Chapter 21: The New Deal, 1932-1940

Franklin D. Roosevelt

- 5th cousin of Theodore Roosevelt - Served as undersecretary of the navy during World War I. - Ran for vice-president on Democratic ticket of 1920 headed by James M. Cox, but the two lost. - In 1921, he contracted polio and lost the use of his legs. Concerned that his disability would harm his image during the 1930s and World War II, he carefully concealed it from the public.

Federal Housing Administration (FHA)

- A government agency created during the New Deal to guarantee mortgages, allowing lenders to offer long-term (usually 30-year) with low down payments (usually 10% of the asking price. - The FHA rarely underwrote loans in racially mixed or minority neighborhoods.

Popular Front

- A period during the mid-1930s when the Communist Party sought to ally itself with socialists and New Dealers in movements for social change, urging reform of the capitalist system rather than revolution. - At the height of this period, Communists gained an unprecedented respectability.

First New Deal: Summary

- A series of experiments, some of which succeeded and some of which did not. - They transformed the role of the federal government, constructed numerous public facilities, and provided relief to millions pf needy persons. - Public employment rescued millions of Americans from the ravages of the Depression. However, while the economy improved somewhat, sustained recovery had not bee achieved. Some 10 million Americans (more than 20% remained unemployed when 1934 came to an end.

Congress and the Second New Deal

- A series of measures in 1935 attacked head-on the problem of weak demand and economic inequality. - Congress levied a highly publicized tax on large fortunes and corporate profits--a direct response to the popularity of Huey Lon's Share Our Wealth campaign. - Congress created the Rural Electrification Agency (REA) to bring electric power to homes that lacked it--80% of farms were still without electricity in 1934--in part to enable more Americans to purchase household appliances.

The Election of 1932

- Accepting the Democratic nomination for president in 1932, Roosevelt promised a "new deal" for the American people, but he was vague about his plan. - Roosevelt advocated a balanced federal budget and criticized his opponent, President Hoover, for excessive government spending--especially to enforce the increasingly unpopular Prohibition law. - Roosevelt showed that he had a greater awareness of the struggles of ordinary Americans. - Devastated by the economic crisis, Americans in 1932 were desperate for new leadership, and Roosevelt won a resounding victory. Democrats swept to a commanding majority in Congress.

Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA)

- Administrative body created in 1933 to control flooding in the Tennessee River valley, provide work for the region's unemployed, and produce inexpensive electric power for the region. - Another product of the Hundred Days that built dams to prevent floods and deforestation along the Tennessee River and to provide cheap electric power for homes and factorings in a 7-state region where many families still lived in isolated log cabins. - The TVA put the federal government, for the first time, in the business of selling electricity in competition with private companies.

A New Deal for Blacks

- African Americans were hit hardest by the Depression. With an unemployment rate double that of whites, even those who retained their jobs now faced competition from unemployed whites who had previously considered positions like waiter and porter beneath them. - Blacks benefited disproportionately from direct government relief and, especially in northern cities, jobs on New Deal public-works projects.

A Reckoning with Liberty

- Along with being a superb politician, Roosevelt was a master of political communication. At a time when his political opponents controlled most newspapers, he harnessed radio's power to bring his message directly into American homes. - By the mid-1930s, more than 2/3 of American families owned radios. They listened avidly to Roosevelt's radio addresses, known as "fireside chats." - He reclaimed the word "freedom" from conservatives and made it a rallying cry for the New Deal. In his 2nd fireside chat, Roosevelt juxtaposed his own definition of liberty as "greater security for the average man" to the older notion of liberty of contract, which served the interests of "the privileged few."

The Supreme Court's Reversal

- Although Congress rejected the Court packing plan, Roosevelt soon accomplished his underlying purpose. Coming soon after Roosevelt's landslide victory of 1936, the threat of "Court packing" inspired an astonishing about-face by key justices. - Beginning in March 1937, the Court suddenly began to be willing to support economic regulation by both the federal government and the states. - It turned aside challenges to Social Security and the Wagner Act. In subsequent cases, the Court affirmed federal power to regulate wages, hours, child labor, agricultural production, and numerous other aspects of economic life. - The Court's new attitude market a permanent change in judicial policy. Having declared dozens of laws unconstitutional in the decades leading up to 1937, the justices have rarely done so since.

Worker's demands

- American factories at the outset of the New Deal were miniature dictatorships in which unions were rare, workers could be beaten by supervisors and fired at will, and management determined the length of the workday and speed of the assembly line. - Workers' demands during the 1930s went beyond better wages. They included an end to employers' arbitrary power in the workplace, and basic civil liberties for workers, including the right to picket, distribute literature, and meet to discuss their grievances. All these goals required union recognition. - Roosevelt's inauguration unleashed a flood of poignant letters to the federal government describing the horrific conditions laborers faced.

Wagner Act (National Labor Relations Act of 1935)

- Another major initiative of the Second New Deal, the Wagner Act, brought democracy into the American workplace by empowering the National Labor Relationship Board to supervise elections in which employees voted on union representation. - It also outlawed "unfair labor practices," including the firing and blacklisting of union organizers. - Law that established the National Labor Relations Board and facilitated unionization by regulating employment and bargaining practices.

The Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA)

- Another policy initiative of the Hundred Days addressed the disastrous struggles of American farmers. The Agricultural Adjustment Act authorized the federal government to set production quotas for major crops and pay farmers to plant less in an attempt to raise farm prices. Many crops already in the field. were destroyed. In 1933, the government ordered move than 6 million pigs slaughtered as part of the policy, a step critics found strange at a time of widespread hunger. - The AAA succeeded in significantly raising farm prices and incomes. Not all farmers benefited, however. Money flowed to property-owning farmers, ignoring the large number who worked on land owned by others. The AAA policy of paying landowning farmers not to grow crops encouraged the eviction of thousands of poor tenants and sharecroppers. Many joined the rural exodus to cities or to the farms of the West Coast.

Roosevelt's Opponent

- As Roosevelt's opponent, Republicans chose Kansas governor Alfred Landon, a former Theodore Roosevelt Progressive. - Landon denounced Social Security and other measures as threats to individual liberty. Opposition to the New Deal planted the seeds for the later flowering of an antigovernment conservatism bent on upholding the free market and dismantling the welfare state.

The Stigma of Welfare

- As a result, public assistance programs allowed for widespread discrimination in the distribution of benefits. Recipients came to bear the humiliating stigma of dependency on government handouts, which would soon come to be known as "welfare." - The situation seemed certain to identify Blacks as recipients of unearned government assistance and welfare as a program for minorities, thus dooming it forever to inadequate "standards of aid." Over time, this is precisely what happened, until the federal government abolished responsibility for welfare entirely in 1996, during the presidency of Bill Clinton.

The New Deal and Feminism

- As the New Deal increased women's visibility in national politics, organized feminism--which had already been in disarray during the 1920s--disappeared as apolitical force. - The Depression inspired widespread demands for women to remove themselves from the labor market to make room for unemployed men. Many men believed that public-works jobs and governmental relief should not go to women, who they believed could be supported by their husbands or fathers. - Most New Deal programs did not excluded women from benefits (although the CCC restricted its camps to men). However, the ideal of the male-headed household powerfully shaped social policy. Since paying taxes on one's wages made one eligible for most generous Social Security programs--old age pensions and unemployment insurance--the left most women uncovered, because they did not work outside the home. - The program excluded the 3 million mostly female domestic workers altogether.

Louis Brandeis

- Believed that large corporations not only wielded excessive power but also had contributed to the Depression by keeping prices artificially high and failing to increae workers' purchasing power. He insisted that they should be broken up, not regulated. - The "brains trust," a group of academics that included a number of Columbia University professors, had an opposing point of view, as they saw bigness inevitable in a modern economy. Large firms needed to be managed and directed by the government, not dismantled. Their view prevailed during what came to be called the First New Deal.

Black Protest

- Black organizations like the Urban League and NAACP lobbied strenuously for a system that enabled agricultural and domestic workers to receive unemployment and old age benefits and that established national relief standards. - The Social Security Act reflected the power of individuals who feared that the inclusion of Black workers would disrupt the region's low-wage, racially divided labor system.

The 1936 Campaign

- By 1936, with working-class voters providing massive majorities for the Democratic Party and businesses large and small bitterly estranged from the New Deal, politics reflected class divisions more completely than at any other time in American history. Conceptions of freedom divided sharply as well. - A fight for the possession of "the ideal of freedom," reported the New York Times, emerged as the central issue of the presidential campaign of 1936. - In his speech accepting renomination, Roosevelt attacked "economic royalists" who sought to establish a new tyranny over the "average man." He argued that economic rights were the precondition of liberty, saying that poor men "are not free men," Throughout the campaign, FDR would insist that the threat posed to economic freedom by the "new despotism" of large corporations was the main issue of the election.

Keynesian economics

- By 1937, Roosevelt was ready to follow Keynes' proposal. In April, he asked Congress for billions more for work relief and farm aid. The events of 1937-1938 marked a major shift in New Deal philosophy. - Public spending would now be the government's major tool for combating unemployment and stimulating economic growth. The Second New Deal had come to an end.

Achievemnts and Limits of the Second New Deal in Rural America

- By 1950, 90% of the nation's farms had been wired for electricity, and almost all now possessed radios, electric stoves, refrigerators, and mechanical equipment to milk cows. - In addition, the federal government under the Second New Deal tried to promote soil conservation and family farming. This effort resulted from the belief that the country would never achieve prosperity so long as farmers' standard of living lagged well behind that of city dwellers, and that rural poverty resulted mainly from the poor use of natural resources. - Thus, farmers received federal assistance in reducing soil loss in their fields. These measures (like those of the AAA) mainly benefited landowners--not sharecroppers, tenants, or migrant workers. In the long run, the Second New Deal failed to stop the trend toward larger farms and fewer farmers.

Indian New Deal

- Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Collier launched an Indian New Deal. - Collier secured passage of the Indian Reorganization Act in 1934. The act abolished the government's campaign of forcibly dividing First Nations lands into small plots for individual families and selling off "surplus" lands, and it recognized the right of the First Nations to govern their own affairs. - For many years, many First Nations people had pressed for a return of their lands and viewed self-determination as foundational to freedom. The Indian Reorganization Act acknowledged these goals, though in limited fashion. It encouraged tribes to establish governing councils and new constitutions, but it compelled them to adopt constitutions in line with government officials' expectations. - Phrase that refers to the reforms implemented for First Nations during the New Deal era. John Collier, the commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), increased the access First Nations had to relief programs and employed more First Nations people at the BIA. He worked to pass the Indian Reorganization Act. However, the version of the act passed by Congress was a much diluted version of Collier's orginal proposal and did not greatly improve the lives of First Nations.

