Chapter 21-1 Apush Foner

uplift less fortunate members of society

"Liberalism," traditionally understood as limited government and free market economics, took on its modern meaning. Thanks to the New Deal, it now referred to active efforts by the national government to...

confused desperation

"This nation asks for action and action now," Roosevelt announced on taking office on March 4, 1933. The country, wrote the journalist and political commentator Walter Lippmann, "was in such a state of... that it would have followed almost any leader anywhere he chose to go."

confined to a wheelchair

After serving as undersecretary of the navy during World War I, he ran for vice president on the ill-fated Democratic ticket of 1920 headed by James M. Cox. In 1921, he contracted polio and lost the use of his legs, a fact carefully concealed from the public in that pre-television era. Very few Americans realized that the president who projected an image of vigorous leadership during the 1930s and World War II was...

Agricultural Adjustment Act

Another policy initiative of the Hundred Days addressed the disastrous plight of American farmers. The... (AAA) authorized the federal government to try to raise farm prices by setting production quotas for major crops and paying farmers not to plant more. Many crops already in the field were destroyed.

keeping prices artificially high and failing to increase workers' purchasing power

Brandeis believed that large corporations not only wielded excessive power but had contributed to the Depression by... They should be broken up, he insisted, not regulated. But the "brains trust"—a group of academics that included a number of Columbia University professors—saw bigness as inevitable in a modern economy.

Columbia River

Early in 1941, the unemployed Woody Guthrie, soon to become one of the country's most popular songwriters and folk singers, brought his family to Portland, Oregon. He hoped to star in a film about the great public-works projects under way on the...

"the only thing we have to fear is fear itself"

FDR spent much of 1933 trying to reassure the public. In his inaugural address, he declared that....(See the Appendix for the full text.)

New York legislature

FDR, as he liked to be called, was born in 1882, a fifth cousin of Theodore Roosevelt. He graduated from Harvard in 1904 and six years later won election to the... from Duchess County, site of his family's home at Hyde Park.

delegated legislative powers to the president and attempted to regulate local businesses that did not engage in interstate commerce

First came the NRA, declared unconstitutional in May in a case brought by the Schechter Poultry Company of Brooklyn, which had been charged with violating the code adopted by the chicken industry. In a unanimous decision, the Court declared the NRA unlawful because in its codes and other regulations it...

a mark of respectability

For many members of the middle class, home ownership had become... For workers, it offered economic security at a time of low wages, erratic employment, and limited occupational mobility.

economic growth, ease the domestic and working lives of ordinary Americans, and keep control of key natural resources in public rather than private hands

Franklin D. Roosevelt believed regional economic planning like that in the Northwest would promote.... "It promises," one supporter wrote, "a world replete with more freedom and happiness than mankind has ever known."

unrestrained pursuit of wealth

Freedom, too, underwent a transformation during the 1930s. The Depression had discredited the ideas that social progress rests on the... and that, apart from unfortunates like widows and orphans, most poverty is self-inflicted.

preserving the natural environment

From time immemorial, the Columbia River had been filled with salmon. But the Grand Coulee Dam made no provision for the passage of fish, and the salmon all but vanished. This caused little concern during the Depression but became a source of controversy later in the century as Americans became more concerned about...

Glass-Steagall Act

Further measures soon followed that transformed the American financial system. The... barred commercial banks from becoming involved in the buying and selling of stocks. Until its repeal in the 1990s, the law prevented many of the irresponsible practices that had contributed to the stock market crash.

economic planning and in improving the lot of ordinary citizens

Given a temporary job by the Bonneville Power Authority, the public agency that controlled the Columbia dams, Guthrie produced a song every day for the next month. One, "Roll on, Columbia," became a popular statement of the benefits that resulted when government took the lead in...

end the Depression or win judicial approval

Having failed to..., the First New Deal ground to a halt. Meanwhile, pressures were mounting outside Washington that propelled the administration toward more radical departures in policy.

production, prices, and wages

Headed by Hugh S. Johnson, a retired general and businessman, the NRA quickly established codes that set standards for... in the textile, steel, mining, and auto industries.

housing market

Hoover's administration established a federally sponsored bank to issue home loans. Not until the New Deal, however, did the government systematically enter the.... Roosevelt spoke of "the security of the home" as a fundamental right akin to "the security of livelihood, and the security of social insurance."

"orthodoxy" (that is, doing nothing) or "revolution."

If Roosevelt failed, Keynes added, the only remaining choices would be...

Conference on Home Building and Home Ownership

In 1931, President Hoover convened a... to review the housing crisis. The president called owning a home an American "birthright," the embodiment of the spirit of "enterprise, of independence, and of . . . freedom." Rented apartments, he pointed out, did not inspire "immortal ballads" like Home, Sweet Home or The Little Gray Home in the West.

foreclosure and to stimulate new construction

In 1933 and 1934, his administration moved energetically to protect home owners from...

