U.S History Topic 5 Lesson

Herbert Hoover

31st President of the United States from 1929-1933. He served as head of the U.S Food Administration during World War I and became intentionally known for humanitarian relief efforts in war-time Belgium. Hoover strongly believed in the Efficiency Movement, which held that the government and the economy were riddled with inefficiency and waste, and could be improved by experts who could identify the problems and solve them. Hoover, who had a small fortune in mining, was the first of two Presidents to redistribute his salary. When the Wall Street Crash of 1929 struck less than eight months after he took office, Hoover tried to combat the ensuing Great Depression with moderate government public works projects such as the Hoover Dam.

Fireside Chats

A series of 30 evening radio addresses given by Franklin D. Roosevelt between 1933 and 1944. They represent the first time in history that an executive communicated directly with a large number of citizens. He spoke with familiarity to millions about the banking crisis, recession, New Deal initiatives and the principal purposes and specific progress of World War II.

Welfare State

A system whereby the government undertakes to protect the health and well-being of its citizens, especially those in financial or social need, by means of grants, pensions, and other benefits. The foundations for the modern welfare state in the US were laid by the New Deal programs of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Black Tuesday

AKA Wall Street Crash of 1929 Investors traded in over 16 million shares on the New York Stock exchange. Billions of dollars were lost, wiping out thousands of investors, and stock tickers ran hours behind because the machinery could not handle the tremendous volume of trading. In the aftermath of Black Tuesday, America and the rest of the industrialized world spiraled into a Great Depression During the late 1920's, Americans speculated a lot and invested money that they didn't even have. Brokers were known for lending investors more than 2/3 of the value of stock they were purchasing. This resulted in $8.5 billion to be out in loan. The issue with this was that the $8.5 billion was more than the total amount of currency circulating in the United States during that period of time. Because investors kept hoping that the price of stock was going to continue going up, people would get greedy and hope for it to go up before pulling out. This speculation resulted in an economic bubble where the price to earning ratio was up to 32.6 in September of 1929. When a P/E ration is this high. it becomes dangerous and could lead to economic problems.

Trickle-Down Economics

AKA: Trickle Down Theory The theory that providing economic benefits to those with upper-level incomes will ultimately benefit society as a whole through the extra wealth invested into the economy and therefore creating jobs that provide wealth for lower income earners. Will Rogers had said that the money was all appropriated for the top in hopes that it would trickle to the needy.

Lillian Hellman

American dramatist and screenwriter known for her success as a playwright on Broadway, as well as her left-wing sympathies and political activism. She famously was blacklisted by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) at the height of the anti-communist campaigns of 1947-52. Although she continued to work on Broadway in the 1950s, her blacklisting by the American film industry caused a precipitous decline in her income during which time she had to work outside her chosen profession. Hellman was praised by many for refusing to answer questions by HUAC; however, her denial that she had ever belonged to the Communist Party was doubted by many, including war correspondent Martha Gellhorn, former wife of Ernest Hemingway and literary critic and Hellman rival Mary McCarthy.

Hoovervilles

As Americans lost their jobs and ran through their savings, they had to scrounge wherever they could to keep from going hungry, They sold furniture, pawned jewelry, and moved to cheaper lodgings-anything to keep their pantries stocked and rents paid. In many cities, they ran out of money, were evicted from their homes, and ended up in the streets. Homeless people slept on park benches, in empty railway cars, or in cardboard boxes. Many grouped together in Hoovervilles, makeshift shantytowns of tents and shacks built on public land or vacant lots. Hoovervilles The largest area of Hoovervilles was in the middle of Central Park in New York City. There, the homeless covered themselves with newspapers, called Hoover blankets, to stay warm at night. They walked around looking for jobs with their empty pants pockets turned inside out, a sign of poverty known as Hoover flags.

