Great Depression DBQ

US History – Great Depression

Document-Based Question

California History Standard

11.6 Students analyze the different explanations for the Great Depression and how the New Deal fundamentally changed the role of the federal government.

11.6.4 Analyze the effects of and the controversies arising from New Deal economic policies and the expanded role of the federal government in society and the economy since the 1930s (e.g., Works Progress Administration, Social Security,

National Labor Relations Board, farm programs, regional development policies, and energy development projects such as the Tennessee Valley Authority, California Central Valley Project, and Bonneville Dam).

Common Core State Standard

Reading

Key Ideas and Details

1. Cite specific textual evidence to support analysis of primary and secondary sources, connecting insights gained from specific details to an understanding of the text as a whole.

2. Determine the central ideas or information of a primary or secondary source; provide an accurate summary that makes clear the relationships among the key details and ideas.

Craft and Structure

4. Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, including analyzing how an author uses and refines the meaning of a key term over the course of a text (e.g., how Madison defines faction in Federalist No. 10).

6. Evaluate authors’ differing points of view on the same historical event or issue by assessing the authors’ claims, reasoning, and evidence.

Integration of Knowledge and Ideas

7. Integrate and evaluate multiple sources of information presented in diverse formats and media (e.g., visually, quantitatively, as well as in words) in order to address a question or solve a problem.

8. Evaluate an author’s premises, claims, and evidence by corroborating or challenging them with other information.

9. Integrate information from diverse sources, both primary and secondary, into a coherent understanding of an idea or event, noting discrepancies among sources.

Writing

Text Types and Purposes

1. Write arguments focused on discipline-specific content.

2. Write informative/explanatory texts, including the narration of historical events, scientific procedures/ experiments, or technical processes.

Production and Distribution of Writing

4. Produce clear and coherent writing in which the development, organization, and style are appropriate to task, purpose, and audience.

5. Develop and strengthen writing as needed by planning, revising, editing, rewriting, or trying a new approach, focusing on addressing what is most significant for a specific purpose and audience.

Research to Build and Present Knowledge

8. Gather relevant information from multiple authoritative print and digital sources, using advanced searches effectively; assess the strengths and limitations of each source in terms of the specific task, purpose, and audience; integrate information into the text selectively to maintain the flow of ideas, avoiding plagiarism and overreliance on any one source and following a standard format for citation.

9. Draw evidence from informational texts to support analysis, reflection, and research.

Range of Writing

10. Write routinely over extended time frames (time for reflection and revision) and shorter time frames (a single sitting or a day or two) for a range of discipline-specific tasks, purposes, and audiences.

UCI History Project, 2012 | 431 Social Science Tower | Irvine, CA | 92697-2505 http://www.humanities.uci.edu/history/ucihp/

Background

In an effort to save his nation from complete economic ruin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt enacted legislation that fundamentally changed the role of government. Various programs, together known as the New Deal, attempted to cure the twin epidemics of unemployment and poverty. Roosevelt also took steps to try to prevent this type of ruin from overtaking Americans again.

Prompt

How successful was the New Deal in addressing the following items: relief (direct aid), recovery (jobs) and reform (laws to prevent another depression)?

Write a five paragraph essay utilizing at least four of the given documents.

Tasks

Include an original claim that organizes your essay

Use at least four documents

Use multiple pieces of evidence in each paragraph to support your argument

Include a counterargument

Include a conclusion

Write in complete sentences

Write in the third person

Sources

Text

“TVA: the New Deal’s Greatest Asset – I. Landscape and Background”

“Works Program Administration: The Lasting Values of the WPA”

“Take the Army Out of the CCC”

“CCC Youth Refuses To Fan Flies Off Officer; Is Fired”

Report, Boston, Massachusetts, November 17, 1934

“’Social Security’ Under the New Deal”

Franklin Roosevelt's Statement on the  National Labor Relations Act

“Salvation for the Tenant Farmer”

“Will the Codes Abolish Child Labor?”

Presidential Statement on N.I.R.A.

Report, New Haven, Connecticut, December 2, 1934, by Robert Washburn

From Huey Long’s autobiography

Quotes from Father Charles Coughlin

A Description of the American Liberty League

“I’d rather not be on relief”

Images

Breadline at McCauley Water Street Mission under Brooklyn Bridge

Relief client near Oil City

Texas tenant farmer in Marysville, California, migrant camp during the peach season


Document A

“TVA: the New Deal’s Greatest Asset – I. Landscape and Background” by Stuart Chase, published in

The Nation , 1936

The story runs that one of the TVA staff went north to Ontario to see how the Hydro was functioning.

