IGCSE: The USA, 1919-41 (Depth Study)
How successful was the New Deal?
Rebellion
 The US was in a state of rebellion when FDR took office. Desperate
people were not waiting for the government to help them; they were
helping themselves, acting directly.
 Aunt Molly Jackson walked into a local store, asked for a 24-pound
sack of flour, gave it to her little boy to take outside, then filled a sack of
sugar and said to the storekeeper, “Well, I’ll see
you in ninety days. I have to feed some children.
I’ll pay you, don’t worry.” When the storekeeper
objected, she pulled out a pistol and said: “Martin,
if you try to take this grub away from me, God
knows that if they electrocute me for it
tomorrow, I’ll shoot you six times in a minute.”
Then, she walked out of the store and went home.
Her seven children were so hungry that they
could not wait for her to bake the dough. They
ate the raw dough off of their mother’s fingers.
Aunt Molly Jackson
Aunt Molly Jackson’s “Ragged Hungry Blues”
All the women in the coal camps are sitting with bowed down heads,
Ragged and barefooted, and the children crying for bread.
No food, no clothes for our children. I’m sure this head don’t lie.
If we can’t get more for our labor, we’ll starve to death and die!
Don’t go under the mountains with a slate a-hangin’ o’er your head
And work for just coal oil and carbide and your children crying for
bread.
This mining town I live in
is a sad and lonely place
Where pity and starvation
is pictured on every face!
Some coal operators might tell you
the hungry blues are not there.
They’re the worst kind of blues
this poor woman ever had.
Coal Miner’s Family (Pursglove, West Virginia, 1938)
 Nate Shaw was arrested in 1932 and served twelve years in an
Alabama prison for shooting a deputy who was attempting to dispossess
a Black farmer.
 Nate Shaw: “And durin of the pressure years, a union begin to operate
in this country, called it the Sharecroppers Union—that was a nice name,
I thought…and I knowed what was goin on was a turnabout on the
southern man, white and colored; it was something unusual. And I heard
about it bein a organization for the poor class
of people—that’s just what I wanted to get into,
too, I wanted to know the secrets of it enough
that I could become in the knowledge of it….
Mac Sloane, white man, said ‘You stay out of it.
These niggers running around here carryin on
some kind of meetin—you better stay out of it.’
I said to myself, ‘You a fool if you think you can
keep me from joinin.’ I went right on and joined
it, just as quick as the next meetin come….
And he done just the thing to push me into it—
Nate Shaw with Wife, Viola,
and Son, Andrew (1907)
gived me orders not to join.
The teachers of this organization begin to drive through this country—
they couldn’t let what they was doin be known. One of em was a
colored fella; I disremember his name but he did a whole lot of time,
holding meetins with us—that was part of this job…. Had the meetins at
our houses or anywhere we could keep a look and a watch-out that
nobody was comin in on us. Small meetins, sometimes there’d be a
dozen…niggers was scared, niggers was scared, that’s tellin the truth….
O, it’s plain as your hand. The poor white man and the poor Black man is
sitting in the same saddle today—big dudes done branched em off that
way. The control of a man,
the controllin power, is in
the hands of the rich man….
That class is standin
together and the poor white
man is out there on the
colored list—I’ve caught
that: ways and actions a heap
of times speaks louder than
Southern Tenant Farmers Union Meeting (Louise Boyle, 1937)
words….”
 Hosea Hudson was a plowhand in Georgia and an iron worker in
Alabama radicalized by the case of the Scottsboro Boys (nine Black
youths accused of raping two white girls and convicted on flimsy
evidence by all-white juries). In 1931, Hudson joined the Communist
Party and began organizing unemployed Blacks.
 Hosea Hudson: “Deep in the winter of 1932 we Party members
organized a unemployed mass meeting
to be held on the old courthouse steps,
on 3rd Avenue, North Birmingham…. It
was about 7,000 or more people turned
out...Negroes and whites…. In 1932 and
‘33 we began to organize these
unemployed block committees in the
various communities of Birmingham….
If someone get out of food…. We
wouldn’t go around and just say, ‘That’s
too bad.’ We make it our business to go
see this person…. And if the person
Hosea Hudson
was willing…we’d work with them….
Block committees would meet every week, had a regular meeting. We
talked about the welfare question, what was happening, we read the Daily
Worker and the Southern Worker to see what was going on about
unemployed relief, what people doing in Cleveland…struggles in
Chicago…or we talk about the latest developments in the Scottsboro
case. We kept up, we was on top, so people always
wanted to come cause we had something different
to tell them every time.”
The Scottsboro Boys (1931)
James W. Ford, the First
African-American on a
Presidential Ticket (1932)
Workers Alliance
 All over the country, people organized spontaneously to stop evictions.
In New York, in Chicago, in other cities—when word spread that
someone was being evicted, a crowd would gather; the police would
remove the furniture from the house, put it out in the street, and the
crowd would bring the furniture back. The Communist party was active
in organizing Workers Alliance groups in the cities.
 Mrs. Willye Jeffries: “A lot of ‘em was put
out. They’d call and have the bailiffs come
and sit them out, and as soon as they’d
leave, we would put ‘em back where they
came out. All we had to do was call
Brother Hilton…. Look, such and such a
place, there’s a family sittin’ out there.
Everybody passed through the neighborUnemployed Men Attending Meeting
hood, was a member of the Workers
of the Workers Alliance Council
(Scotts Run, West Virginia, c. 1936)
Alliance, had one person they would call.
When that one person came, he’d have about fifty people with him….
Take that stuff right on back up there. The men would connect those
lights and go to the hardware and get gas pipe, and connect that stove
back. Put the furniture back just like you had it, so it don’t look like you
been out the door.”
Unemployed Councils
 Unemployed Councils were formed all over the country.