National Recovery Administration

- Controversial federal policy created in 1933 that brought together business and labor settlers to create "codes of fair competition" and "fair labor policies," including a national minimum wages - The agency would work with groups of business leaders of American industry to set standards for output, prices, and working conditions.

Dr. Francis Townsend

- Dr. Francis Townsend, a California physician, meanwhile won wide support for a plan by which the government would make a monthly payment of $200 to older Americans, with the requirement that they spend it immediately. - This, he argued, would boost the economy. Along with the rise of the CIO, these signs of popular discontent helped spark the Second New Deal.

Huey Long

- Driven by intense ambition and the desire to help uplift Louisiana's "common people," Long won election as governor in 1928 and in 1930 took a seat in the U.S. Senate. From Washington, he dominated every branch of state government. - He used his dictatorial power to build roads, schools, and hospitals and to increase the tax burden on Louisiana's oil companies. - He was on the verge of announcing a run for president when the son of a defeated political rival assassinated him in 1935.

Court packing

- Emboldened by his electoral triumph, Roosevelt now made what many considered a serious political miscalculation. With the excuse that several members of the Supreme Court were too old to perform their duties, he proposed that the president be allowed to appoint a new justice for each one who remained on the Court past age 70 (6/9 had already passed this age). - FDR's aim was to change that balance of power on a Court that he feared would invalidate Social Security, the Wagner Act, and other measures of the Second New Deal. - President Franklin D. Roosevelt's failed 1937 attempt to increase the number of U.S. Supreme Court justices from 9 to 15 in order to save his Second New Deal programs from constitutional challenges.

The Second New Deal

- Encouraged by Democratic gains in the midterm elections of 1934, Roosevelt in 1935 launched the Second New Deal. The first had focused on economic recovery. The emphases of the 2nd was economic security--a guarantee that Americans would be protected against unemployment and poverty. - The idea that lack of consumer demand caused the Depression had been popularized by Huey Long, Francis Townsend, and the CIO. More and more New Dealers concluded that the government should no longer try to plan business recovery but should try to redistribute the national income so as to sustain mass purchasing power in the consumer economy.

New Deal legislations

- Even as the Court made its peace with Roosevelt's policies, the momentum of the Second New Deal slowed. - The landmark United States Housing Act did pass in 1937, initiating the first major national effort to built homes for the poorest Americans.

FDR and Liberty

- FDR 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. - Section 7a of the National Industrial Recovery Act recognized the workers' right to organized unions--a departure from the "open shop" policies of the 1920s and a step toward government support for what workers called "industrial freedom." This helped FDR win support from labor.

Eleanor Roosevelt

- FDR's wife - She transformed the role of First Lady, turning a position with no formal responsibilities into a base for political action. - She traveled widely, spoke out on public issues, wrote a regular newspaper column, and worked to enlarge the scope of the New Deal in areas like civil rights, labor legislation, and work relief.

The Fair Labor Standards Bill

- Failed to reach the floor for over a year. When it finally passed in 1938, it banned goods produced by child labor from interstate commerce, set 40 cents as the hourly minimum wage, and required overtime pay for hours of work exceeding 40 per week. - This last major piece of New Deal legislation established the practice of federal regulation of wages and working conditions, another radical departure from pre-Depression policies

Federal Discrimination in Housing

- Federal housing policy powerfully reinforced residential segregation. Nearly all municipalities, North as well as South, insisted that housing built or financially aided by the federal government be racially segregated. - The Federal Housing Administration insured mortgages that contained clauses barring future sales to non-white buyers, and it refused to channel money into integrated neighborhoods. - Discriminatory practices by private banks, real estate companies, and federal policy allowed housing segregation to become entrenched in the United States. - Blacks could not accumulate home equity and financial wealth because they were excluded from federally backed mortgage insurance, as minority neighborhoods were designated "undesirable" for credit purposes.

The New Deal and Mexican Americans

- For Mexican Americans, the Depression was a wrenching experience. The previous deportation campaigns of the federal government and local officials led more than 400K people (1/5 of Mexican-American population) to return to Mexico. - Those who remained mostly worked in grim conditions in California's vegetable and fruit fields, whose corporate farms benefited enormously from New Deal dam construction that provided them with cheap electricity and water for irrigation. The Wagner Act and Social Security Act did not apply to agricultural laborers.

The New Deal

- Franklin D. Roosevelt's campaign promise, in his speech to the Democratic National Convention of 1932, to combat the Great Depression with "a new deal for the American people"; the phrase became a catchword for his ambitious plan of economic programs - Franklin D. Roosevelt believed regional economic development like that in the Northwest would promote economic growth, ease the domestic and working lives of ordinary Americans, and keep control of key natural resources in public rather than private hands. - The early Roosevelt administration spent far more money on building roads, dams, airports, bridges, and housing than on any other activity.