He stopped a farmer on the road and asked him what, after twenty years of experience, he thought of the

Hydro.

"I think it's a fine thing." "Why?" "Well, stranger, there are a lot of reasons, but the biggest reason is that it keeps the young folks at home. The smartest ones used to go off to the cities, and now most of them stay on the farms. There is so much right here to interest them."

As we shall see, cheap electric power is not the only function of the TVA, is probably not even the most important function in the long run. The Ontario farmer, however, stated the ultimate goal as well as it can be stated in a phrase. The TVA is an attempt to keep a region viable, healthy, and interesting, and to hold the oncoming generations on their homeland.


Document B

“Works Program Administration: The Lasting Values of the WPA”, by Ellen S. Woodward, National

Archives

It was with this truth in mind, that President Roosevelt conceived the fundamental idea of a work relief program as an alternative to the dole. It is with this in mind that the Works Progress Administration has labored unceasingly this past year at the titanic task of finding jobs for nearly 4,000,000 of the nation's jobless who were stagnating on relief. How well the aim has been achieved is shown in the latest figures on work relief employment. On March 7th there were over 3,300,000 men and women at work on the entire program, most of them on the 70,000 WPA projects selected.


Document C

“Take the Army Out of the CCC”, by Raymond Gram Swing, in The Nation , 1935

The CCC has become the bright jewel of the New Deal. At the beginning, the fact that the army was in it aroused alarm, for the camps looked like the nucleus of a fascist militia. While here and there individual mistakes and local circumstances he' e made camps unpopular, on the whole the CCC is liked throughout the breadth of the land, and deservedly so. The military element has shown laudable restraint. The idea of giving unemployed young men healthy outdoor work under camp routine has won enthusiastic approval. As a form of relief the CCC has avoided the pitfalls of other relief agencies. And conservation has been both furthered and publicized. It was inevitable that an experiment which turned out successfully should be placed on a permanent basis. And now the decision to give the CCC a regular status in American life has been made. The President has announced it, and the Administration will have a definite program to lay before Congress early next year. After it has been announced, no doubt there will be a brief public discussion, but the CCC is worth careful thought, and both the Administration and

Congress will benefit if the country begins the debate sooner.


Document D

“CCC Youth Refuses To Fan Flies Off Officer; Is Fired”, Norfolk Journal and Guide , 13 January 1934:

7.   

NEW YORK, N.Y. —It required just one month and six days to get an honorable discharge from the

Civilian Conservation Corps and his last month's pay for Eddie Simons, Harlem youth, after the

N.A.A.C.P. took up his case. The story is an interesting one, illustrating as it does some of the difficulties confronting young Negroes in the forestry service officered largely by white Southerners, as well as the Willingness of the administration to do justice when pressed for action.

Young Simons was dishonorably discharged and his last month's pay withheld at Camp No. 5, North

Lisbon, N.J., on September 26, when he refused to stand and fan flies from a white officer, Lt. J. A.

Elmore of the 16th Infantry, temporarily in charge of the camp.

Simons told the officer he did not think fanning flies was part of his duty. Lt. Elmore thereupon dishonorably discharged the lad and denied him his last month's pay although admitting that Simons' record was good.

The N.A.A.C.P. immediately took up the case and protested to Robert Fechner, director of the

Emergency Conservation Work, who acknowledged his letter, and promised investigation. Three weeks later director Fechner again wrote the N.A.A.C.P. that he had directed that Eddie Simons be given an honorable discharge "free from any charge of insubordination" and that "he be paid all cash allowances and allotments due."


Document E

Report, Boston, Massachusetts, November 17, 1934

At the same time there seems to be a firm conviction among business men, social workers and public here (I didn't broach it to clients) that ERA is even more political than Public Welfare, at least in its local units which determine who gets the jobs. One of the bases of such feeling is that ERA has a chance to be more political in the nature of the case, since it provides jobs for only a fourth or so of those who apply, while Public Welfare in some fashion has to take care of all comers. The charges in the midst of the campaign if widespread inefficiency and worse on the part of local ERA administrations, made by the foreman of the Federal Grand Jury, and his subsequent arrest on charges of taking a bribe in the same connection, have naturally not decreased the general suspicion of politics.


