The Great Depression and the
New Deal
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v
=IjSTQwamo8M (FDR)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v
=hphgHi6FD8k (Huey Long)
Overview
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Weaknesses of American economy
Vulnerability of ordinary American
Myths of the New Deal
Achievements and failures of New Deal
Cultures of protest and survival
Wall Street, October, 1929
Why
• Other depressions 1807, 1837, 1873, 1893
• Efficiency of machinery makes labor more productive
and individual worker less important
• Wages do not keep pace with production
• Broadening gap between rich and poor (In 1929, top .1%
(24,000 families) had aggregate income equal to lower
42% (11.5 mil families)
• Individual savings declines for individual families
• More families dependent on jobs in industrial economy;
self-sufficient farming slowing disappearing
• Margin stocks (but only 4 mil/ 120 mil Americans held
stocks)
From the Crash to the First New
Deal
• Begins October 29, 1929
• Interest rate cuts don’t work; production slows, wages
and jobs eventually cut
• Smoot-Hawley tariff on imports worsens situation
• Hoover reluctant to make big changes (relief
unAmerican?) Forced to sign Emergency Relief Act
(1932)
• Layoffs and lack of unemployment insurance make
things worse
• Election of Roosevelt; New Deal: Relief, recovery, reform
Hooverian disasters:
Hoovervilles (Seattle, WA) and
the Bonus Army (1932)
White Angel Bread Line, San Francisco, 1933
(photo by Dorothea Lange)
FDR with Jack
Garner, Hyde
Park 1932
In this campaign photograph,
Roosevelt’s leg braces were
obvious.
Although many pictures avoided
showing his handicap,
Americans were well aware of
how he overcame total paralysis
from polio.
March 12, 1933: The First Fireside Chat on the
Banking Crisis
First New Deal, 1933
• Emergency Banking Act, 1933 (FDIC prevents runs on
banks)
• CCC helps unemployment with environmental
conservation jobs
• FERA gives money to state and local govts for relief
• Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) works with farmers to
fix production and prices (not so popular)
• Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA): successfully brings
power to 6 southern states but damned as “socialistic”
by Republicans
• Public Works Administration (PWA) Part of NRA to
promote public works jobs to stimulate economy
Downside of First New Deal
• Right: dairy farmers throw
away milk to stabilize prices.
This image outraged many
who found FDR’s AAA les
than successful at rectifying
hunger and poverty
• AAA also spurs evictions of
sharecroppers
• Many owners did not share
profits with sharecroppers
Second New Deal
• More radical: 3 goals-- to create jobs; old age pensions,
unemployment compensation and insurance; provide
housing and slum clearance
• WPA and Harry Hopkins, 1935
• Social Security Act, 1935 (still survives)
• Nat’l Labor Relations Act (Wagner) guarantees collective
bargaining, 1935
• Resettlement Administration, 1935 (reforestation and soil
erosion projects; relocation of poor)
• Nat’l Housing Act (1937) public housing
• Fair Labor Stds Act (1938) Federal minimum wage (25c)
and maximum hours
Roosevelt carves up
big business
• Cartoon by Quincy Scott
in the Portland Oregonian
• When NRA rendered
unconstitutional by
Supreme Court, Frances
Perkins (first female
member of cabinet and
Secretary of Labour) and
FDR retaliate with the
Wagner Act (1935)
Left: San Francisco, 1934
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What began as a
longshoreman’s strike
eventually included most
workers in the city
Textile workers (including
huge groups of women
workers) struck in 1934
Above right: Auto workers’ sit-down strike: Flint Michigan, 1937
Workers occupy production area, making it impossible for company to bring in
strikebreakers
Sit-down strikes were very effective, but outlawed by the Supreme Court in 1939
Republic
Steel Plant,
May 30,
1937
• Chicago cops charge CIO workers and strikers
• Ten workers killed; eight were shot in the back
• Big Steel signs contract
The Dust Bowl,
1934-1940
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To reduce pressure from grazing
cattle on the remaining grasslands,
the Drought Relief Service of the
Dept. of Agriculture purchased nearly
8 million head of cattle between 1934
and 1935
The agency also lent money to
farmers to feed their cattle
The Taylor Grazing Act brought cattle
onto 8 million acres of government
land
In most Great Plains counties, 50%
of all people received relief– jobs
from WPA, new farms from the
Resettlement Administration, and
subsidies not to grow from the AAA
• Lamar, Colorado, 1934– at the height of
the Dust Bowl storms
Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother, 1936
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Taken in Nipomo, California for the Farm Security
Administration
Roy Stryker: “She has all the suffering of mankind in her, but
the perseverance too.”