Freedom during the 1930s

- Freedom underwent a transformation during the 1930s. The New Deal elevated a public guarantee of economic security to the forefront of American discussions of freedom. Regional economic planning reflected this understanding of freedom, as did other New Deal measures like the Social Security Act--which offered aid to the unemployed and aged--and the Fair Labor Standards Act, which established a national minimum wage. - While the New Deal significantly expanded the meaning of freedom, 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, First Nations, or other non-whites who were deprived of basic rights.

Pressure on FDR

- Having failed to end the Depression or win judicial approval, the First New Deal ground to a halt. - Meanwhile, pressures were mounting outside. Washington that propelled the administration toward more radical departures in policy.

The Impact of the NRA

- Headed by Hugh S. Johnson, a retired general and businessman, the NRA quickly established codes that set standards for production, prices, and wages in the textile, steel, mining , and auto industries. - Yet, the NRA became the center of controversy because large companies dominated the code-writing process. They used the NRA to drive up prices, limit production, lay off workers, and divide markets among themselves at the expense of smaller competitors. - The NRA produced neither economic recovery nor peace between employers and workers. - It did, however, combat the sense tat the government was doing nothing to deal with the economic crisis.

Women in the workforce

- However, because the Depression hit industrial employment harder than low-wage clerical and service jobs where women predominated, the proportion of the workforce made up of women rose. - The government tried to reverse this trend. In its final days, the Hoover administration prohibited both members of a married couple from holding federal jobs. Until the repeal of that provision in 1937, it led to the dismissal of numerous female civil service employees whose husbands worked fro the government. Employers from banks to public school systems barred married women from jobs.

Works Progress Administration

- In 1934, Roosevelt had severely decreased federal employment for those in need. - Now, he approved the establishment of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), which hired some 3 million Americans, in virtually every walk of life, each year until it ended in 1943. - It constructed thousands of public buildings and bridges, more than 500,000 miles of roads, and 600 airports. It built stadiums, swimming pools, and sewage treatment plants. - Unlike previous work relief programs, the WPA employed many out-of-work white collar workers and professionals, even doctors and dentists. - The WPA set hundreds of artists to work decorating public buildings with murals. It hired writers to produce local histories and guidebooks to the 48 states and to record the recollections of ordinary Americans, including hundreds of formerly enslaved people. - Thanks to the WPA, audiences across the country enjoyed their first glimpse of live musical and theatrical performances and their first opportunity to view exhibitions of American art.

The Supreme Court and the New Deal

- In 1935, the Supreme Court, still controlled by the conservative Republican judges who held to the 19th century understanding of freedom as liberty of contract, began to invalidate key New Deal Laws. - First came the NRA, declared unconstitutional in May 1935 in a case brought by the Schechter Poultry Company of Brooklyn.

The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money

- In 1936, John Maynard Keynes had challenged economists' traditional belief in the importance of balanced budgets through The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. - He insisted that large-scale government spending was necessary to sustain purchasing power and stimulate economic activity during downturns. Such spending should be enacted even at the cost of a budget deficit (a situation in which the government spends more money than it takes in).

The 1936 Presidential Election

- In 1936, Roosevelt won a landslide reelection, with more than 60% of the popular vote. - His success stemmed from strong backing from organized labor and his ability to unite southern white and northern Black voters, Protestant farmers and urban Catholic and Jewish ethnics, industrial workers and middle-class home owners. These groups made up the "New Deal coalition," which would dominate American politics for nearly half a century.

United States v. Butler

- In January 1936, the AAA fell in this Supreme Court decision, which declared the AAA as an unconstitutional exercise of congressional power over local economic activiies.

Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC)

- In March 1933, Congress established the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), which set unemployed young men to work on projects like forest preservation, flood control, and the improvement of national parks and wildlife preserves. - The CCC made a major contribution to the enhancement of the American environment. - 1933 New Deal public work relief program that provided outdoor manual work for unemployed men, rebuilding infrastructure, and implementing conservation program. The program cut the unemployment rate, particularly among young men.

Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA)

- In May 1993, Congress created the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, 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 1933, another agency, the Civil Works. Administration (CWA), was launched. - By January 1934, it employed more than 4 million people in the construction of. highways, tunnels, courthouses, and airports. - 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.

Grand Coulee Dam

- In the 1930s, the federal government launched a project of dam construction on the Columbia River to create thousands of jobs for the unemployed and a network of dams that produced abundant cheap power - Large environmental and human costs for fish and FN

Injustices against the Navajo nation

- In the case of the Navajo nation, by then the largest tribe in the United States, the Indian New Deal brought new injustices. - Sheepherding was important to the Navajo political economy, but grazing had contributed to soil erosion and drought. Federal conservation officials called for drastic, immediate herd reductions. Federal agents seized animals, transported them to canyons or corrals, and killed them. Outraged by Collier's support of livestock reduction, the Navajo rejected the Indian Reorganization Act in June 1935.

The Heyday of American Communism

- In the mid-1930s, for the first time in American history, the left--an umbrella term for socialists, communists, labor radicals, and many New Deal liberals--enjoyed a shaping influence on the nation's politics and culture. - The CIO and Communist Party became focal points for a broad social and intellectual impulse that helped to redraw the boundaries of American freedom. - The Communist Party experienced remarkable growth during the 1930s, despite being an obscure, faction-ridden organization when the Depression began.