 Charles R. Walker: “I find it no secret that Communists organize
Unemployed Councils in most cities and usually lead them, but the
councils are organized democratically and the majority rules. In one I
visited in Lincoln Park, Michigan, there were three hundred members of
which eleven were Communists…. The Council had a right wing, a left
wing, and a center. The chairman of the Council…was also the local
commander of the American Legion. In Chicago there are 45 branches
of the Unemployed Council, with a total membership of 22,000.
The Council’s weapon is democratic force of numbers, and their
function is to prevent evictions of the destitute, or if evicted to bring
pressure to bear on the Relief Commission to find a new home; if an
unemployed worker has his gas or his water turned off because he can’t
pay for it, to see the proper authorities; to see that the unemployed who
are shoeless and clothesless get both; to eliminate through publicity and
pressure discrimination
between Negroes and white
persons, or against the
foreign born, in matters of
relief…to march people
down to relief headquarters
and demand they be fed and
clothed. Finally to provide
legal defense for all
unemployed arrested for
“Not King Kong—King Co. Sheriff, Claude Bannick:
joining parades , hunger
No picture can do justice to an animal who at the bidding of
marches, or attending union
mortgage-holder and judge throws out families into the street.”
meetings.”
(Voice of Action, Communist Party, Seattle, 1 May 1933)
Self-Help Organizations
 People organized to help themselves, since business and government
were not helping them in 1931 and 1932. In Seattle, the fishermen’s
union caught fish and exchanged them with people who picked fruit and
vegetables, and those who cut wood exchanged that. There were
twenty-two locals, each with a commissary where food and firewood
were exchanged for other goods and services: barbers, seamstresses,
and doctors gave of their skills in return for other things. By the end of
1932, there were 330
self-help organizations in
thirty-seven states, with
over 300,000 members.
By early 1933, they seem
to have collapsed; they
were attempting too big a
job in an economy that was After working in the fields, self-help cooperative members receive
more and more a shambles. their wages in vegetables (Los Angeles County, 15 January 1933).
“Bootleg Coal”
 Perhaps the most remarkable example of self-help took place in the
coal district of Pennsylvania, where teams of unemployed miners dug
small mines on company property, mined
coal, trucked it to cities, and sold it below
the commercial rate. By 1934, 5 million
tons of this “bootleg” coal were produced
by 20,000 men using 4 thousand vehicles.
When attempts were made to prosecute,
local juries would not convict, local jailers
A Bootleg Coal Miner
would not imprison.
Revolutionary Possibilities
 These were simple actions, taken out of practical need, but they had
revolutionary possibilities.
 Paul Mattick: “All that is really necessary for the workers to do in
order to end their miseries is to perform such simple things as to take
from where there is, without regard to established property principles
or social philosophies, and to start to produce for themselves. Done on
a broad scale, it will lead to lasting results; on a local, isolated plane it
will be…defeated…. The bootleg miners
have shown in a rather clear and impressive
way, that the so-much bewailed absence of a
socialist ideology on the part of the workers
really does not prevent workers from acting
quite anticapitalistically, quite in accordance
with their own needs. Breaking through the
confines in private property in order to live
up to their own necessities, the miners’
action is, at the same time a manifestation
of the most important part of class
consciousness—namely, that the problems
of the workers can be solved only by
Paul Mattick
themselves.”
FDR’s First 100 Days
 From instinctive practical necessity, Roosevelt and his advisers, the
businessmen who supported him, quickly took measures to give jobs,
food baskets, relief, to wipe out the idea “that the problems of the
workers can be solved only by themselves.”
 The Roosevelt reforms went far beyond previous legislation. They had
to meet two pressing needs: to reorganize capitalism in such a way to
overcome the crisis and stabilize the
system; also, to head off the alarming
growth of spontaneous rebellion.
 From an average failure of 100 banks
a year in the 1920s, the rate of collapse
had reached the catastrophic figure of
4,004 in 1933. During FDR’s first day in
office, to sustain the nation’s property
structure, he used executive power to
close the national banks temporarily.
FDR’s First Inauguration (4 March 1933)
 During FDR’s first 100 days, his objective—to stabilize the system for
its own protection—was most obvious in the National Recovery Act
(NRA), the major law of Roosevelt’s first months in office. In addition to
the NRA, Roosevelt pushed emergency legislation through Congress:
the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), the Civilian
Conservation Corps (CCC),
the Federal Emergency Relief
Administration (FERA), the
Home Owners’ Loan
Corporation (HOLC), and the
Tennessee Valley Authority
(TVA). Congress quickly
passed these acts without
examining or debating them.
Additionally, Roosevelt used
Hoover’s RFC to loan $10
billion to the railroads, as
well as to many large and
Political Cartoon (26 April 1934)
small businesses.
 Roosevelt responded to requests by trade associations for direct
government backing by proposing the NRA. Based on precedent
established during World War I, the NRA legalized the trade-association
agreements on production and prices. Section 7(a) of the law recognized
the right of labor to bargain collectively, but most union growth in 1933
and 1934 came in the form of company unions. The NRA was designed
to take control of the economy through codes agreed on by the
government, management, and labor
fixing prices and wages, limiting
competition. From the first, the NRA
was dominated by big businesses and
served their interests. Roosevelt
moved to make some concessions
to working people where organized
labor was strong, but “where
organized labor was weak, he was
unprepared to withstand the
pressures of industrial spokesmen
NRA Beauty Pageant
to control the…NRA codes.”
 Bernard Bellush (The Failure of the N.R.A.): “[Title I] turned much of the
nation’s power over to highly organized, well-financed trade associations
and industrial combines. The unorganized public, otherwise known as the
consumer, along with the members of the fledgling trade-union
movement, had virtually nothing to say about the initial organization of
the NRA or the formulation of basic policy…. The White House
permitted the National Association of Manufacturers, the Chamber of
Commerce, and allied businesses and trade associations to assume
overriding authority…. Indeed, private administration became public
administration, and private government became
public government insuring the marriage of
capitalism with statism…. FDR surrendered an
inordinate share of the power of government,
through the NRA, to industrial spokesmen
throughout the country.”