Hoover Dam

At the turn of the 20th century, farmers sought to divert the Colorado River to budding Southwestern communities via a series of canals. When the Colorado broke through the canals in 1905, creating the inland Salton Sea, the job of controlling the raging river fell to the U.S Bureau of Reclamation. Bureau director Arthur Powell Davis in 1922 outlined a plan before Congress for a multipurpose dam in Black Canyon, located on the Arizona-Nevada border. It was named the Boulder Canyon project, after the original proposed site, the dam would not only control flooding and irrigation, it would generate and sell hydroelectric power to recoup its costs. Still, the proposed $165 tag concerned some lawmakers, while representatives of six of the seven states in the river drainage area-Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, and Nevada- worried the water would primarily go to California. Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover, brokered the 1922 Colorado River Compact to divide the water evenly among the seven states, but the legal wrangling continued until outgoing President Calvin Coolidge authorized the Boulder Canyon Project in December 1928. In honor of the new president's contributions, Secretary of the Interior Ray L. Wilbur announced the structure would be called the Hoover Damn in 1930, although the name wasn't official until 1947. As the Great Depression unfolded, hopeful laborers descended on Las Vegas and set up camp in the surrounding desert for the chance to work on the project. Those who were hired eventually moved to Boulder City, a community specifically built six miles from the worksite to house employees. Meanwhile the U.S Government set about finding a contractor to build the 60 story arch dam. The contract was awarded in March 1931 to Six Companies, a group of construction firms that had pooled its resources to meet the steep $5 The first difficult step of construction involved blasting the canyon walls to create four diversion tunnels for the water. Facing strict time deadlines, workers toiled in 140-degree tunnels choked with carbon monoxide and dust, conditions that prompted a six-day strike in August 1931. When two of the tunnels were complete, the excavated rock was used to form a temporary coffer dam that successfully rechanneled the river's path in November 1932. The second step of involved the clearing of the walls that would contain the dam. Suspended from heights of up to 800 feet above the canyon floor, high scalers wielded 44-pound jackhammers and metal poles to knock loose material, a treacherous task that resulted in casualties from falling workers, equipment and rocks. Meanwhile, the dried riverbed allowed for construction to begin on the powerplant, four intake towers and the dam itself. Cement was mixed onsite and hoisted across the canyon on one of five 20-ton cableways, a fresh bucket capable of reaching the crews below every 78 seconds. Offsetting the heat generated by cooling concrete, nearly 600 miles of pipe loops were embedded to circulate water through the poured blocks, with workers continually spraying the concrete to keep it moist. As the dam rose, block by block, from the canyon floor, the visual renderings of architect Gordon Kaufmann took form. Electing to emphasize the imposing mass of the structure, Kaufmann kept the smooth, curved face free of adornment. The powerplant was given a futuristic touch with horizontal aluminum fins for windows, while its interior was designed to pay homage to Native American cultures. With the body of water that would become Lake Mead already beginning to swell behind the dam, the final block of concrete was poured and topped off at 726 feet above the canyon floor in 1935. On September 30, a crowd of 20,000 people watched President Franklin Roosevelt commemorate the magnificent structure's completion. Approximately 5 million barrels of cement and 45 million pounds of reinforcement steel had gone into what was then the tallest dam in the world, its 6.6 million tons of concrete enough to pave a road from San Francisco to New York City. Altogether, some 21,000 workers contributed to its construction. Hoover Dam fulfilled the goal of disseminating the one-wild Colorado River through the parched Southwest landscape, fueling the development of such major cities as Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Phoenix. Capable of irrigating 2 million acres, its 17 turbines generate enough electricity to power 1.3 million homes. The dam was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1985 and one of America's Seven Modern Civil Engineering Wonders in 1994. It receives some 7 million visitors annually, while Lake Mead, the world's largest reservoir, hosts another 10 million as a popular recreation area. million performance bond.

Huey Long

Beginning in 1932, Long resigned his governorship of Louisiana to pursue a career in the U.S Senate. He took little interest in the Senate, only using it to advance his national ambitions. At first he supported Roosevelt, but by the middle of 1933, he had broken with the president and struck out on his own. Long voiced populist resentments that many depression-era Americans felt toward 'wealthy plutocrats' and 'bloated fortunes'. He promised through his implausible Share-Our-Wealth Plan, a radical redistribution of wealth; confiscatory taxes would scale down large fortunes, and the revenue would be used to guarantee everyone a minimum annual income of twenty-five hundred dollars. By 1935, he had launched his own national political organization and was talking openly of running for president next year against Roosevelt. The public opinion polls of the time indicated that he could not win, but that he might tip the balance in at a close race. In fact, the 'Long threat' as Democratic politicians described it was probably less serious that it appeared. Long's national organization was flimsy and decentralized, and he showed no ability to form effective alliances with the many other dissident leaders of the time, whose support he would have needed for an effective national campaign.

John Maynard Keynes

Believed that the way to stabilize the economy was to stabilize price levels, and to do that the government's central bank must lower interest rates when prices tend to rise and raise them when prices tend to fall. Keynes ideas took a dramatic change however, as unemployment in Britain dragged on during the interwar period, reaching levels as high as 20%. Keynes revolutionized the way economists think about economics. It was path breaking in several ways, in particular because it introduced the notion of aggregate demand as the sum of consumption, investment, and government spending; and because it showed that full employment could be maintained only with the help of government spending. Economists still argue about what Keynes thought caused high employment. Some think he attributed it to wages that take a long time to fall. But Keynes actually wanted wages not to fall, and in fact advocated in the General Theory that wages be kept stable. A general cut in wages, he argued, would decrease income, consumption, and aggregate demand. This would offset any benefits to output that the lower price of labor might have contributed.