Father Charles E. Coughlin

- In the mid-1930s, the "radio priest," Father Charles E. Coughlin, attracted millions of listeners with weekly broadcasts attacking Wall Street bankers and greedy capitalists, and calling for government ownership of key industries as a way of combating the Depression. - Initially a strong supporter of FDR, Coughlin became increasingly critical of the president for what he considered the failure of the new Deal to promote social justice. - His crusade would later shift to anti-Semitism and support for European fascism.

Redefining the People

- In theater, film, and dance, the Popular Front vision of American society sank deep roots. In this broad left-wing culture, social and economic radicalism defined true Americanism, not support for the status quo. - Ethnic and racial diversity was the glory of American society, and the "American way of life" meant unionism and social citizenship, not the unbridled pursuit of wealth. - During the 1930s, artists and writers who strove to create socially meaningful works eagerly took up the task of depicting the daily lives of ordinary farmers and city dwellers. - Dorothea Lange took photographs of migrant workers and sharecroppers. Black spirituals were known as art created by the people. Both of these came to be seen as expressions of genuine Americanism. - Films celebrated populist figures who challenged and defeated corrupt businessmen and politicians, as in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). Earl Robinson's song "Ballad for Americans," a typical expression of Popular Front culture that celebrated the religious, racial, and ethnic diversity of American society, became a national hit and was performed in 1940 at the Republican national convention.

A year of strikes

- Labor's great upheaval exploded in 1934, a year that witnessed thousands of strikes. - Many produced violent confrontations between workers and the local police. - San Francisco experienced the country's first general strike since 1919. It began with a walkout of dock-workers, who demanded recognition of the International Longshoremen's Association and an end to the hated "shape up" system in which they had to gather en masse each day to wait for work assignments. - The year 1934 also witnessed a strike of 400K textile workers in states from New England to the Lower South, demanding recognition of the United Textile Workers. Many of these walkouts won at least some of the workers' demands. The textile strike failed, however.

Share Our Wealth Movement

- Long launched the Share Our Wealth Movement in 1934, with the slogan "Every Man a King." He called for the confiscation of most of the wealth of the richest America in order to finance an immediate grant of $5,000 and a guaranteed job and annual income for all citizens. - Program offered by Huey Long as an alternative to the New Deal. The program proposed to confiscate large personal fortunes, which would be used to guarantee every poor family a cash grant of $5,000 and every worker an annual income of $2,500. It also promised to provide pensions, reduce working hours, and pay veterans' bonuses and ensured a college education to every qualified student.

Mexican American resistance

- Mexican American leaders strsuggled to develop a consistent strategy for their people. They sought greater rights by claiming to be white Americans--in order to avoid the same discrimination as African Americans--but also sought the backing of the Mexican government and promoted a mystical sense of pride and identification with Mexican heritage later given the name la raza.

The New Deal and Filipinos

- Mexican Americans were not the only group encouraged to leave the United States. - In 1935, Congress passed the Filipino Repatriation Act, offering free transportation to those born in the Philippines and willing to return there. - Persons who did leave would only be able to return by applying under the Philippines' annual immigration quota of 50. Given the lack of economic opportunity in the Philippines and fear about being permanently unable to return to the United States, of the 45K Fiilipinos in the country, only around 2,00 accepted the offer.

Federal Discrimination in Employment

- Most Blacks holding federal jobs were working in positions with low salaries like clerks or custodians. In the South, many New Deal construction projects refused to hire Blacks at all. - The New Deal began the process of modernizing southern agriculture, but tenants--Black and white--footed much of the bill. Many sharecroppers were driven off the land as a result of the AAA policy of raising crop prices by paying landowners to reduce cotton acreage. - Not until the Great Society of the 1960s would those left out of Social Security and other New Deal programs--racial minorities, many women, migrants, and other less privileged workers--win inclusion in the American welfare state.

Schechter Poultry Corp. v. U.S.

- NRA was declared unconstitutional in this case by the Supreme Court. Schechter Poultry Company. - The company was charged with violating the code adopted by the chicken industry. - In a unanimous decision the Supreme Court declared the NRA was unlawful because its codes and other regulations, it delegated legislative powers to the president and attempted to regulate local businesses that did not engage in interstate commerce. (Commerce Clause, Congress can only regulate interstate commerce, not interstate commerce).

The Origins of the Social Security Act of 1935

- None of the ideas in the Social Security Act of 1935 were original ideas. - The Progressive platform of 1912 had called for old age pensions. Assistance to poor families with dependent children descended from the mothers' pensions promoted by maternalist reformers. Many European countries had already adopted national unemployment insurance plans. What was new, however, was that in the name of economic security, the American government would now supervise not simply temporarily relief but also a permanent system of social insurance.

Emergency Banking Act of 1933

- On March 9, 1933, Congress rushed to pass the Emergency Banking Ac, which provided funds to shore up threatened institutions. - The First New Deal measure that provided for reopening the banks under strict conditions and took the United States off the gold standard.