 Barton Bernstein (Towards a New Past): “Despite
the annoyance of some big businessmen with
Section 7a, the NRA reaffirmed and consolidated
NRA Logo
their power….”
 Roosevelt responded to advice from conservative
farm organizations, representing large famers, to have
the federal government set limits on production by
proposing the AAA, which ordered the slaughter of six
million pigs and the plowing under of ten million acres
of cotton. The AAA was an attempt to organize
agriculture. It favored the larger farmers as the NRA
favored big business.
 The CCC took many jobless young men out of the
cities, gave them uniforms and military discipline, and
put them into work camps.
 The FERA was a radical
means to maintain stability
and to lesson rebellious
discontent among the
unemployed by releasing
federal funds to the states
for relief of the jobless and
FERA Distribution of Clothing
the starving.
AAA Poster
CCC Poster
 The HOLC loaned billions to homeowners to enable them to pay their
mortgages.
 The TVA was an important experiment in regional planning and an
unusual entrance of government into business—a government-owned
network of dams and hydroelectric plants to control
floods and to produce
electric power in the
Tennessee Valley. The TVA
developed the rural area
along the Tennessee River
and its tributaries, building
fertilizer factories. It gave
jobs to the unemployed,
helped the consumer with
Lower electric rates, and
In some respect deserved
the accusation that it was
TVA Map
“socialistic.”
 By his quick actions from March
to June 1933, FDR had stopped
the disintegration of the society,
of the economy, and of the
property structure of the nation.
The economic status quo in
banking, industry, and agriculture
had successfully been sustained.
But the New Deal’s organization
of the economy was aimed mainly
at stabilizing the economy, and
secondly at giving enough help to
the lower classes to keep them
from turning a rebellion into a
real revolution. Once economic
Wood Cowan, “Let’s Leave Out the Joker”
disintegration had been halted,
Boston Evening Transcript
Roosevelt expected to stop deficit
spending, but he believed that the political and legal marriage of the
national government and corporations was a permanent necessity.
Opposition to the New Deal
 Roosevelt’s New Deal came under heavy attack from both the right
and the left, from the rich and the poor. The Supreme Court in 1935
declared the NRA unconstitutional, claiming it gave too much power to
the President and undermined the power of the states, but most critics
of the New Deal felt Roosevelt was not doing enough to end the
depression.
 In 1934, Poet Langston Hughes expressed the frustration of many
Americans in “Ballad of Roosevelt.”
The pot was empty,
The cupboard was bare.
I said, Papa,
What’s the matter here?
I’m waitin’ on Roosevelt, son,
Roosevelt, Roosevelt,
Waitin’ on Roosevelt, son.
The rent was due,
And the lights was out.
I said, Tell me, Mama,
What’s it all about?
We’re waitin’ on Roosevelt, son,
Roosevelt, Roosevelt,
Just waitin’ on Roosevelt.
Sister got sick
And the doctor wouldn’t come
Cause we couldn’t pay him
The proper sum—
A-waitin’ on Roosevelt,
Roosevelt, Roosevelt,
A-waitin’ on Roosevelt.
Then one day
They put us out o’ the house.
Ma and Pa was Meek as a mouse
Still waitin’ on Roosevelt,
Roosevelt, Roosevelt.
But when they felt those
Cold winds blow
And didn’t have no
Place to go
Pa said, I’m tired
O’ waitin’ on Roosevelt,
Roosevelt, Roosevelt.
Damn tired o’ waitin’ on Roosevelt.
I can’t git a job
And I can’t git no grub.
Backbone and navel’s
Doin’ the belly-rub—
A-waitin’ on Roosevelt,
Roosevelt, Roosevelt.
And a lot o’ other folks
What’s hungry and cold
Done stopped believin’
What they been told
By Roosevelt,
Roosevelt, Roosevelt—
Cause the pot’s still empty,
And the cupboard’s still bare,
And you can’t build a
Bungalow
Out o’ air—
Mr. Roosevelt, listen!
What’s the matter here?
 Huey Long, a senator from Louisiana, criticized the New Deal for its
lack of concern for the poor of America. Long demanded justice for the
poor, not relief. He organized 27,000 Share-Our-Wealth clubs across the
entire country, reaching 7 million people. Long demanded a minimum
wage for all workers and pensions for retired people to be financed by a
heavy tax on the rich so that “every man could be a king.”
 Francis Townsend, a 67-year-old doctor from California, organized a
national movement of older people. The American population was aging
as the birthrate had
declined for decades
and as immigration
was curtailed in the
1920s. Townsend
called for a pension
of $200 a month for
every person over
sixty. The money
was to be raised by
Huey Long
Francis Townsend
a national sales tax.
 Charles Coughlin was a Roman
Catholic priest and political leader
with a weekly radio broadcast that
reached 30 million listeners. He was
an early supporter of Roosevelt’s
New Deal but quickly turned against
it, claiming the New Deal primarily
benefited bankers. In 1934, Coughlin
established the National Union for
Social Justice, demanding monetary
Charles Coughlin
reform, nationalization of major
industries and railroads, and labor protections. Coughlin combined this
populist message with support of the fascism of Adolf Hitler and Benito
Mussolini and with anti-Jewish rhetoric.
 With Roosevelt interested only in stabilizing the status quo, workers
decided to take matters in their own hands. For the first time since the
US Civil War, workers demonstrated enough solidarity in city after city
to enable them to match the violence used against them by the ruling
class. In 1934, 1.5 million workers in different industries went on strike.
 Longshoremen on the West Coast, in a rank-and-file insurrection
against their own union leadership as well as against the shippers, held a
convention, demanded the abolition of the shape-up (a kind of earlymorning slave market where work gangs were chosen for the day), and
went out on strike. Two thousand miles of Pacific coastline were quickly
tied up. The teamsters cooperated, refusing to truck cargo to the piers,
and maritime workers joined the strike.