Tenant Farmers

Between 1930 and 1934, nearly one million farmers failed to pay their mortgages and lost their farms. Banks foreclosed on their lands and houses and repossessed their farming equipment. The bankers sold what they could at public auctions. Some farmers remained on the land as tenant farmers, working for bigger landowners rather than for themselves. But another effect was that many people drifted away from their rural communities and people migrated to cities to look for some kind of work. The farmers problem ironically, was that they grew too much. Worldwide crop production soared-a result of more efficient farm machinery, stronger fertilizers, and improved plant varieties-but demand fell. People ate less bread, Europeans imposed protective tariffs, and consumers replaced cotton with rayon. A covering of tough grass-roots called sod permitted the land to retain moisture and support vegetation. During the 1890's however, overgrazing cattle had severely damaged the sod. Then during World War I, demand for wheat and the use of gasoline powered tractors allowed farmers to plow large sections of the prairie for the first time. The fragile skin protecting the prairie was destroyed. When drought struck, beginning in 1930, and temperatures soared (108 degrees in Kansas for weeks on end) the wind began to blow the soil away. Tenant farmers found themselves evicted from their land. By 1939, a million Dust Bowl refugees and other tenant farmers left the Plains to work as itinerant produce pickers in California. As a result, whole counties were depopulated.

National Recovery Administration

Congress established the National Recovery Administration (NRA) to help revive industry and labor through rational planning. The idea behind the NRA was simple: representatives of business, labor, and government would establish codes of fair practices that would set prices, production levels, minimum wages, and maximum hours within each industry. The NRA also supported workers' right to join labor unions. The NRA sought to stabilize the economy by ending ruinous competition, overproduction, labor conflicts, and deflating prices. Led by General Hugh Johnson, the new agency got off to a promising start. By midsummer 1933, over 500 industries had signed codes covering 22 million workers. In New York City, burlesque show strippers agreed on a code limiting the number of times that they would undress each day. By the end of the summer, the nation's ten largest industries had been won over, as well as hundreds of smaller businesses. All across the land businesses displayed the "Blue Eagle," the insignia of the NRA, in their windows. Thousands participated in public rallies and spectacular torchlight parades. The NRA's success was short-lived. Johnson proved to be an overzealous leader who alienated many businesspeople. Instead of creating a smooth-running corporate state, Johnson presided over a chorus of endless squabbling. The NRA boards, which were dominated by representatives of big business, drafted codes that favored their interests over those of small competitors. Moreover, even though they controlled the new agency from the outset, many leaders of big business resented the NRA for interfering in the private sector. Many quipped that the NRA stood for "national run-around."

Charles Coughlin

Coughlin's views as a priest were influenced by late eighteenth century Catholic teachings emphasizing conservative clerical activism. His views were also shaped by the Basilian Order to which he belonged. Founded in France in the early nineteenth century, the Basilians studied medieval church doctrine in the context of fierce opposition to modern economic and social developments. They believed that the Church should return to its theological roots and, among other issues, restore the prohibition against usury, which many Basilians regarded as a main source of the ills that afflicted modern society. Such views would blend with antisemitism in Coughlin's radio broadcasts throughout his career. In a 1930 broadcast, Coughlin attributed the current economic problems on those who profited from usury stating, "We have lived to see the day that modern Shylocks have grown fat and wealthy, praised and deified, because they have perpetuated the ancient crime of usury under the modern racket of statesmanship." Coughlin left the Basilian Order in 1918 and became a diocesan priest under the diocese of Detroit. From 1916 to 1923, Coughlin was on the faculty at Assumption College in Sandwich (now Windsor), Ontario, Canada. After a chance meeting with Michael Gallagher, the bishop of the diocese of Detroit, he was given the opportunity to establish a new parish in Royal Oak, Michigan—the Shrine of the Little Flower. This church served as the center of Coughlin's operations for the next forty years. In October 1926, Coughlin broadcast his first radio address. Originally his broadcasts taught catechism classes for children, but he soon moved on to broadcasting religious services with political overtones. By the time of the 1929 stock market crash, Coughlin had a large, loyal audience and had gained the reputation of a spokesperson for the "common man." In 1930, he launched a crusade against communism, drawing upon his own fear and that of others that a communist influence was spreading throughout the United States.