Public Works Administration (PWA)

- One section of the National Industrial Recovery Act created the Public Works Administration (PWA), with an appropriation of $3.3 billon. - Directed by Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, it built roads, schools, and other public facilities, including NYC's Triborough (now Robert F. Kennedy Bridge) and the Overseas Highway between Miami and Key West, Florida. - A New Deal agency that contracted with private construction companies to build roads, schools, hospitals, and other public facilities.

Voices of Protest

- Other popular movements of the mid-1930s also placed the question of economic justice on the political agenda. - In California, the novelist Upton Sinclair won the Democratic nomination for governor in 1934 as the head of the End Poverty in California Movement. - Sinclair called for the state to use empty factories and land in cooperative ventures that would provide jobs for the unemployed. He lost the election after being subjected to one of the first modern "negative" media campaigns - The rise to national prominence of Huey Long offered another sign of popular dissatisfaction with the slow pace of economic recovery.

Challenging the Color Line

- Popular Front culture moved well beyond New Deal liberalism in condemning racism as incompatible with true Americanism. - In the 1930s, groups like the American Jewish Committee and the National Conference of Christians and Jews actively promoted ethnic and religious tolerance, defining pluralism as "the American way." Whether in Harlem or East Los Angeles, however, the Communist Party was the era's only predominantly white organization to make fighting racism a top priority. - Communist influence even spread to the South. The Communist-dominated International Labor Defense mobilized popular support for Black defendants victimized by a racist criminal justice system.

Liberalism and the Democratic Party

- Roosevelt also 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 surprisingly, the white supremacist South, united by the belief that the federal government must provide Americans with protection against the disturbances caused by modern capitalism. - "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 provide citizens a baseline security against economic calamity.

The modern meaning of "liberalism"

- Roosevelt appealed to traditional values in support of new policies. He gave the term "liberalism" its modern meaning. - In the 19th century, liberalism had been a shorthand for limited government and free-market economics. - Roosevelt consciously chose to employ "liberalism" to describe a large, active, socially conscious state.

African American Representation in the Roosevelt Administration

- Roosevelt appointed a number of African Americans to important federal positions - Key members of his administration, including his wife, Eleanor, and Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes--a former president of the Chicago chapter of the NAACP--directed national attention to the injustices of segregation, disenfranchisement, and lynching.

The Coming of the New Deal

- Roosevelt considered the New Deal as an alternative to socialism on the left, Nazism on the right, an the inaction favored by upholders of unregulated capitalism. - He hoped to reconcile democracy individual liberty, and economic recovery and development. - Roosevelt did not, however, enter office with a blueprint for dealing with the Depression. At first, he relied on a group of intellectuals and social workers who took up key positions in his administration.

The Limits of Change

- Roosevelt envisioned the Second New Deal--and especially Social Security--expanding the meaning of freedom by extending assistance to broad groups of needy Americans--the unemployed, elderly, and dependent--as a right of citizenship, not charity or special privilege. - However, political realities, especially the power of inherited ideas about gender and Black disenfranchisement in the South, powerfully affected the drafting of legislation. Different groups of Americans experienced the New Deal in radically different ways.

Political Monopoly in the South

- Roosevelt made the federal government the symbolic representative of all the people, including racial and ethnic groups generally ignored by previous administrations. Yet the power of the Solid South helped to mold the New Deal welfare state into an entitlement of white Americans. - After the South's Blacks lost the right to vote around the turn of the century, Democrats enjoyed a political monopoly in the region. Democratic members of Congress were elected again and again. Committee chairmanships in Congress rest on seniority--how many years a member has served in office. Thus, beginning in 1933, when Democrats took control of Congress, southerners assumed the key leadership positions. At their insistence, the Social Security law excluded agricultural and domestic workers, the largest categories of Black employment.

"The security of the home"

- Roosevelt spoke of "the security of the home" as a fundamental right. - In 1933 and 1934, his administration moved energetically to protect home owners from foreclosure and to stimulate new construction. - The Home Owners' Loan Corporation and Federal Housing Administration (FHA) insured millions of long-term mortgages issued by private banks. - A t the same time, the federal government built thousands of units of low-rent housing. - Thanks to the FHA and, later, the Veterans. Administration, home ownership came within the reach of tens millions of amilies. - It became cheaper for most Americans to buy single-family homes than to rent apartments.

20th Amendment

- Roosevelt's 2nd inaugural address was the first to be delivered on January 20. - In order to shorten a newly elected president's wait before taking office. The recently ratified 20th Amendment had moved inauguration day from March 4 to January 20.

FDR's Advisors

- Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, a veteran of Hull House and the New York Consumers' League - Harry Hopkins, who had headed emergency relief efforts during FDR's term as governor of NY. - Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, a veteran of Theodore Roosevelt's Progressive campaign of 1912 - Louis Brandeis, who had advised Woodrow Wilson during the 1912 campaign and now offered political advice to FDR while serving on the Supreme Court.

Government intervention

- Social Security represented a dramatic departure from the traditional functions of government. The Second New Deal transformed the relationship between the federal government and American citizens. - Before the 1930s, national political debate often revolved around the question of whether the federal government should intervene in the economy. - After the New Deal, debate rested on how it should intervene. - In addition, the government assumed a responsibility, which it has never fully relinquished since then, for guaranteeing Americans a living wage and protecting them against economic and personal misfortune.