The police moved in to open the piers; the
strikers resisted en masse. A general strike
was called in San Francisco. With 130,000
workers on strike and the city immobilized,
500 special police were sworn in and 4, 500
National Guardsmen assembled, with
infantry, machine gun, tank and artillery
units. Two strikers were slain. The pressure
to end the strike became too strong. The
longshoremen accepted a compromise
settlement, but they had shown the
Funeral March of 40,000 for Slain
Workers (San Francisco, 1934)
potential of a general strike.
 In Minneapolis, truck drivers,
struggling to unionize, mobilized
support from 20 thousand
workers to defend themselves
successfully against the police
and management vigilantes who
attempted to break their strike.
Soon nothing was moving in the
city except milk, ice, and coal
Striking Teamsters Battle Police (Minneapolis, 1934)
trucks given exemptions by the
strikers. Farmers drove their products into town and sold them directly
to the people in the city. The police attacked the strikers, killing two.
After a month, the employers gave in to the teamsters’ demands.
 The largest strike of all started when 325,000 textile workers in the
South left the mills and set up flying squadrons in trucks and autos to
move through the strike areas, picketing, battling guards, entering the
mills, unbelting machinery. The strike impetus came from the rank-andfile, against a reluctant union leadership. Deputies and armed
strikebreakers in South Carolina fired on pickets, killing seven.
 The textile strike spread to
Lowell, Massachusetts and to
Saylesville and Woonsocket,
Rhode Island, where the
National Guard murdered
another striker. By September
1934, 421,000 textile workers
were on strike throughout
the country. There were mass
arrests, organizers were
beaten, and the death toll rose
Striking Textile Workers and State Troopers (1934)
to thirteen. Roosevelt stepped
in and set up a board of mediation, and the union called off the strike.
 In the rural South, too, organizing took place, often stimulated by
Communists, but nourished by the grievances of poor whites and Blacks
who were tenant farmers or farm laborers, always in economic
difficulties but hit even harder by the Depression. The Southern Tenant
Farmers Union started in Arkansas, with Black and white sharecroppers,
and spread to other areas.
 Roosevelt’s AAA was not helping the poorest of farmers; in fact, by
encouraging farmers to plant less, it forced tenants and sharecroppers to
leave the land. Farm laborers moving from farm to farm, area to area, no
land of their own, in 1933 were earning about $300 a year. By 1935, of
6.8 million farmers, 2.8 million were tenants. The average income of a
sharecropper was $312 a year. Black farmers were worst off.
 The leaders of the AFL, which left hundreds of thousands of workers
out of its tightly controlled, exclusive unions, condemned the militant
strikes but began organizing in the new mass
production industries—auto, rubber,
packinghouse. John L. Lewis of the United
Mine Workers, Sidney Hillman of the
Amalgamated Clothing Workers, and David
Dubinsky of the International Ladies Garment
Workers visualized the possibility of industrial
unions within the AFL outside of craft lines, all
workers in a plant belonging to one union.
They set up a Committee for Industrial
Sharecropper’s Child Suffering from
Rickets and Malnutrition (1935)
Organization within the AFL.
 While the poor believed Roosevelt
was not doing enough to end the
Great Depression, the rich believed he
was doing too much. In 1933, a group
of wealthy bankers invited retired
Marine Corps Major General Smedley
Butler to lead a fascist coup against
Roosevelt and to assume near-absolute
power as “Secretary of General Affairs.”
Butler exposed the conspiracy, testifying
before Congress in 1934. Angered by the
lack of Congressional action, Butler said
in 1935, “Like most committees it has
slaughtered the little and allowed the big
to escape. The big shots weren’t even
called to testify. They were all mentioned
in the testimony. Why was all mention of
these names suppressed from the
testimony?”
“Gen. Butler Bares ‘Plot’ by Fascists,
Newtown Square, Pennsylvania”
(Universal Newsreel)
The Second New Deal
 The spontaneous strikes across the country in 1934 forced Roosevelt
and his advisers to consider legislation to provide some permanent
security for workers and the elderly. Unlike Hoover, however, FDR was
flexible in the means he used to sustain the existing property patterns in
the country. To head off radicalism, he was willing, in an emergency, to
engage in deficit spending to keep unemployment under control.
 Roosevelt: “I am fighting
Communism, Huey Longism,
Coughlinism, Townsendism.”
 In his message to Congress
in 1935, Roosevelt launched a
second New Deal, declaring,
“We have not weeded out
the over-privileged and we
have not effectively lifted up
the underprivileged.”
FDR Addressing Congress (1935)
 In 1935, FDR signed into law the Wagner Labor Relations Act, which
established a National Labor Relations Board. The NLRB undermined
unions by redirecting workers’ anger, energy, and spontaneity into a
lengthy election and certification process. The Wealth Tax Act of 1935
increased the income tax for upper-income groups and established
higher inheritance and gift taxes. The Social Security Act of 1935
provided pensions for workers when they reached the age of 65. They
were to be payments from a government fund from wages matched by
payments from employers. Large numbers of workers, however, were
excluded from social security,
but the law provided funds to the
states to pay unemployment
compensation. Federal funds also
went to the states to support the
children of dependent mothers.
Additionally, FDR increased the
use of federal funds to provide jobs
for the unemployed in the Works
A WPA Construction Site (Kansas)
Progress Administration (WPA).
 The Wagner Act of 1935, setting up the National Labor Relations
Board, was an attempt to stabilize the capitalist system in the face of
labor unrest. A steel corporation challenged the Wagner Act in the
courts, but the Supreme Court found it constitutional. Unions were not
wanted by employers, but they were more controllable—more
stabilizing for the system than the wildcat strikes, the factory
occupations of the rank and file. Two sophisticated ways of controlling
direct labor action developed in the mid-1930s. First, the NLRB would
give unions legal status, listen to them, settling certain of their
grievances. Thus it could moderate labor rebellion by channeling energy
into elections—just as the constitutional system channeled possibly
troublesome energy into voting. The NLRB would set limits in economic
conflict as voting did in political conflict. And second, the workers’
organization itself, the union, would channel the workers’
insurrectionary energy into contracts, negotiations, union meetings, and
try to minimize strikes, in order to build large, influential, even
respectable organizations. The Wagner Act successfully limited the
power of organized workers.