Document F

“’Social Security’ Under the New Deal”, by Abraham Epstein, The Nation, September 4, 1935

The effect this bill may have on the American social-insurance movement is of vital importance. Social insurance is recognized today as offering the only practicable instrument for meeting the problem of insecurity arising from modern industrial development. It is used in communist as well as capitalist and fascist countries. Its chief asset lies in its power to distribute the cost over all groups in society--the rich as well as the poor. But in placing the entire burden of insecurity upon the workers and industry, to the exclusion of the well-to-do in the nation, the present social-security bill violates the most essential modern principles of social insurance. There is also grave danger that the administrative perplexities inherent in the bill, to say nothing of possible court nullification, may deal a death blow to the entire movement in the United States.


Document G

Franklin Roosevelt's Statement on the  National Labor Relations Act  (The Wagner Act),  July 5,

1935

The National Labor Relations Board will be an independent quasi-judicial body. It should be clearly understood that it will not act as mediator or conciliator in labor disputes. The function of mediation remains, under this Act, the duty of the Secretary of Labor and of the Conciliation Service of the

Department of Labor. It is important that the judicial function and the mediation function should not be confused. Compromise, the essence of mediation, has no place in the interpretation and enforcement of the law.


Document H

“Salvation for the Tenant Farmer”, by J. M. Maclachlen, in Opportunity, Journal of Negro Life , April

1935

“Yet if the proposals now current are administered in their literal terms that is exactly what we may expect. Technological changes to be expected in the cotton economy within a few years, particularly the perfected mechanical cotton-picker, will liberate the large planter from his former need for the tenant system. With a strong government-supported control of cotton production and price, the larger farmers are already shifting to the use of wage labor at the planting, cultivating, and harvesting seasons. The tendency is for planters to leave these laboring families on public relief rolls between the short seasons when they are needed in the fields. If the AAA continues its cotton program and succeeds in maintaining a higher price for from "furnishing" the cropper family to paying day-wages to the occasional laboring family will be advantageous to southern planters even if the promised mechanical cotton-picker fails of general adoption as soon as some people expect.”


Document I

“Will the Codes Abolish Child Labor?”, by Gertrude Folks Zimand, Director Research and Publicity,

National Child Labor Committee, The Survey , August 1933

However, the mere inclusion of a 16-year age minimum is not sufficient for all industries. Not only the

14- and 15-year-old coal-mining operatives, of whom there were 722 in 1930, should relinquish their jobs to adults, but the 15,182 boys of 16 and 17 years as well. The code of the bituminous coal industry, however, provides merely that children under 16 should not be employed "inside a mine." Undoubtedly the 3,181 children under 16 should be taken out of the sawmills, as the lumber code already submitted to the National Recovery Administration stipulates—but every one of the 15,736 workers who are under

18 years should also be removed from this hazardous employment. The general public, as well as the men who get their jobs, will be relieved if the 15,219 "chauffeurs, truck and tractor drivers" who are under 18 years surrender their drivers' seats to older men. And the railroad tracks are no place for the

5,665 boys under 18 who are working upon them as "laborers." Nor is there any place in our blastfurnaces and steel rolling-mills for the 4,973 boys under 18 who were so employed in 1930.


Document J

Presidential Statement on N.I.R.A., Franklin Delano Roosevelt, June 16, 1933

I am fully aware that wage increases will eventually raise costs, but I ask that managements give first consideration to the improvement of operating figures by greatly increased sales to be expected from the rising purchasing power of the public. That is good economics and good business. The aim of this whole effort is to restore our rich domestic market by raising its vast consuming capacity. If we now inflate prices as fast and as far as we increase wages, the whole project will be set at naught. We cannot hope for the full effect of this plan unless, in these first critical months, and, even at the expense of full initial profits, we defer price increases as long as possible. If we can thus start a strong, sound, upward spiral of business activity, our industries will have little doubt of black-ink operations in the last quarter of this year. The pent-up demand of this people is very great and if we can release it on so broad a front, we need not fear a lagging recovery. There is greater danger of too much feverish speed.

In a few industries, there has been some forward buying at unduly depressed prices in recent weeks

Increased costs resulting from this Government-inspired movement may make it very hard for some manufacturers and jobbers to fulfill some of their present contracts without loss. It will be a part of this wide industrial cooperation for those having the benefit of these forward bargains (contracted before the law was passed) to take the initiative in revising them to absorb some share of the increase in their suppliers' costs, thus raised in the public interest. It is only in such a willing and considerate spirit, throughout the whole of industry, that we can hope to succeed.