Sit-down strike

- Tactic adopted by labor unions in the mid-and late 1930s, whereby striking workers refused to leave factories, making production impossible; proved highly effective in the organizing drive of the Congress of Industrial Organizations - In December 1936, unions, most notably the United Auto Workers (UAW), an emerging CIO union, unveiled the sit-down strike. This was a remarkably effective tactic that the IWW had pioneered 3 decades earlier. - Rather than walking out of the Fisher Auto Body plant in Cleveland, thus enabling management to bring in strikebreakers, workers halted production but remained inside. - Sit-downs soon spread to General Motors factories in Flint, Michigan, the nerve center of automobile production. - Demonstrating a remarkable spirit of unity, the strikers cleaned the plant, oiled the idle machinery, and settled disputes among themselves. Workers' wives shuttled food into the plant. - On February 11, General Motors agreed to negotiate with the UAW. By the end of 1937, the UAW claimed 400K members.

The New Deal and Housing

- The Depression devastated the American housing industry. The construction of new residences virtually ended, and banks and savings and loan associations that had financed home ownership collapsed. Those that remained afloat foreclosed on many homes. - Millions of Americans lived in overcrowded, unhealthy urban slums or in ramshackle rural dwellings. Private enterprise alone, it seemed clear, was unlikely to solve the nation's housing crisis.

The Hundred Days

- The Emergency Banking Act was the first of an unprecedented flurry of legislation during the first 3 months of Roosevelt's administration, a period known as the Hundred Days. - Extraordinarily productive first 3 months of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration in which a special session of Congress enacted fifteen of his New Deal proposals. - 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, who initials soon became part of the language of politics--NRA, AAA, CCC.

Glass-Steagall Act

- The Glass-Steagall Act barred commercial banks from becoming involved in the buying and selling of stocks. Until its repeal in the 1990s, the law prevented many irresponsible practices that had contributed to the stock market crash. - Until its repeal in the 1990s, the law prevented many of the irresponsible practices that had contributed to the stock market crash. - Also established the Federal Deposit insurance Corporation (FDIC), a government system that insured the accounts of individual depositors. - Together, these measures rescued the financial system and greatly increased the government's powerr over it

Government Jobs

- 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 individual self-reliance. - However, with nearly 25% of the workforce unemployed, spending on relief was unavoidable.

Impact of the Indian New Deal

- The Indian New Deal ended the devastating policy of forced assimilation and now emphasized the goal of First Nations sovereignty, but the Indian Reorganization Act did not significantly improve reservation living conditions. Some New Deal programs, such as livestock reduction and the Columbia River basin project, inflicted new harms.

The New Deal and American Women

- The New Deal brought more women into government than ever before in American history. A number of talented women, including Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, advised the president and shaped public policy. - Most prominent of all was Eleanor Roosevelt, FDR's distant cousin, whom he married in 1905.

The First Nations New Deal

- The New Deal had a contradictory impact on First Nations peoples. Government policies that broke up collective landholdings and forced assimilation had devastated First Nation economies and increased their dependence on the government. First Nations people suffered desperate impoverishment and poor health conditions, with tuberculosis rates 2x the rate of white Americans.

Welfare State

- The Social Security Act launched the American version of the welfare state, a term that originated in Britain during World War II to refer to a system of income assistance, health coverage, and social services for all citizens. - Compared with similar programs in Europe, the American welfare state has always been far more decentralized, involved lower levels of public spending, and covered fewer citizens. The original Social Security bill, for example, envisioned a national system of health insurance. Congress dropped this, however, after ferocious opposition from the American Medical Association, which feared government regulation of doctors' activities and incomes.

Repeal of prohibition

- The biggest difference between the parties during the campaign was the Democrats' call for the repeal of Prohibition. - This position solidified Roosevelt's support among urban, ethnic workers who despised the law. Democrats argued that repeal would provide jobs by reopening a shuttered industry and raise government revenue.

National Industrial Recovery Act

- The centerpiece of Roosevelt's plan for combating the Depression, the National Industrial Recovery Act was to a large extent modeled on the government-business partnership established by the War Industries Board of World War I. - Established the National Recovery Administration (NRA). - 1933 law passed n the last of the Hundred Days; it created public -works jobs through the Federal Emergency Relief Administration and established a relegation for industry through the National Recovery Administration, which was later ruled unconstitutional in 1935.

The Social Security Act of 1935

- The centerpiece of the Second New Deal was the Social Security Act of 1935. It embodied Roosevelt's belief that the national government had a responsibility to ensure the material well-being of ordinary Americans. It created a system of unemployment insurance, old age pensions, and aid to people with disabilities, the elderly poor, and families with dependent children. - 1935 law that created the Social Security system with provisions for a retirement pension, unemployment insurance, disability insurance, and public assistance (welfare).

Shift in the Black vote

- The decade witnessed a historic shift in Black voting patterns. - In the North and West, where they enjoyed the right to vote, Blacks in 1934 and 1936 abandoned their allegiance to the party of Lincoln and emancipation in favor of Democrats and the New Deal. - However, southern congressmen prevented passage of a federal antilynching law. FDR offered little support. - Social Security's old age pensions and unemployment benefits, as well as the minimum wages established by the Fair Labor Standards Act, excluded agricultural and domestic workers. Thus, it left most employed Blacks and most Black women uncovered.