 The WPA gave federal money to put thousands of writers, artists,
actors, and musicians to work—in a Federal Theater Project, a Federal
Writers Project, a Federal Art Project: murals were painted on public
buildings; plays were put on for working-class audiences who had never
seen a play; hundreds of books and pamphlets were written and
published. People heard a symphony for the first time. It was an exciting
flowering of arts for the people, such as had never happened before in
American history, and which has not been duplicated since.
“Revolt of the Beavers” (Federal Theater Project, 1937); “Pursuit of Happiness”
(Federal Art Project, 1937); Book Display (Federal Writers Project, n.d.)
Opposition to the Second New Deal
 Despite the second New Deal, rank-and-file workers continued to
criticize Roosevelt for not doing enough. Workers in the rubber industry
in Akron, Ohio engaged in a new tactic of resistance—the sit-down
strike. The workers stayed in the plant instead of walking out, with clear
advantages: they were directly blocking the use of strikebreakers; they
did not have to act through union officials but were in direct control of
the situation themselves; they were not isolated, as in their work, or on
the picket line; they were thousands under one roof, free to talk to one
another, to form a community of struggle. In early 1936 at the Firestone
rubber plant, makers of truck tires, their wages already too low to pay
for food and rent, were faced with a wage cut. When several union men
were fired, others began to stop work, to sit down on the job. In one
day, the whole of plant #1 was sitting down. In two days, plant #2 was
sitting down, and management gave in. In the next ten days, there was a
sit-down at Goodyear. The strikers ignored a court issued injunction
against mass picketing, and 150 deputies were sworn in. Soon, they faced
10,000 workers from all over Akron. In a month, the strike was won.
 Louis Adamic: “Sitting by their machines, cauldrons, boilers and work
benches, they talked. Some realized for the first time how important
they were in the process of rubber production. Twelve men had
practically stopped the works…. Superintendents, foremen, and straw
bosses were dashing about…. In less than an hour the dispute was
settled, full victory for the men.”
 The idea of the sit-down spread through 1936.
In December, the longest sit-down strike of all,
at Fisher Body plant #1 in Flint, Michigan, began.
It lasted until February 1937. For 40 days, there
was a community of 2,000 strikers. Committees
organized recreational activities, a postal service,
and sanitation. A restaurant owner across the
street from the factory prepared three meals a
day for the strikers. There were classes in
parliamentary procedure, in public speaking, and
in the history of the labor movement. Graduate
students from the University of Michigan gave
Louis Adamic’s Dynamite (1934)
courses in journalism and creative writing.
A procession of 5,000 armed workers encircled the plant. Police
attacked with tear gas and the workers fought back with fire hoses. In
the gunfire, 13 workers were wounded, but the police were beaten back.
The sit-down spread to
other General Motors
plants. Finally, there was a
settlement, a six-month
contract recognizing that
from now on the company
would have to deal with a
union. The idea of the sitdown spread.
 In 1936, there were 48
sit-down strikes; in 1937,
477. The sit-downs were
especially dangerous
Striking Workers during the Flint Sit-Down Strike (1936-37)
because they were not
controlled by the regular
union leadership.
 The AFL leadership was hostile to the rank and file, so the sit-down
strikers withdrew to begin a new labor movement, the Congress of
Industrial Organization (CIO) in 1936. The CIO rapidly gained 2 million
members as the newfound sense of worker solidarity exploded in
massive illegal sit-down strikes where the workers occupied automobile
and steel plants. No longer
able to count on federal
troops or even the police
as they had before 1929,
corporations like General
Motors and Ford spent
$1 million a year for spies
and a private police force
to fight the strikers.
Worker discipline gradually
defeated the automobile
and steel companies and
established CIO unions
Woolworth Workers’ Sit-Down Strike (Detroit, 1937)
throughout these industries.
 Once established, however, the CIO turned against sit-down strikes.
CIO leader John L. Lewis told the New York Times, “A CIO contract is
adequate protection against sit-downs, lie-downs, or any other kind of
strike.” The Communist party,
some of whose members played
critical roles in organizing CIO
unions, seemed to take the same
position. One Communist leader
in Akron was reported to have
said after the sit-downs had been
successful: “Now we must work
for regular relations between the
union and the employers—and
strict observance of union
procedure on the part of the
workers.” The CIO, a militant and
aggressive union, sacrificed the
John L. Lewis Cover, Time Magazine
power of the workers for
(2 October 1933)
respectability.
 Labor unrest continued, however, and authorities responded violently.
In Chicago, on Memorial Day, 1937, a strike at Republic Steel brought the
police out, firing at
a mass picket line of
strikers, killing ten
of them. Autopsies
showed the bullets
had hit the workers
in the back as they
were running away.
This became known
as the Memorial Day
Massacre. In the end,
Republic Steel was
organized.
Chicago Police Shooting Striking Workers in the Back (30 May 1937)
Minorities and Women in the New Deal
 From 1933 to 1940, Roosevelt gave groups outside the male WASP
establishment a new sense of participation in national life. Blacks,
Catholics, women,
lower-middle-class
white southerners,
academic intellectuals,
and artists who could
not obtain a place
under the business
leadership of the
1920s were mobilized
by Roosevelt in the
Democratic party of
the 1930s to support
his New Deal
Margaret Bourke-White, “Louisville: Great Ohio River Valley Flood, 1937”
programs.
(Blacks line up, seeking food and clothing from a relief station.)
 The increasing political strength of Catholics pressured Roosevelt to
support labor unions and social security between 1933 and 1935.