Public Works Administration

Created by the National Industrial Recovery Act on June 16, 1933, the Public Works Administration (PWA) budgeted several billion dollars to be spent on the construction of public works as a means of providing employment, stabilizing purchasing power, improving public welfare, and contributing to a revival of American industry. Between July 1933 and March 1939, the PWA funded the construction of more than 34,000 projects, including airports, electricity-generating dams, and aircraft carriers; and seventy percent of the new schools and one third of the hospitals built during that time. It also electrified the Pennsylvania Railroad between New York and Washington, D.C. Its one big failure was in quality, affordable housing, building only 25,000 units in four and one half years. The PWA spent over $6 billion, but did not succeed in returning the level of industrial activity to pre-depression levels. Nor did it significantly reduce the unemployment level or help jump-start a widespread creation of small businesses. FDR, personally opposed to deficit spending, refused the spend the sums necessary to accomplish these goals. Nonetheless, the historical legacy of the PWA is perhaps as important as its practical accomplishments at the time. It provided the federal government with its first systematic network for the distribution of funds to localities, ensured that conservation would remain an element in the national discussion, and provided federal administrators with a broad amount of badly needed experience in public policy planning. When FDR moved industry toward war production and abandoned his opposition to deficit spending, the PWA became irrelevant and was abolished in June 1941.

Dorothea Lange

Dorothea Lange (1895-1965) documented the change on the homefront, especially among ethnic groups and workers uprooted by the war. Three months after Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt ordered the relocation of Japanese-Americans into armed camps in the West. Soon after, the War Relocation Authority hired Lange to photograph Japanese neighborhoods, processing centers, and camp facilities. Lange's earlier work documenting displaced farm families and migrant workers during the Great Depression did not prepare her for the disturbing racial and civil rights issues raised by the Japanese internment. Lange quickly found herself at odds with her employer and her subjects' persecutors, the United States government. To capture the spirit of the camps, Lange created images that frequently juxtapose signs of human courage and dignity with physical evidence of the indignities of incarceration. Not surprisingly, many of Lange's photographs were censored by the federal government, itself conflicted by the existence of the camps. The true impact of Lange's work was not felt until 1972, when the Whitney Museum incorporated twenty-seven of her photographs into Executive Order 9066, an exhibit about the Japanese internment. New York Times critic A.D. Coleman called Lange's photographs "documents of such a high order that they convey the feelings of the victims as well as the facts of the crime."

Reconstruction Finance Corporation

Established January 22, 1932; a U.S government agency established by Congress to provide financial aid to railroads, financial institutions and business corporations. With the passage of the Emergency Relief Act in July 1932, its scope was broadened to include aid to agriculture and financing for state and local public works. The RFC made little use of its powers under the Herbert Hoover administration, but was vigorously utilized during the New Deal years and contributed greatly to the recovery effort. During World War III, the agency was enormously expanded in order to finance the construction and operation of war plants and to make loans to foreign governments. The RFC was intended to be an independent, nonpolitical agency, and during its early years it operated without much interference. As the function of the RFC grew, however and as it began to assume responsibility for dispersing huge sums of money, it tended to become involved in politics.

New Deal

In 1932 Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected overwhelmingly on a campaign promising a New Deal for the American people. Roosevelt worked quickly upon his election to deliver the New Deal, an unprecedented number of reforms addressing the catastrophic effects of the Great Depression. Unlike his predecessor, Herbert Hoover, who felt that the public should support the government and not the other way around, Roosevelt felt it was the federal government's duty to help the American people weather these bad times. desperate Congress gave him carte blanche and rubber-stamped his proposals in order to expedite the reforms. During the first 100 days of his presidency, a never-ending stream of bills was passed, to relieve poverty, reduce unemployment, and speed economic recovery. His first act as president was to declare a four-day bank holiday, during which time Congress drafted the Emergency Banking Bill of 1933, which reorganized the banks and closed the ones that were insolvent and stabilized the banking system and restored the public's faith in the banking industry by putting the federal government behind it. He urged Americans to put their savings back in the banks and by the end of the month almost three quarters of them had opened. Next he asked Congress to take the first step toward ending Prohibition by making it legal again for Americans to buy beer. (At the end of the year, Congress ratified the 21st Amendment and ended Prohibition for good). In May, he signed the Tennessee Valley Authority Act into law, enabling the federal government to build damns along the Tennessee River that controlled flooding and generated inexpensive hydroelectric power for the people in the region. That same month, Congress passed a bill that paid commodity farmers (farmers who produced things like wheat, dairy, tobacco, and corn) to leave their fields fallow in order to end agricultural surpluses and boost prices. June's National Industry Recovery Act guaranteed that workers have the right to unionize and bargain collectively for higher wages and better working conditions; It also suspended some antitrust laws and established a federally funded Public Works Administration. In addition to the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the Tennessee Valley Authority Act, and the National Industrial Recovery Act, Roosevelt had won passage of 12 other major laws, including the Glass-Steagall Banking Bill and the Home Owners' Loan Act, in his first 100 days in office. Almost every American found something to be pleased about and something to complain about in this motley collection of bills, but it was clear to all that FDR was taking the "direct, vigorous" action that he'd promised in his inaugural address