Respectability for Communists

- The energy and activism of the Communist Party made it the center of gravity for a broad democratic upsurge rather than its ideology. - Its involvement in an array of activities, including demonstrations by the unemployed, struggles for industrial unionism, and a renewed movement for Black civil rights made it popular.

Other important measures of Roosevelt's first 2 years in office

- The establishment of the Federal Communications Commission to oversee te nation's broadcast airwaves and telephone communications - The creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission to regulate the stock and bond markets - The ratification of the 21st Amendment to the Constitution, which repealed Prohibition

Limits of the American Welfare State

- The fact that domestic and agricultural workers were not covered by unemployment and old age benefits meant that Social Security at first excluded large numbers of Americans, especially unmarried women and non-whites.

Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO)

- The labor upheaval led to the formation of a new labor organization, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1935. - In contrast to the American Federation of Labor's traditional policy of organizing workers by craft, the CIO sought to mobilize all workers in a given industry, such as steel manufacturing.

The Impact of the "Southern Veto"

- The majority of Black workers found themselves confined to the least generous and most vulnerable wing of the new welfare state. The public assistance programs established by Social Security, notably aid to dependent children and to the poor elderly, were open to all Americans who could demonstrate financial need. - However, they set benefits at extremely low levels and authorized the states to determine eligibility standards, including "moral" behavior as defined by local authorities.

Labor's Great Upheaval

- The most striking development of the mid-1930s was the mobilization of millions of workers in mass-production industries that had successfully resisted unionization. - This era of unprecedented militancy was called "labor's great upheaval," and it came as a great surprise. Unlike in the past, however, the federal government now seemed to be on the side of labor. - American-born children of the "new" immigrants now dominated the industrial labor force, and organizers no longer had to distribute materials in numerous languages as the IWW had done. A group of militant labor leaders, many of them socialists and communists, had survived the repression of the 1920s. They provided leadership to the labor upsurge.

The Banking Crisis

- The new president 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, bank after bank closed its doors. - 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. - Roosevelt declared a "bank holiday," temporarily halting all bank operations, ad called Congress into special session.

1930s Weather in the Midwest

- The onset in 1930 of a period of unusually dry weather worsened the Depression's impact on rural America. - By mid-decade, the region suffered from the century's most severe drought. - Mechanized agriculture in this semi-arid region had pulverized the topsoil and killed native grasses that prevented erosion.

U.S. Steel

- The victory in the auto industry reverberated throughout industrial America. - Steelworkers had suffered memorable defeats in the struggle for unionization, notably at Homestead in 1892 and in the Great Steel Strike of 1919. - In March 1937, however, fearing a sit-down campaign and aware that it could no longer count on the aid of state and federal authorities, U.S. Steel--the country's single most important business firm--agreed to recognize the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (precursor of the United Steelworkers of America)

Labor and Politics

- Throughout the industrial heartland, the labor upsurge altered the balance of economic power and propelled to the forefront of politics labor's goal of a fairer, freer, more equal America. - The CIO put forward an ambitious program for federal action to shield Americans from economic and social insecurity, including public housing, universal health care, and unemployment and old age insurance - Building on the idea, so prominent in the 1920s, that the key to prosperity lay in an American standard of living based on mass consumption, CIO leaders explained the Depression as the result of an imbalance of wealth and income. - By mid-decade, many New Dealers accepted the "underconsumptionist" explanation of the Depression, which saw lack of sufficient consumer demand as its underlying cause.

John L. Lewis

- Under the leadership of United Mine Workers president John L. Lewis, the Congress of Industrial Organizations aspired to create unions in the core of the American economy. - According to Lewis, the CIO hoped to secure "economic freedom and industrial democracy" for American workers--a fair share in the wealth produced by their labor and a voice in determining the conditions under which they worked.

Rise in union membership

- Union membership reached 9 million by 1940, more than double the number in 1930. Workers gained new grievance procedures and seniority systems governing, hiring, firing, and promotions. - The CIO unions helped to stabilize a chaotic employment situation and offered members a sense of dignity and freedom.

The Dust Bowl

- Winds now blew much of the soil away, creating the Dust Bowl, as the affected areas of Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, and Colorado were called. The drought and dust storms displaced more than 1 million farmers. - Great Plains counties where millions of tons of topsoil were blown away from parched farmland in the 1930s; massive migration of farm families followed.

A New Conception of America

- With Catholics and Jews occupying prominent posts in the Roosevelt administration and new immigrant voters forming an important part of its electoral support, the New Deal made ethnic pluralism a living reality in American politics. - The 1930s witnessed an acceleration of cultural assimilation because of the virtual cutoff of southern and Eastern European immigration in 1924, the increasing exposure of ethnic communities to movies, chain stores, and mass advertising, and the common experience of economic crisis. - For the children of the new immigrants, labor and political activism became agents of a new kind of Americanization.

1937 economic downturn

- With economic conditions improving in 1936, Roosevelt had reduced federal. funding for farm subsidies and WPA work relief. - The result was disastrous. Unemployment, still 14% at the beginning of 1937, rose to nearly 20% by year's end.