Catholics brought an outlook of social responsibility with them when
they began arriving in large numbers in the 1880s and 1890s. As a
consequence they were more willing to support the unionization of
labor and to advocate that labor play a leadership role in national
politics. In 1919, the Catholic Bishops Program for Social Reconstruction
had called for public housing for the poor, for minimum-wage laws, and
for unemployment, health, and oldage insurance. Father John A. Ryan,
Cardinal O’Connell of Boston,
Cardinal Mundelein of Chicago,
and Cardinal Dougherty of
Philadelphia saw the Roosevelt
plan of social reconstruction as
the Catholic plan but criticized
Roosevelt for not doing enough
to make labor a major participant
FDR and Cardinal Mundelein (27 October 1938)
in the industrial process.
 Senator Robert Wagner (D-NY), a Catholic, provided the leadership to
pass legislation that encouraged the expansion of labor unions. FDR
increased the proportion of Catholics appointed to federal offices and
placed two Catholics, James Farley and Thomas Walsh, in his Cabinet.
 In the “progressive” era between
1890 and 1917, many women, such
as Florence Kelley and Jane Addams,
openly advocated social-welfare
legislation, calling for minimum-wage
and maximum-hour laws for workers,
public housing, and health, old-age and
unemployment insurance. Although
FDR Signing Wagner Act with Theodore Peyser,
their political aspirations were
Frances Perkins, and Robert Wagner (5 July 1935)
blocked in the 1920s, the concept of
social welfare gained support as the number of professional social-work
schools increased from 15 to 40. When FDR broke precedent in 1933
and brought the federal government into relief and welfare, he relied
upon the experience of professional social workers, appointing Frances
Perkins, the first woman Cabinet member, as Secretary of Labor.
 There was no great feminist movement in the
1930s, but many women became involved in the
labor organizing of those years. A Minnesota poet,
Meridel LeSeuer, was thirty-four when the great
teamsters’ strike tied up Minneapolis in 1934.
 Meridel LeSeuer: “I have never been in a strike
before…. The truth is I was afraid…. “Do you
need any help?” I said eagerly…. We kept on
pouring thousands of cups of coffee, feeding
thousands of men…. The cars were coming back.
Meridel LeSeuer
The announcer cried, ‘This is murder….’ I saw
them taking men out of cars and putting them on the hospital cots, on
the floor…. The picket cars keep coming in. Some men have walked back
from the market, holding their own blood in…. Men, women and
children are massing outside, a living circle close packed for
protection…. We have living blood on our skirts…. Tuesday, the day of
the funeral, one thousand more militia were massed downtown. It was
over ninety in the shade. I went to the funeral parlors and thousands of
men and women were massed there waiting in the terrific sun.
One block of women and children were standing two hours waiting. I
went over and stood near them. I didn’t know whether I could march. I
didn’t like marching in parades…. Three women drew me in. ‘We want all
to march,’ they said gently. ‘Come with us.’”
 Alice Lynd was the wife of Staughton Lynd,
the son of the couple who had conducted
the Middletown studies. In the 1930s, she
was a laundry worker and union organizer.
 Alice Lynd: “You have to tell people things
they can see. Then they’ll say, ‘Oh, I never
thought of that’ or ‘I have never seen it like
that….’ Like Tennessee. He hated Black
people. A poor sharecropper…. He danced
with a Black woman…. So I have seen
people change. This is the faith you’ve got to
Staughton and Alice Lynd (1951)
have in people.”
 To most white Americans of the 1930s, however, North and South,
Blacks were invisible. Only the radicals made an attempt to break the
racial barriers: Socialists, Trotskyists, Communists most of all.
 The CIO, influence by the Communists, organized Blacks in the
production industries. Blacks were still being used as strikebreakers, but
now there were also attempts to bring Blacks and whites together
against their common enemy.
 Mollie Lewis (“Negro Women in Steel,” The Crisis, February 1938):
“While the municipal government of Gary [Indiana] continues to keep
the children apart in a system of separate schools, their parents are
getting together in the union and in
the auxiliary…. The only public eating
place in Gary where both races may
be freely served is a cooperative
restaurant largely patronized by
members of the union and auxiliary….
When the black and white workers
and members of their families are
convinced that their basic economic
interests are the same, they may be
expected to make common cause for
Steel Workers
the advancement of these interests….”
 Needing the support of southern voters for his New Deal, Roosevelt
refused to take any liberal positions on Black issues, informing the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)
that he would not support an anti-lynching bill.
 Although Blacks benefited from many New Deal programs, they were
discriminated against in most government agencies. For Black people, the
New Deal was psychologically encouraging, but most Blacks were
ignored by the New Deal programs.
As tenant farmers, as farm laborers,
as migrants, as domestic workers, they
did not qualify for unemployment
insurance, minimum wages, social
security, or farm subsidies. Black
workers were discriminated against in
getting jobs. They were the last hired,
the first fired. Blues singers, such as
Washboard Sam and Casey Bill
Weldon, sang of the empty promises
Sharecropper
of the New Deal.
Washboard Sam’s “CCC Blues”
I’m goin’ down, I’m goin’ down to the CCC.
I’m goin’ down, I’m goin’ down to the CCC.
I know that the WPA won’t do a thing for me.
I told her my name and the place I stayed.
She said she’d give me a piece of paper,
come back some other day.
I’m goin’ down, I’m goin’ down to the CCC.
I know that the WPA won’t do a thing for me.
I told her I had no fevers and the shape I was in.
She said she would help me but she didn’t say when.
I’m goin’ down, I’m goin’ down, goin’ down to the CCC.
I know that the WPA won’t do a thing for me.
I told her I needed a job, had no relief.
On my rent day, she sent me a can of beef.
I’m goin’ down, I’m goin’ down to the CCC.
See, I know that the WPA won’t do a thing for me.