• Above right: Migrant Farmers en route to California, 1935
A New Deal for Black Americans?
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By 1932, roughly half of all African Americans
were out of work
Many New Deal agencies discriminate against
blacks
28 African American men were lynched in
1933 alone, often but not always in the South
Walter White of NAACP lobbies
unsuccessfully for anti-lynching law and to
stop New Deal discrimination
Mary McLeod Bethune (NYA) and
Roosevelt’s Black Cabinet
Mexican Americans
• Nearly 1 million Mexican Americans deported under Hoover at
start of Depression
• 1936 agricultural workers exempt from National Labor relations
act
• 1939: Grapes of Wrath ignores Mexican American workers,
although 2/3 of all strikes in the Depression were lead by
Latinos
• 1941: Bracero program brings back Mexican workers to
undercut domestic wages and break strikes– extended through
1964 440,000 per annum at height
• Luisa Moreno becomes first Latina to hold national union office
as Veep of United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing and allied
Workers of America (CIO affiliate); forms El Congreso in 1938
FDR criticized for
not going far enough
to combat economic
inequalities
• Huey Long and the “Share Our Wealth Society”
Nine old
men kill
the NRA,
May 27,
1935
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(left to right, standing) Roberts, Butler, Stone, Cardozo, (seated) Brandeis, Van Devanter,
McReynolds, Sutherland
NRA claimed Schechter Poultry Corp. (NY), had sold “unfit chickens” and paid lower wages than the
minimum set by Code
Schechter Corp claims none of NRA’s business, since Corp. did not engage in interstate commerce
Supreme Court rules NRA unconstitutional, since it delegated legislative powers to the executive
branch
First major setback to FDR’s New Deal
Cultures of Survival
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Cinema
Popular Music
Literature
Photography
Theatre
• Hollywood pursues many narratives of
underdogs struggling for survival
• Songs like “Sunny Side of the Street” and
“Silver Lining” predict better times
• Woody Guthrie songs of protest link
western and modern outlaws
• Cult of John Dillinger and Bonnie and
Clyde
• Gone with the Wind (1936), return to
history, but also parallels struggle for
economic survival
• Farm Security Organization (1937)
finances major photographers to
document Dust Bowl and Depression
• WPA supports radical theatre—first black
Macbeth directed by Orson Welles
• Hallie Flanagan directs Federal Theatre
Project (WPA)
In any given week,
2/3 US population
went to the movies
• Although most studios
actually lost money
during the Depression
and RKO went
bankrupt every year,
they produced some
of the most lavish and
beloved films of all
time. Depression or
no Depression, it was
Hollywood’s “Golden
Age.”
I Am a Fugitive
From a Chain
Gang (1932)
starring Paul Muni,
produced by Darryl
Zanuck for Warner
Brothers
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Warner Brothers wasn’t afraid of tackling critical American issues–
veterans’ unemployment, gang violence, police corruption, prohibition,
racism, nationwide depression
Fugitive was the true story of ex-vet Robert Elliott Burns, sentenced to hard
labor in a Georgia chain gang for petty thieving
The film was so successful at dramatizing the inhumane conditions of
southern penal system that Georgia sued Warner Brothers for libel (the
state lost in 1938)
Best-sellers and Histories of the GD
Legacy
• FDR’s work does not solve Depression or
substantially combat discrimination against
women, blacks, and other minorities BUT:
• Returns progressive ideals to American
politics
• West and South transformed through
public works
• Framework for welfare state
• Rights of workers protected for first time
• Reinstates faith in presidency