Repatriation

In the Southwest, many white Americans clamored for Asian American and Mexican American Repatriation. Repatriation involved efforts by local state, and federal governments to encourage or coerce immigrants and their naturalized children to return to their country of origin. Hundreds of thousands of people of Mexican ancestry-many of them U.S.-were pushed out of the United States. Some were deported, others were pressured to leave voluntarily. Even so, many more remained. By the end of the 1930's, Mexican Americans were working in most economic sectors of the Southwest, including farming, ranching, and industry. Compared to the exit of Mexican Americans, the number of Europeans and departing was small. Still, nearly 200,000 European immigrants left the United States between 1931 and 1934, the peak years of repatriation. How many of these departures were involuntary is impossible to know.

Indian New Deal

In the late 19th century, American Indian policy had begun to place a growing emphasis on erasing a distinctive Native American identity. In 1871, Congress ended the practice of treating tribes as sovereign nations in an attempt to weaken the authority of tribal leaders. An effort was also made to undermine older systems of tribal justice. Accordingly, Congress created a Court of Indian Offenses in 1882 to prosecute Indians who violated government laws and rules. Indian schools took Indian children away from their families and tribes and sought to strip them of their tribal heritage. School children were required to trim their hair and to speak English and were prohibited from practicing Indian religions. The 1887 Dawes Act was the culmination of these policies. The act allocated reservation lands to individual Indians. The purpose of the act was to encourage Indians to become farmers; however, the plots were too small to support a family or to raise livestock. Government policies reduced Indian-owned lands from 155 million acres to just 48 million acres in 1934. When Roosevelt became president in 1933, he appointed a leading reformer, John Collier, as commissioner of Indian affairs. At Collier's request, Congress created the Indian Emergency Conservation Program (IECP), a CCC-type project for the reservations which employed more than 85,000 Indians. Collier also made certain that the PWA, WPA, CCC, and NYA hired Native Americans. Collier had long been an opponent of the 50-year-old government allotment program which partitioned and distributed tribal lands. In 1934, he persuaded Congress to pass the Indian Reorganization Act. The act terminated the allotment program of the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887; provided funds for tribes to purchase new land; offered government recognition of tribal constitutions; and repealed prohibitions on Native American languages and customs. That same year, federal grants were provided to local school districts, hospitals, and social welfare agencies to assist Native Americans.

Wagner Act

July 5, 1935. It established the National Labor Relations Board and addressed relations between unions and employers in the private sector.

Mary McLeod Bethune

Mrs. Bethune's background as a teacher inspired her to open the Daytona Educational and Industrial Training School for Negro Girls in Daytona Beach, Florida. On October 3, 1904, the Daytona Educational and Industrial Training School opened with just five students. Eventually the school blossomed to include a farm, high school, and nursing school. The school became the co-educational Bethune-Cookman College in 1929 after merging with Cookman Institute and was fully accredited in 1943. Mrs. Bethune proved her expertise not only as an educator, but also as an organizer and fundraiser through her work with Bethune-Cookman College. She employed her diverse talents when she founded the National Council of Negro Women in 1935. She envisioned NCNW to be an "organization of organizations" that would represent the national and international concerns of Black women. It would also give Black women the opportunity to realize their goals for social justice and human rights through united, constructive action. In addition to being an educator and an organizer, Mrs. Bethune was also a political activist. She was the first African American woman to be involved in the White House, assisting four different presidents. But she had the most significant influence on Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal Government. From 1936-1945 she served as the informal "race leader at large" for the administration. Mrs. Bethune was also one of the most influential African American leaders in the Black Cabinet, which organized the Federal Council on Negro Affairs. She also served as Director of Negro Affairs for the National Youth Administration, where she tirelessly worked to help young people find jobs and to secure funds for youth. In 1974, Mrs. Bethune became the first Black leader and the first woman to have a monument, the Bethune Memorial Statue, erected on public park land in Washington DC in honor of her remarkable contributions. She also became the only Black woman to be honored with a memorial site in the nation's capital in 1994 when National Park Service acquired the Council House, Bethune's last official residence and the original headquarters of NCNW. Today the Council House offers a variety of educational programs and exhibits.