She said she’d give me a job,
everything was nice and warm,
Takin’ care of the dead in a funeral home
I’m goin’ down, I’m goin’ down to the CCC.
I know that the WPA won’t do a thing for me.
Washboard Sam (1931)
Casey Bill Weldon’s “WPA Blues”
Said my Baby told me this morning just about the break of day,
My Baby told me this morning just about the break of day,
Said, “You oughta get up this morning,
get you a job on that WPA.”
I says, “I am a gambler, and I gamble night and day.”
I says, “I am a gambler, and I gamble night and day.”
Says, “I don’t need no job on that WPA!”
She said, “I’m leaving you now, Daddy; yeah, that’s all I got to say.”
She said, “I’m leaving you now, Daddy; yeah, that’s all I got to say.”
She said, “I’m gonna get me a man
that’s workin’ on that WPA!”
And all the women hollerin’,
and they hollerin’ night and day.
All the women hollerin’,
and they hollerin’ night and day.
“I’m gonna quit my pimp, get me a man on that WPA!”
So hard luck has overtaken me,
had to throw my dice and cards away.
Hard luck has overtaken me,
had to throw my dice and cards away.
Casey Bill Weldon
Yeah, I’ve gotta try to get me a job on that WPA.
 Black Harlem, with all the New Deal reforms, remained as it was. There
350,000 people lived, 233 persons per acre compared with 133 for the
rest of Manhattan. With 10,000 families living in rat-infested cellars and
basements, tuberculosis was common. In Harlem Hospital in 1932,
proportionately twice as many people died as in Bellevue Hospital,
which was in the white area downtown Harlem was a place that bred
crime, what Roi Ottley and William Weatheby referred to as “the bitter
blossom of poverty.” Half of the married women worked as domestics,
traveling to the Bronx and gathering on street corners—“slave markets,”
they were called—to be hired. Prostitution crept in.
 Ella Baker and Marvel Cooke (“The Bronx Slave Market,” The Crisis,
1935): “Not only is human labor bartered and
sold for the slave wage, but human love is also
a marketable commodity. Whether it is labor
or love, the women arrive as early as eight
a.m. and remain as late as one p.m. or until
they are hired. In rain or shine, hot or cold,
they wait to work for ten, fifteen, and twenty
cents per hour.”
Harlem in the Great Depression
 On 19 March 1935, even as the New Deal reforms were being passed,
Harlem exploded: 10,000 swept through the streets, destroying the
property of white merchants while 700 policemen moved in and
brought order. Two Blacks were killed. Langston Hughes wrote about the
bitter hopes of Americans in “Let America Be America Again.”
…I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart, The steel of freedom does not stain.
I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars.
From those who live like leeches
I am the red man driven from the land,
on the people’s lives,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek— We must take back our land again,
And finding only the same old stupid plan.
America!...
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak….
O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the land where every man is free.
The land that’s mine—the poor man’s, Indian’s,
Negro’s, ME—
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.
Harlem Riot (19 March 1935)
Sure, call me any ugly name you choose—
 Roosevelt took no public stand on discrimination against Blacks until A.
Philip Randolph, head of the Sleeping-Car Porters Union, threatened a
massive march on the national capital in 1941 to protest the failure of
the government to integrate Blacks into war industries. Under this
pressure, Roosevelt created a committee on Fair Employment Practices
to require corporations doing government work to hire Black workers,
but the FEPC had no enforcement powers and changed little. Roosevelt
did nothing to end segregation in the armed forces.
 The President’s wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, however, visualized a new
politics in 1936 in which women, Blacks, and organized labor would play
a dynamic role to end all discrimination
against these minorities. Influenced by his
wife, Roosevelt appointed Blacks to
important positions in the federal
government for the first time in American
history, including Mary Bethune, William
Hastie, E. K. Jones, Laurence Oxley,
Ira DeA. Reid, and Robert C. Weaver.
A. Philip Randolph and Eleanor Roosevelt
Evaluating the New Deal
 When the economy began to make a modest recovery in 1936,
Roosevelt cut back on WPA expenditures. This cut in government
expenditures produced a sharp recession in 1937, and unemployment
again doubled, from 5 million to 10 million. In 1939, with the country
more stable and the New Deal reform impulse weakened, programs to
subsidize the arts were eliminated. These cut backs demonstrated the
contradiction of the New Deal: an attempt to address the economic
crisis without abandoning the capitalist system, a system that creates
permanent crisis for some and cyclical crisis for almost all. Not until his
1940 budget message to Congress did Roosevelt speak of the possibility
of permanent government manipulation of the economy to sustain
prosperity, but that would be a permanent wartime economy based on
government military spending instead of spending on the arts.
 The New Deal showed more clearly than before the dilemma of
working people in the US. The system responded to workers’ rebellions
by finding new forms of control—internal control by their own
organization as well as outside control by law and force. But along with
the new controls came new concessions. These concessions did not
solve basic problems; for many people, they solved nothing. But they
helped enough people to create an atmosphere of progress and
improvement, to restore some faith in the system. For example, in 1938,
Congress passed a Fair Labor Standards Act, which established a 40hour workweek and a very low minimum wage of 25¢ an hour. But it
was enough to dull the edge of resentment. Housing was built for a small
percentage of the people who needed it, but the sight of federally
subsidized housing projects, playgrounds, vermin-free apartments,
replacing dilapidated tenements was refreshing. The TVA suggested
exciting possibilities for regional planning with local control. Social
Security provided meager benefits in comparison to the benefits accrued
by large, established businesses, and it excluded farmers, domestic
workers, and old people, and offered no health insurance.
 When the New Deal was over, capitalism remained intact. The ruling
class remained intact. Roosevelt was a hero to millions, but the same
system that had brought the Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression—
the system of waste, or inequality, of concern for profit over human
need—remained.