6 million

In 1933, the government ordered more than... pigs slaughtered as part of the policy, a step critics found strange at a time of widespread hunger.

invalidate key New Deal laws

In 1935, the Supreme Court, still controlled by conservative Republican judges who held to the nineteenth-century understanding of freedom as liberty of contract, began to...

Adolf Hitler

In Germany,..., leader of the Nazi Party, established one of the most brutal dictatorships in human history. Hitler banned all political opposition and launched a reign of terror against Jews and others deemed to be "un-German."

United States v. Butler

In January 1936, the AAA fell in..., which declared it an unconstitutional exercise of congressional power over local economic activities. In June, by a 5-4 vote, the justices ruled that New York could not establish a minimum wage for women and children.

Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC)

In March 1933, Congress established the..., which set unemployed young men to work on projects like forest preservation, flood control, and the improvement of national parks and wildlife preserves. By the time the program ended in 1942, more than 3 million persons had passed through CCC camps, where they received government wages of $30 per month.

Federal Emergency Relief Administration

In May 1933, Congress created the..., to make grants to local agencies that aided those impoverished by the Depression. FDR, however, much preferred to create temporary jobs, thereby combating unemployment while improving the nation's infrastructure of roads, bridges, public buildings, and parks.

Civil Works Administration (CWA)

In November, yet another agency, the..., was launched. By January 1934, it employed more than 4 million persons in the construction of highways, tunnels, courthouses, and airports. But as the cost spiraled upward and complaints multiplied that the New Deal was creating a class of Americans permanently dependent on government jobs, Roosevelt ordered the CWA dissolved.

"new deal"

In his speech accepting the Democratic nomination for president in 1932, Roosevelt promised a... for the American people. But his campaign offered only vague hints of what this might entail.

Joseph Stalin

In the Soviet Union, another tyrant,..., embarked on successive five-year plans that at great social cost produced rapid industrialization and claimed to have eliminated unemployment. The militarist government of Japan invaded China in 1937, and hoped to extend its rule throughout Asia.

ordinary citizens

It is indeed paradoxical that Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had been raised in privilege on a New York country estate, came to be beloved as the symbolic representative of... But like Lincoln, with whom he is often compared, Roosevelt's greatness lay in his willingness to throw off the "dogmas of the quiet past" (Lincoln's words) to confront an unprecedented national crisis.

Blue Eagle

Johnson launched a publicity campaign to promote the NRA and its symbol, the..., which stores and factories that abided by the codes displayed. But after initial public enthusiasm, the NRA became mired in controversy.

drive up prices, limit production, lay off workers, and divide markets among themselves

Large companies dominated the code writing process. An inquiry conducted by the labor lawyer Clarence Darrow in 1934 concluded that they used the NRA to... at the expense of smaller competitors

economic recovery nor peace between employers and workers

Many anti-union employers ignored section 7a. The government lacked the manpower to police the 750 codes in effect by 1935. The NRA produced neither...

Dust Bowl

Mechanized agriculture in this semiarid region had pulverized the topsoil and killed native grasses that prevented erosion. Winds now blew much of the soil away, creating the..., as the affected areas of Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, and Colorado were called. A local newspaper described the situation in Cimarron County, Oklahoma: "Not a blade of wheat; cattle dying on the range, ninety percent of the poultry dead because of the sand storms, milk cows gone dry."

National Recovery Administration (NRA)

National Industrial Recovery Act established the..., which would work with groups of business leaders to establish industry codes that set standards for output, prices, and working conditions. Thus, "cutthroat" competition (in which companies took losses to drive competitors out of business) would be ended. These industrywide arrangements would be exempt from antitrust laws.

owned their homes

On the eve of World War I, a considerably higher percentage of immigrant workers than the native-born middle class...

Public Works Administration (PWA)

One section of the National Industrial Recovery Act created the..., with an appropriation of $3.3 billion. Directed by Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, it built roads, schools, hospitals, and other public facilities, including New York City's Triborough Bridge and the Overseas Highway between Miami and Key West, Florida.

The Grapes of Wrath

One storm in 1934 carried dust as far as Washington, D.C. The drought and dust storms displaced more than 1 million farmers. John Steinbeck's novel... (1939) and a popular film based on the book captured their plight, tracing a dispossessed family's trek from Oklahoma to California.

Twenty-first Amendment to the Constitution, Federal Communications Commission, and Securities and Exchange Commission

Other important measures of Roosevelt's first two years in office included the ratification of the..., which repealed Prohibition; the establishment of the... to oversee the nation's broadcast airwaves and telephone communications; and the creation of the... to regulate the stock and bond markets.

