheaper and more available) and investing directly in the housing sector, agriculture, industry, interstate transportation, and science and technology. Such an approach, liberals asserted, promoted growth and smoothed capitalism’s destructive boom-and-bust cycles, which had produced a severe recession—and two long depressions—every decade since the Civil War. Government should also invest in its citizens and help them move into the middle class by providing subsidized mortgages, free education, and a safety net for those who were unable to support themselves, whether due to age, illness, or misfortune. These ambitious goals required higher taxation.

By 1940, one in three Americans was receiving some kind of direct federal aid. Seniors collected Social Security, and many homeowners had mortgage guarantees. Loans and subsidies were available for farm or industrial development. By British, Japanese, and European standards, the New Deal state was still relatively weak, and it relied on states and municipalities to oversee a number of its programs. But by American standards, it was a radical departure from previous practice. Washington, D.C., became a symbol of politics and political power as never before.

New Deal liberalism also reshaped the Democratic Party, which successfully cemented a coalition among various constituencies that were not necessarily sympathetic to one another. Unionized labor, women of all classes, white ethnic immigrants, black northerners, and white southerners were the basis of the party’s power through the 1960s. For the first time, Jews and Catholics served in high-ranking government positions.

The New Deal coalition was often an uneasy one, however, particularly in matters of gender and race. Women were officially discouraged from working in paid employment through official propaganda and the lower wages they received, despite the fact that almost all working-class women—and a significant number of their middle-class counterparts—worked out of necessity. At the same time, women played a vastly expanded role in the New Deal government. First lady Eleanor Roosevelt by turns shocked and impressed Americans as the first president’s wife to play an active and public role in government. An experienced educator, labor advocate, and Democratic campaigner, she held press conferences, toured the country giving speeches on her husband’s behalf, and openly advocated for equal rights for women and minorities. FDR’s cabinet included Frances Perkins, secretary of labor and the first woman to serve in any cabinet, and over a dozen women served in executive-level positions in the Treasury, State Department, and other government agencies.

African Americans had a more mixed experience of the New Deal. Although Roosevelt appointed over forty African Americans to executive positions in the federal government, the president and many liberal lawmakers were less than eager to confront the fact that minorities were disproportionately bearing the brunt of the Depression. Nor was FDR, whose New Deal initiatives required the support of southern segregationists in Congress, willing to fight the injustices of racial segregation, disenfranchisement, and racial violence. Privately critical of lynching, the president nevertheless refused to support an anti-lynching bill (which consequently was defeated in Congress).

In theory, New Deal programs were race-blind. In practice, they either failed to benefit most African Americans or imposed southern-style segregation (the Civilian Conservation Corps camps, for instance, were segregated, as was federal theater). The New Deal’s reliance on local authorities to implement and manage most programs meant that they were subject to local prejudice. Across the country, local governments almost always segregated federally funded housing, and the Federal Housing Administration approved the same restrictive real estate covenants that had excluded African Americans from white neighborhoods in the 1920s. Low-income African American housing was targeted for demolition, and although the slums were often dilapidated, they were also home to tens of thousands of people and the foundation of the community (see Interpreting the Sources: Lester Melrose and Casey Bill Weldon, “W.P.A. Blues” ). A majority of African Americans, moreover, did not qualify for Social Security because most were agricultural or domestic workers, and those categories of labor were excluded. For the most part, liberals would not actively embrace civil rights as a matter of federal action until the 1960s— and when they did, many southern Democrats quit the party.

Rise of the Left

Liberalism was not the only new political movement to congeal amid the extraordinary conditions of the Great Depression. Communist, socialist, and related left-wing organizations all underwent significant growth. Although New Deal liberals shared some of the Left’s goals, the latter pushed for even greater government involvement in the economy, including government ownership of utilities, and unlike liberals openly demanded full racial equality.