Document K

Report, New Haven, Connecticut, December 2, 1934, by Robert Washburn

There is another fundamental problem in regard to getting people back into private employment that is present not only in Hartford but everywhere else I have been. When business men complain that FERA keeps people from private employment, they are often not really complaining that hourly wages or even budgets are too high. There is a difficulty deeper than that, though most of the business men haven't thought enough to know it. It is perfectly true that where large families are involved the budget is more than the head of the family was ever able to earn regularly. But this does not mean it is necessarily larger than the family income, because in ordinary times more than one member of the family would have been working.

Now, however, it is often impossible for the head of the family to go back to a real job without serious sacrifice. The universality of the problem is shown by the fact that relief "cases" are multiplied by more than 4 to get the number of people involved, while there are only approximately 2.5 people in the county for everyone gainfully employed in normal times. Industry never did support these large families, even at sub-decency levels, on the wages of any one family member, and it is hopeless to expect it to do so now.

In the case of a man making $12 a week on FERA and getting supplementary aid of $18 a week to meet his budget, he naturally will not go out and take a job for $20, thereby depriving his family of $10. But the general set-up works to keep his children from going out and getting jobs, too. In Conn. two thirds of whatever they make is "subtracted from the budget. In the above family, if a girl gets an office job for

$12 a week, $8 would be subtracted from the family budget. But the four that is left her may be insufficient for carfare, lunches and extra clothes she needs to hold the job, so she is not only working for nothing but may actually find that the whole family is worse off than before.


Document L

From Huey Long’s autobiography

All the people in America cannot eat up the food that is produced in America; all the people in America cannot wear out the clothes that can be made in America; nor can all of the people in America occupy the houses that stand in this country, if all are allowed to share in homes afforded by the nation. But when one man must have more houses to live in than ninety-nine other people; when one man decides he must own more foodstuff than any other ninety-nine people own; when one man decides he must have more goods to w ear for himself and family than any other ninety-nine people, then the condition results that instead of one hundred people sharing the things that are on earth for one hundred people, that one man, through his gluttonous greed, takes over ninety-nine parts for himself and leaves one part for the ninety-nine.


Document M

Quotes from Father Charles Coughlin

“…While we sympathize with the Serbian or the Russian, with the Jew in Germany or the Christian in

Russia, the major portion of our sympathy is extended to our dispossessed farmer, our disconsolate laborers who are being crushed at this moment while the spirit of internationalism runs rampant in the corridors of the Capitol, hoping to participate in setting the world aright while chaos clamors at our doors.”  – January 28, 1935

“I need not recall for you that both the laboring and agricultural classes of America are forced to work for less than a living wage while the owners of industry boastfully proclaim that their profits are increasing.”  – April 6, 1936


Document N

A Description of the American Liberty League, founded in 1934, written by one of its members, Jouett

Shouse

“If the American people wish to change the form of their government from a federal republic with limited powers to an absolute dictatorship or to state socialism, they can do so by appropriate amendments to the Constitution. However, so far, they have done nothing of the kind, and the existing contract is still binding, whether it is observed or not.

One basic purpose of the American Liberty League is to see to it that this contract is complied with-faithfully, honestly, completely, and without evasion under the camouflage of giving new names to unconstitutional proposals.... The American Liberty League believes that Congress, having been elected to represent the people, should not shirk its task by delegating authority to bureaus to promulgate arbitrary regulations having the force of laws. Likewise, the League believes that Congress should not attempt to delegate judicial power to executive bureaus. The courts of the nation and not government bureaus should pass upon questions of civil justice.

It is also the belief of the League that the right to authorize the spending of public funds and to raise revenue is solely the function of the legislative branch of the government and that balanced budgets and sound fiscal policies are possible only while Congress retains its full responsibility for the nature and manner of spending public money.”


Document O

Library of Congress, Breadline at McCauley Water Street Mission under Brooklyn Bridge, New

York, 1930-34?

Document P


Library of Congress, “I’d rather not be on relief”

Document Q


Library of Congress, Relief client near Oil City, Oklahoma, 1937.

Document R


Library of Congress, Texas tenant farmer in Marysville, California, migrant camp during the peach season. 1927 made seven thousand dollars in cotton. 1928 broke even. 1929 went in the hole. 1930 still deeper. 1931 lost everything. 1932 hit the road. 1935, fruit tramp in California


Great Depression DBQ

US History – Great Depression

Document-Based Question

Library of Congress, Relief client near Oil City, Oklahoma, 1937.

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Great Depression DBQ

US History – Great Depression

Document-Based Question

Library of Congress, Relief client near Oil City, Oklahoma, 1937.

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