American ambition

Owning one's home had long been a widely shared... "A man is not a whole and complete man," Walt Whitman had written in the 1850s, "unless he owns a house and the ground it stands on."

urban slums or in ramshackle rural dwellings

Papers presented at the conference revealed that millions of Americans lived in overcrowded, unhealthy... Private enterprise alone, it seemed clear, was unlikely to solve the nation's housing crisis.

Social Security Act and Fair Labor Standards Act

Regional economic planning like that in the Northwest reflected this understanding of freedom. So did other New Deal measures, including the..., which offered aid to the unemployed and aged, and the..., which established a national minimum wage

electricity and irrigation

Residents of the economically underdeveloped Pacific Northwest had long dreamed of tapping this unused energy for.... But not until the 1930s did the federal government launch the program of dam construction that transformed the region. The project created thousands of jobs for the unemployed, and the network of dams produced abundant cheap power.

democracy, individual liberty, and economic planning

Roosevelt conceived of the New Deal as an alternative to socialism on the left, Nazism on the right, and the inaction of upholders of unregulated capitalism. He hoped to reconcile... "You have made yourself," the British economist John Maynard Keynes wrote to FDR, "the trustee for those in every country who seek to mend the evils of our condition by reasoned experiment within the framework of the existing social system."

bank after bank had closed its doors

Roosevelt confronted a banking system on the verge of collapse. As bank funds invested in the stock market lost their value and panicked depositors withdrew their savings,.... By March 1933, banking had been suspended in a majority of the states—that is, people could not gain access to money in their bank accounts.

"bank holiday"

Roosevelt declared a... temporarily halting all bank operations, and called Congress into special session. On March 9, it rushed to pass the Emergency Banking Act, which provided funds to shore up threatened institutions.

group of intellectuals and social workers

Roosevelt did not enter office with a blueprint for dealing with the Depression. At first, he relied heavily for advice on a... who took up key positions in his administration. They included Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, a veteran of Hull House and the New York Consumers' League who had been among the eyewitnesses to the Triangle fire of 1911; Harry Hopkins, who had headed emergency relief efforts during Roosevelt's term as governor of New York; Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, a veteran of Theodore Roosevelt's Progressive campaign of 1912; and Louis Brandeis, who had advised Woodrow Wilson during the 1912 campaign and now offered political advice to FDR while serving on the Supreme Court.

balanced federal budget

Roosevelt spoke of the government's responsibility to guarantee "every man . . . a right to make a comfortable living." But he also advocated a... and criticized his opponent, President Hoover, for excessive government spending.

role of the federal government in people's lives

Seizing on the sense of crisis and the momentum of his electoral victory, Roosevelt won rapid passage of laws he hoped would promote economic recovery. He persuaded Congress to create a host of new agencies, whose initials soon became part of the language of politics—NRA, AAA, CCC. Never in American history had a president exercised such power or so rapidly expanded the...

20 percent of the workforce

Some 10 million Americans—more than...—remained unemployed when 1934 came to an end.

Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA)

Some New Deal public-works initiatives looked to government-planned economic transformation as much as economic relief. The..., another product of the Hundred Days, built a series of dams to prevent floods and deforestation along the Tennessee River and to provide cheap electric power for homes and factories in a seven-state region where many families still lived in isolated log cabins.

transformed the role of the federal government, constructed numerous public facilities, and provided relief to millions of needy persons

Taken together, the First New Deal was a series of experiments, some of which succeeded and some of which did not. They... But they did not end the Depression.

single-family homes than to rent apartments

Thanks to the FHA and, later, the Veterans' Administration, home ownership came within the reach of tens of millions of families. It became cheaper for most Americans to buy...

poor tenants and sharecroppers

The AAA policy of paying landowning farmers not to grow crops encouraged the eviction of thousands of... Many joined the rural exodus to cities or to the farms of the West Coast.

prices and incomes

The AAA succeeded in significantly raising farm... But not all farmers benefited. Benefits flowed to property-owning farmers, ignoring the large number who worked on land owned by others.

protection against the dislocations caused by modern capitalism

The Columbia River project reflected broader changes in American life and thought during the New Deal of the 1930s. Roosevelt oversaw the transformation of the Democratic Party into a coalition of farmers, industrial workers, the reform-minded urban middle class, liberal intellectuals, northern African-Americans, and, somewhat incongruously, the white supremacist South, united by the belief that the federal government must provide Americans with...

immense amount of energy

The Columbia River winds its way on a 1,200-mile course from Canada through Washington and Oregon to the Pacific Ocean. Because of its steep descent from uplands to sea level, it produces an...

housing crisis

The Depression devastated the American housing industry. The construction of new residences all but ceased, and banks and savings and loan associations that had financed home ownership collapsed or, to remain afloat, foreclosed on many homes (a quarter of a million in 1932 alone).