Court Packing

On February 5, 1937, President Franklin Roosevelt announces a controversial plan to expand the Supreme Court to as many as 15 judges, allegedly to make it more efficient. Critics immediately charged that Roosevelt was trying to "pack" the court and thus neutralize Supreme Court justices hostile to his New Deal. During the previous two years, the high court had struck down several key pieces of New Deal legislation on the grounds that the laws delegated an unconstitutional amount of authority to the executive branch and the federal government. Flushed with his landslide reelection in 1936, President Roosevelt issued a proposal in February 1937 to provide retirement at full pay for all members of the court over 70. If a justice refused to retire, an "assistant" with full voting rights was to be appointed, thus ensuring Roosevelt a liberal majority. Most Republicans and many Democrats in Congress opposed the so-called "court-packing" plan. In April, however, before the bill came to a vote in Congress, two Supreme Court justices came over to the liberal side and by a narrow majority upheld as constitutional the National Labor Relations Act and the Social Security Act. The majority opinion acknowledged that the national economy had grown to such a degree that federal regulation and control was now warranted. Roosevelt's reorganization plan was thus unnecessary, and in July the Senate struck it down by a vote of 70 to 22. Soon after, Roosevelt had the opportunity to nominate his first Supreme Court justice, and by 1942 all but two of the justices were his appointees.

Frank Capra

One of America's most influential directors during the 1930s, winning three Oscars for best director.

Civilian Conservation Corps

Other Introductions In March 1933, within weeks of his inauguration, President Franklin Roosevelt sent legislation to Congress aimed at providing relief for unemployed American workers. He proposed the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) to provide jobs in natural resource conservation. Over the next decade, the CCC put more than three million young men to work in the nation?s forests and parks, planting trees, building flood barriers, fighting fires, and maintaining roads and trails, conserving both private and federal land. After a decade of national prosperity in the Roaring Twenties, Americans faced a national crisis after the Crash of 1929. The Great Depression saw an unemployment rate of more than twenty-five percent in the early 1930s. Inner-city crime rates soared, and the government did not have any specific plans to intervene. At the same time in the Midwest, the nine-year drought that would come to be known as the Dust Bowl was just beginning. Farmers struggled to hold on to their crops and their livestock as more precious topsoil blew away in windstorms every day. The CCC was President Roosevelt's answer to the environmental and economic challenges facing the country. Enlisting 250,000 workers in just two months, the CCC was an ambitious undertaking that brought several government agencies together in the effort. The Department of Labor recruited men from the ages of 18 to 25; the War Department clothed and trained them for two weeks, and the Department of Agriculture designed and managed the specific work assignments. With projects in every U.S. state and territory, "Roosevelt's Tree Army" lived in camps under quasi-military discipline, and received a wage of $30 per month, $25 of which they were required to send home to their families. Typically, boys rose early for breakfast in the canteen before heading off for eight hours of manual labor. Lunch was often brought out to the work site. In the evenings ninety percent of enrollees took advantage of classes offered in subjects from literature to welding — courses which, over nine years, taught 40,000 illiterate men to read and write. After planting 3 billion trees in nine years of service, the CCC dissolved in July of 1942. As the economy began to improve in the late 1930s, young men found higher-paying jobs at home, and the number of CCC camps across the country dwindled. President Roosevelt's attempt at turning it into a permanent agency failed. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor and subsequent U.S. involvement in World War II, the CCC's funding and assets were diverted as the nation's focus shifted toward the war effort. The legacy of the CCC continues to live on in the hundreds of campgrounds, hiking trails and swimming holes still enjoyed by Americans today.

Speculation

Practice of engaging in risky financial transactions in an attempt to profit from fluctuations in the market value of tradable goods. The problem with speculation is that it creates an artificially inflated market. The more stock that sells in a company, the higher it's worth. So if a bunch of people buy stock on an anticipated future value, so the value of stock is worth more now and if the stock does not continue at its speculated growth rate, no one will have the money to pay back the stock that was bought and the company has to reclaim the stock and the stock will be worthless. In the 1920's investors were able to speculate wildly buying stocks on the margin, needing only 10% of the price of a stock to be able to purchase it. Rampant speculation led to falsely high stock prices, and when the stock market began to tumble in the months leading up to its crash, speculative investors couldn't make their margin calls Peak Speculation: August 1929

Black Cabinet

President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed an unprecedented number of African Americans to high positions. By mid-1935, forty-five had positions in cabinet offices and New Deal agencies. In 1936, this group began calling itself the Federal Council on Negro Affairs. Although these leaders were not officially cabinet members, their role in advising the President on black employment, education, and civil rights issues led the press to refer to them as FDR's "Black Cabinet" or the "Black Brain Trust." Among them were Mary McLeod Bethune, director of the Division of Negro Affairs of the National Youth Administration; William H. Hastie, assistant solicitor in the Department of the Interior; and Robert C. Weaver, who served as a special assistant to the Administrator of the United States Housing Authority.