Roosevelt’s Foreign Policy
 Roosevelt and his advisers were sure that foreign trade was essential
to American prosperity, and he was ready to use political and military
power to protect that trade. In 1935, Roosevelt argued, “foreign markets
must be regained if America’s producers are to rebuild a full and
enduring domestic prosperity for our people. There is no other way if
we would avoid painful economic dislocations, social readjustments, and
unemployment. Roosevelt’s intentions were frustrated, however, by a
rising tide of neutralist sentiment within the US.
 The diminished prestige of the corporations caused by the depression
made it possible for the “farm bloc” senators to strengthen their
critique of a foreign policy based upon corporate expansion. Senator
Gerald P. Nye (R-ND) revealed to the public the profiteering of
munitions manufacturers in WWI, and he used the resulting public
outrage to pass Neutrality Acts in 1935, 1936, and 1937, designed to
keep the American economy from being integrated into that of warring
nations. Protestant
ministers and college
professors supported
the “farm bloc” senators
promoting isolationism.
They argued that bankers
and munitions makers
had used propaganda to
drag the United States
into WWI, a capitalist
civil war that grew out
Senator Gerald P. Nye Speaking against War
(20 February 1936)
of commercial rivalry.
 In 1937, Roosevelt gave speeches on German, Italian, and Japanese
aggression, hoping to gain support for the end of isolationism. He failed
to rally public opinion in support of his foreign policy, but he did
persuade Congress to enlarge the navy in 1938. Not until 1939, as
Europe approached the outbreak of World
War II, could Roosevelt persuade Congress
to modify the Neutrality Acts and end the
embargo on the sale of arms. In 1940, the
Congress passed a huge $18 billion
appropriation for military preparedness and
the first peacetime conscription act. FDR,
who had been transferring government
armaments to private interests so they
could be sold to England, acted directly by
issuing an executive agreement in which he
made a gift of 50 destroyers to England in
return for the right to establish military
US Naval Destroyers Transferred to
bases on several British possessions.
Royal Navy (9 September 1940)
 The overwhelming majority of Americans supported neutrality, forcing
Roosevelt to campaign in the 1940 presidential election on a peace
platform. After the election, however, Roosevelt moved rapidly to
integrate the US with the war effort of England. He persuaded Congress
to pass a Lend-Lease Act in 1941, making it possible for the government
to give England all the arms and supplies it needed. Roosevelt initiated an
initiated an undeclared war
on Germany in mid 1941,
ordering the navy to attack
German submarines in the
North Atlantic that interfered
with supply ships bound for
England as far as Iceland (more
than two-thirds of the ocean).
The undeclared war became a
declared war when the
Japanese attacked the US fleet
at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on
7 December 1941.
Political Cartoon in Favor of Lend-Lease (Dr. Seuss)
World War II Ends the Great Depression
 The outbreak of World War II in 1939 enabled Roosevelt to forge a
new alliance with corporate leaders and provided him with a way to end
the depression while preserving the capitalist system. Anticipating war
and calling on his experience with the “industrial-military complex” of
1917, Roosevelt appointed a War Resources Board headed by Edward
Stettinius of US Steel. Business leaders had bitterly attacked Roosevelt
for doubling the national debt from $19 to $43 billion to help the poor
and the unemployed, but they were willing to accept unlimited deficit
spending for national defense. Helping
the poor and unemployed strengthened
democracy and increased the possibility
of challenges to the US ruling class.
Military spending, however, provided
economic stimulus without
strengthening democracy and even
promoted corporate control.
The War Resources Board
 Massive government spending on the military proved acceptable to
business, organized labor, and the average voter. Large corporations, in
making an alliance with the Roosevelt
New Deal, accepted the administration’s
inclusion of organized labor within the
establishment, and labor leaders gave
their blessings to large-scale
government spending on the military.
The bulk of this government spending
passed to the largest corporations,
where unions had most strongly
established themselves. Charles Wilson
of General Motors said, “This defense
business is big business. Small plants
can’t make tanks, airplanes, or other
complex armaments…. What’s good
for General Motors is good for the
country.” World War II, not the New
Charles E. Wilson Cover, Time Magazine
(13 December 1943)
Deal, ended the Great Depression.
 The coming of World War II also weakened the labor militancy of the
1930s because the war economy created millions of new jobs at higher
wages. The New Deal had succeeded only in reducing unemployment
from 13 million to 9 million. It was the war that put almost everyone to
work, and the war did something else: patriotism, the push for unity of
all classes against enemies overseas, made it harder to mobilize anger
against the corporations. During the war, the AFL and CIO pledged to
call no strikes.
Norman Rockwell’s “Four Freedoms” (1943) Oil Paintings of
Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms State of the Union Address” (1941)
Evaluating FDR
 Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the only US president to be elected to
more than two terms. According to historian John A. Garraty, this was
because Roosevelt had the magic of charisma. He was able through the
power of his personality and the genius with which he used radio to
persuade Americans that the US was winning the war against economic
depression. Roosevelt inspired people with the joy of victory. It was this
power of personality joined with the power of the role of commanderin-chief in a war on the depression that made it possible for Roosevelt
to demand and be given a third and fourth term as President. The cult of
personality was so strong that hiss personal physicians were afraid to
reveal to national leaders
that the President was
dying even as he called
for his re-election
because his leadership
was indispensable.
Americans Listening to Roosevelt’s “Fireside Chats”
Review Questions
 Describe Roosevelt’s inauguration and the “Hundred Days.”
 What was the New Deal as introduced in 1933?
 What was the New Deal legislation? What were the “alphabet
agencies” and what was their work? What were the economic and
social changes they caused?
 How far did the character of the New Deal change after 1933?
 Why did the New Deal encounter opposition?
 Describe the opposition to the New Deal from the Republicans, from
the rich, from the business interests, from the Supreme Court, and
from the radical critics like Huey Long.
 What were the strengths and weaknesses of the New Deal in dealing
with unemployment and the Depression?
 Why did unemployment persist despite the New Deal?
 Did the fact that the New Deal did not solve unemployment mean that
it was a failure?