Britain and France

The Depression did not produce a single pattern of international public response. For nearly the entire decade of the 1930s, conservative governments ruled... They were more interested in preserving public order than relieving suffering or embarking on policy innovations.

"Hundred Days"

The Emergency Banking Act was the first of an unprecedented flurry of legislation during the first three months of Roosevelt's administration, a period known as the...

building roads, dams, airports, bridges, and housing

The Grand Coulee Dam was part of what one scholar has called a "public works revolution" that transformed the American economy and landscape during the 1930s. The Roosevelt administration spent far more money on... than any other activity.

individual self-reliance

The Hundred Days also brought the government into providing relief to those in need. Roosevelt and most of his advisers shared the widespread fear that direct government payments to the unemployed would undermine...

understandings of freedom

The NRA reflected how even in its early days, the New Deal reshaped... In effect, FDR had repudiated the older idea of liberty based on the idea that the best way to encourage economic activity and ensure a fair distribution of wealth was to allow market competition to operate, unrestrained by the government.

economic security

The New Deal elevated a public guarantee of... to the forefront of American discussions of freedom. The 1930s were a decade of dramatic social upheaval. Social and political activists, most notably a revitalized labor movement, placed new issues on the political agenda.

economic development of the West

The TVA put the federal government, for the first time, in the business of selling electricity in competition with private companies. It was a preview of the program of regional planning that spurred the...

57 percent

The biggest difference between the parties during the campaign was the Democrats' call for the repeal of Prohibition. Battered by the economic crisis, Americans in 1932 were desperate for new leadership, and Roosevelt won a resounding victory. He received... of the popular vote, and Democrats swept to a commanding majority in Congress.

National Industrial Recovery Act

The centerpiece of Roosevelt's plan for combating the Depression, the..., was to a large extent modeled on the government-business partnership established by theWar Industries Board of World War I. Roosevelt called it "the most important and far-reaching legislation ever enacted by the American Congress."

managed and directed by the government

The competitive marketplace, they argued, was a thing of the past, and large firms needed to be..., not dismantled. Their view prevailed during what came to be called the First New Deal.

Washington and Oregon

The dam provided the cheapest electricity in the country for towns that sprang up out of nowhere, farms on what had once been deserts in eastern..., and factories that would soon be producing aluminum for World War II airplanes. The project also had less appealing consequences.

most severe drought

The onset in 1930 of a period of unusually dry weather in the nation's heartland worsened the Depression's impact on rural America. By mid-decade, the region suffered from the century's...

Progressive era

The presence of these individuals reflected how Roosevelt drew on the reform traditions of the... But Progressivism, as noted in Chapter 18, was hardly a unified movement, and Roosevelt's advisers did not speak with one voice.

Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC)

The same law established the..., a government system that insured the accounts of individual depositors. And Roosevelt took the United States off the gold standard— that is, he severed the link between the country's currency and its gold reserves, thus making possible the issuance of more money in the hope of stimulating business activity.

Home Owners Loan Corporation and Federal Housing Administration

The... (FHA) insured millions of long-term mortgages issued by private banks. At the same time, the federal government itself built thousands of units of low-rent housing. New Deal housing policy represented a remarkable departure from previous government practice.

not a single bank failed

Together, these measures rescued the financial system and greatly increased the government's power over it. About 5,000 banks—one-third of the nation's total—had failed between 1929 and 1933, representing a loss of tens of millions of dollars to depositors. In 1936,... in the United States.

political condition of personal freedom

When one writer in 1941 published a survey of democratic thought beginning in the ancient world, he concluded that what distinguished his own time was its awareness of "the social conditions of freedom." Thanks to the New Deal, he wrote, "economic security" had "at last been recognized as a..."

40 percent

When the Grand Coulee Dam went into operation in 1941, it was the largest man-made structure in world history. It eventually produced more than... of the nation's hydroelectric power.

meaning of freedom

Yet while the New Deal significantly expanded the..., it did not erase freedom's boundaries. Its benefits flowed to industrial workers but not tenant farmers, to men far more fully than women, and to white Americans more than blacks, who, in the South, still were deprived of the basic rights of citizenship.

Economy Act

one of the first measures of the Hundred Days had been the..., which reduced federal spending in an attempt to win the confidence of the business community. But with nearly a quarter of the workforce unemployed, spending on relief was unavoidable.

section 7a of the new law

to win support from labor,... recognized the workers' right to organize unions—a departure from the "open shop" policies of the 1920s and a step toward government support for what workers called "industrial freedom."