Tennessee Valley Authority

President Roosevelt signed the Tennessee Valley Authority Act on May 18, 1933, creating the TVA as a Federal corporation. The new agency was asked to tackle important problems facing the valley, such as flooding, providing electricity to homes and businesses, and replanting forests. Other TVA responsibilities written in the act included improving travel on the Tennessee River and helping develop the region's business and farming. The establishment of the TVA marked the first time that an agency was directed to address the total resource development needs of a major region. TVA was challenged to take on—in one unified development effort—the problems presented by devastating floods, badly eroded lands, a deficient economy, and a steady out-migration. The most dramatic change in Valley life came from the electricity generated by TVA dams. Electric lights and modern appliances made life easier and farms more productive. Electricity also drew industries to the region, providing desperately needed jobs.

John Steinback

Successful Writer of the Great Depression Era

Okies

Term used for refugees of the Dust Bowl, regardless of their states of origin. Okie families packed onto rickety trucks and headed toward California or Oregon or Washington, any place where a job might be found. Before the pace slowed, 800,000, people migrated out of Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas alone.

Federal Art Project

The Federal Art Project (FAP) was created in 1935 to provide work relief for artists in various media--painters, sculptors, muralists and graphic artists, with varous levels of experience. Holger Cahill, a curator and fine and folk art expert, was appointed director of the program. As with the other Federal cultural projects of the time, the program sought to bring art and artists into the everyday life of communities throughout the United States, through community art centers, exhibitions and classes. The Federal Art Project was just one of several government-sponsored art programs of the period. Others included the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) (1933-34), the Department of the Treasury's Section of Painting and Scultpure (1934-42; renamed the Section of Fine Arts in 1938), and its Treasury Relief Art Project (TRAP) (1935-38).

Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) preserves and promotes public confidence in the U.S. financial system by insuring deposits in banks and thrift institutions for at least $250,000; by identifying, monitoring and addressing risks to the deposit insurance funds; and by limiting the effect on the economy and the financial system when a bank or thrift institution fails. An independent agency of the federal government, the FDIC was created in 1933 in response to the thousands of bank failures that occurred in the 1920s and early 1930s. Since the start of FDIC insurance on January 1, 1934, no depositor has lost a single cent of insured funds as a result of a failure. The FDIC receives no Congressional appropriations - it is funded by premiums that banks and thrift institutions pay for deposit insurance coverage and from earnings on investments in U.S. Treasury securities. The FDIC insures approximately $9 trillion of deposits in U.S. banks and thrifts - deposits in virtually every bank and thrift in the country. The standard insurance amount is $250,000 per depositor, per insured bank, for each account ownership category. The FDIC's Electronic Deposit Insurance Estimator can help you determine if you have adequate deposit insurance for your accounts. The FDIC insures deposits only. It does not insure securities, mutual funds or similar types of investments that banks and thrift institutions may offer. (Deposit Insurance: What's Covered distinguishes between what is and is not protected by FDIC insurance.) The FDIC directly examines and supervises more than 4,500 banks and savings banks for operational safety and soundness, more than half of the institutions in the banking system. Banks can be chartered by the states or by the federal government. Banks chartered by states also have the choice of whether to join the Federal Reserve System. The FDIC is the primary federal regulator of banks that are chartered by the states that do not join the Federal Reserve System. In addition, the FDIC is the back-up supervisor for the remaining insured banks and thrift institutions. The FDIC also examines banks for compliance with consumer protection laws, including the Fair Credit Billing Act, the Fair Credit Reporting Act, the Truth-In-Lending Act, and the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, to name a few. Finally, the FDIC examines banks for compliance with the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) which requires banks to help meet the credit needs of the communities they were chartered to serve. To protect insured depositors, the FDIC responds immediately when a bank or thrift institution fails. This was created by the Banking Act of 1933

New Deal Coalition

The New Deal Coalition was the alignment of interest groups and voting blocs that supported Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal legislation. The coalition endured for decades, supporting Democratic presidential candidates until the late 1960s. It allowed the Democratic Party to capture the presidency in all but two elections in that period-those won by Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956. The New Deal Coalition included the Democratic state party organizations, city machines, labor unions, and blue collar workers, minorities (racial, ethnic, and religious), farmers, white Southerners, people on relief, and liberal intellectuals. The coalition fell apart amid the bitter disputes over the Vietnam War and civil rights during the 1968 election, but it remains the model that Democratic party activists seek to replicate.