Frustrated with both the government and the American Federation of Labor’s disapproval of many strikes, a small cadre of unionists formed the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1938. The CIO, which had begun as a subcommittee of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) three years earlier, unionized Mexican Americans, African Americans, and other populations that the AFL had traditionally spurned. For the first time, a major labor organization made racial justice a central objective. The CIO also welcomed over eight hundred thousand women to its ranks and, unlike the AFL, accepted members of America’s small communist party. (A number of CIO leaders, though not a lot of its rank-and-file members, belonged to the party.) The CIO argued that the New Deal had not gone far enough toward protecting workers from exploitation. In particular, the union called upon Congress to explicitly recognize workers’ rights to unionize and to bargain collectively with employers for industrywide contracts.

The American Communist Party (CPUSA)—a legal and relatively open organization in the 1930s—grew from just a few thousand to over 100,000 card-carrying members. Even larger numbers of Americans were sympathetic “fellow travelers” or cycled through the party at some point. For the first time in American history, the CPUSA enjoyed a degree of respectability among the working class and the middle class, and even in the mass media.
At a time when liberals shied away from demanding full racial equality and acquiesced to the inequitable implementation of the New Deal, racial justice also found a champion in the CPUSA. Even the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was hesitant to tackle the unduly high levels of poverty, disease, and miscarriages of justice that African Americans endured, fearing that taking on such a cause might jeopardize the organization’s respectable, middle-class reputation and goals. Only the CPUSA was prepared to defend poor African American sharecroppers and laborers wrongly accused of crimes—as the nine Scottsboro Boys were in 1931.

The Scottsboro Boys, nine black teenagers, had been convicted and sentenced to death for the alleged rape of two transient white women in Alabama. The CPUSA paid top New York attorney Samuel Leibowitz to lead the youths’ appeal. Despite glaring contradictions in the young women’s testimony, and national media coverage notwithstanding, the Alabama Supreme Court affirmed the convictions. In 1932, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the Alabama decision in the groundbreaking case of Powell v. Alabama, ruling that the young men’s right of due process had been denied. (A long series of retrials ensued, during which five of the young men were reconvicted and four were freed.) At a time when most white people accepted racial inequality, the CPUSA argued tirelessly that African Americans and other minorities were entitled to nothing less than full civil, political, and social equality.

Communists and the CIO also joined the Popular Front—a loose international coalition of leftists that was formed in 1935 with the goal of stopping the advance of fascism in Spain, Germany, and elsewhere in Europe (see Chapter 25). In the United States, the CPUSA abandoned its previous commitment to overthrowing the capitalist system and, together with other front members, threw its weight behind the New Deal. As well as running soup kitchens, adult education classes, and housing programs, the Popular Front helped drive the tremendous upsurge in artistic production that the New Deal had set in motion. A new conception of the United States emerged—as a racially, ethnically diverse nation that celebrated differences and valued the active participation of all people in civic and cultural life.

Conservative Rebirth

Although they were in the minority, conservative lawmakers and others who opposed an expanded role for government were equally active. In some instances, as in the advertising industry, business lobbies brought pressure to bear on Congress to water down legislation. The American Medical Association, for instance, spent considerable funds defeating a proposal for a system of national health insurance. Although southern Democrats often supported key New Deal reforms— and lapped up federal dollars as eagerly as the North—they were uniformly opposed to any initiative that might deprive the southern states of local control over federal resources. FDR’s attempt to restructure the Supreme Court and to strengthen the executive also alienated many southerners, who criticized his actions as a federal power-grab at the expense of the South. Above all, southern Democrats feared that leftists might soon persuade Roosevelt (whose wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, openly supported civil rights) to attack racial segregation and disfranchisement.

Conservative congressmen in both parties went on the offense in 1937. The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) investigated allegedly subversive and disloyal activities among federal and private employees. The committee chair, Texas Democrat Martin Dies, subpoenaed hundreds of people, many because of ties to the Communist Party. Dies’s real intention, however, was to discredit some of the most outspoken northern New Dealers, especially those working for the WPA, and to warn Roosevelt off exerting greater federal control of the New Deal. The committee turned up relatively little evidence, but the hearings helped turn the relatively small anti-communist movement into a larger, far more mainstream conservative network. Leaders of the AFL, which now faced competition from the more radical CIO, became more audibly anti-communist. Worried that communists were spreading atheist values, Catholic leaders also spoke out, and Catholic workers began building anti-communist blocs within the unions.