Works Project Administration

The WPA was a relief measure established in 1935 and was redesigned in 1939 when it was transferred to the Federal Works Agency. Headed by Harry L. Hopkins, it offered work to the unemployed on an unprecedented scale by spending money on a wide variety of programs, including highways and building construction, slum clearance, reforestation, and rural rehabilitation. Roosevelt's work relief program employed more than 8.5 million people. For an average salary of $41.47 a month, WPA employees built bridges, roads, public buildings, public parks, and airports. Under the direction of Harry Hopkins, an enthusiastic ex-social worker who had come from modest means, the WPA would spend more than $11 million in employment relief before it was canceled in 1943. The work relief program was more expensive than direct relief payments, but worth the added cost, Hopkins believed. "Give a man a dole," he observed, "and you save his body and destroy his spirit. Give him a job and you save both body and spirit". The WPA employed far many more men than women, with only 13.5 percent of WPA employees being women in the peak year of 1938. Although the decision had been made early on to pay women the same wages as men, in practice they were consigned to the lower-paying activities of sewing, bookbinding, caring for the elderly, school lunch programs, nursery school, and recreational work. Ellen Woodward, director of the women's programs at the WPA, successfully pushed for women's inclusion in the Professional Projects Division. In this division, professional women were treated more equally to men, especially in the federal art, music, theater, and writers' projects. When federal support of artists was questioned, Hopkins answered, "Hell! They've got to eat just like other people." The WPA supported tens of thousands of artists, by funding creation of 2,566 murals and 17,744 pieces of sculpture that decorate public buildings nationwide. The federal art, theater, music, and writing programs, while not changing American culture as much as their adherents had hoped, did bring more art to more Americans than ever before or since. The WPA program in the arts led to the creation of the National Foundation for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. The WPA paid low wages and it was not able to employ everyone — some five million were left to seek assistance from state relief programs, which provided families with $10 per week. However, it went a long way toward bolstering the self-esteem of workers. A poem sent to Roosevelt in February 1936, in block print, read, in part,

Social Security Act

The act was an attempt to limit what was seen as dangers in the modern American life, including old age, poverty, unemployment, and the widowed or fatherless children. The act provided benefits to retirees and the unemployed, and a benefit at death. Payments to current retirees are financed by payroll tax on current workers' wages, half directly as a payroll tax and half paid to the employer.

Hawley-Smoot Tariff

This raised U.S tariffs to historically high levels. The original intention behind it was to increase protection afforded domestic farmers against foreign agricultural imports. Massive expansion in the agricultural production sector outside of Europe during World War I led, with the post-war recovery of European producers, to massive agricultural overproduction during the 1920's. This in turn, led to declining farm prices during the second half of the decade. During his election, Hoover promised the farmers he would raise the tariff levels on agricultural products. But once the process started, demand for increased protection flooded from the industrial sector, and soon a bill that had been made to relieve farmers, became a means to raise tariffs in all sectors of the economy. The bill provoked a storm of foreign retaliatory measures and came to stand as a symbol of the "beggar-thy-neighbor" policies (policies designed to improve one's own lot at the expense of others). Such policies led to a decline in international trade. Overall, world trade declined by some 66% between 1929 and 1934.

Dust Bowl

Through the mid-1930's, a drought in the Great Plains added to their problems. Water was a constant problem in the region. Normal rainfall seldom exceeded 20 inches a year that traditional American agricultural practices demanded. As a result, droughts on the Great Plains were often more devastating than those in the East and Midwest. In the years before America's western rivers were dammed and irrigation practices became widespread, there were few answers to the drought threat. New farming methods made drought conditions worse. Intensive farming came to prominence throughout the region in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Farmers then had moved onto the plains and plowed under much of the natural grasses in order to plant oceans of winter wheat. And after 1909, there were many more farmers too. In that year, the federal government expanded the acreage allotted in the Homestead Act to 320 acres per settler. The collapse of agriculture and the Great Plains Dust Bowl caused millions of other Americans to leave the Midwestern and southern regions where they were born. Many migrated to California lured by the promise of jobs, but were crushed when the promise too often proved empty. In reality, the migrants faced fierce competition from Mexican American, Filipino, and other farm laborers who were also seeking work. Many of them gave up farming and headed for nearby cities such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego, hoping to find factory work or join the military. Other farm families headed north or east to the cities of the Northeast and Midwest, again looking for jobs, shelter and relief. One of the irreversible effects of this massive migration-some 2.5 million people let the Plains states alone was that rural states lost population. while states with large cities gained population. It was one of the largest migrations in the nation's history, once again changing the nation's demographic patterns. The farmers best able to survive the Great Depression were the ones with the biggest operations. They often bought repossessed land at rock bottom prices and expanded their holdings into large commercial farms. The Dust Bowl also motivated the government to help Great Plains farmers. After the initial crisis, immense federal projects dammed western rivers. Dams eventually provided irrigation that made farm profits possible on the Great Plains.