Opposition to leftist causes of various kinds also grew within the federal government itself, particularly in the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Although Roosevelt had authorized the FBI to engage in limited political surveillance in 1934—specifically, of German Americans suspected of producing Nazi propaganda—FBI director J. Edgar Hoover radically expanded this mandate to include leftists, liberals, students, free speech advocates, and even liberal congressmen and Supreme Court justices. Through wiretaps, break-ins, and burglaries, the staunchly conservative Hoover built extensive (and secret) information files on thousands of Americans. He then selectively leaked information to conservative lawmakers and organizations such as the American Legion, who used it to discredit the New Deal by arguing that Russian-led communists had infiltrated government. This relationship laid much of the institutional and cultural groundwork for the anticommunist crusade of Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy (see Chapter 26).

The Roosevelt Recession

Although unemployment and poverty levels remained high in 1937, the nation’s gross domestic product had risen an average of 10 percent per year since 1933. On the strength of these gains, FDR cut federal spending on employment and other programs. The cuts unexpectedly triggered an immediate uptick in unemployment of about 1.5 million Americans. Fearing a recession, the new Federal Reserve swiftly lowered interest rates, which precipitated a run on the stock market. The country’s economic growth consequently slowed, and unemployment jumped again, from 14 percent to 19 percent. Approximately ten million workers lost their jobs, and industrial output and real income declined to 1933 levels. The nation had entered what many would call the Roosevelt recession.

Aware that conservatives would not support more taxes, the president opted for a new practice that would become known as pump priming, in which the government injected money into new employment programs. Conservative Democrats balked but Roosevelt fought back, campaigning against several of his own southern party members in the 1938 midterm elections. His strategy backfired, however, and the intraparty split widened. The rift pushed voters toward the Republicans, who picked up dozens of seats in the House, eight seats in the Senate, and thirteen governorships. These results signaled that the popular mandate FDR had won in 1936 had fractured and was diminishing. With Roosevelt pursuing no major legislation after 1938, the New Deal appeared to have stalled.

CONCLUSION

The New Deal did not end the Depression. Significantly, however, it relieved the suffering of tens of millions of people and enduringly changed American politics, life, and culture. Before 1933, the federal government had been relatively weak and inactive in peacetime. Its principal arenas of action had been interstate commerce and foreign policy, and it therefore lacked the administrative and financial capacity to respond effectively to the unemployment, poverty, and distress that overwhelmed so many Americans after 1929. Although some Progressive Era reformers had envisioned a far more hands-on role for federal government, it took the Great Depression and President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s experimental relief programs to kindle popular support for active government. It was only then that a new vision of government—New Deal liberalism—emerged and found broad support. Mass culture, with its powerful new radio and cinema networks, played a key role in galvanizing public opinion in favor of reform. Many Americans were critical of the rapid expansion of advertising, but the industry aggressively fended off most efforts at regulation.

By the mid-1930s, the federal government was more present, responsible, and visible in every sphere of American life. Thanks to Social Security and other entitlement programs, the United States had a rudimentary welfare system for the first time. At both the state and the federal levels, government grew substantially, as did Americans’ reliance on it. By 1940, more than a million Americans worked permanently for the civil service, about eight hundred thousand more than in 1930. The New Deal also transformed industrial relations—which had long been rocky and sometimes violent. Unions became legitimate organizations in the eyes of most Americans, and employers no longer called upon militias, the U.S. Army, or private security forces to disperse strikes. For the most part, workers confined their actions to coordinated, peaceable picketing and filed grievances with the National Labor Relations Board. The New Deal’s reinvention of government had brought relief and hope to a nation on its knees.

In 1939, however, it was by no means obvious that the New Deal would have a lasting legacy. Opposition within the Democratic and Republican Parties and among southern voters had effectively paralyzed reform. What seemed clear, in the wake of Germany’s invasion of Czechoslovakia and Poland in 1939, was that the forces of fascism and Nazism were on the march and that the world was facing another catastrophic global conflict.